Mathematical Physics, which takes its cues from Newton, seeks to analyze the universe and the matter it contains in terms of force and energy. We seek to discover ultimate reality by dissecting things into ever smaller parts, backtracking from the visible into the realm particles.
Physics has come a long way in explaining how things work and our mathematical formalisms are extremely useful for technological development, but the larger picture still escapes us. The ‘big bang’ origin of the universe takes the concepts of force and energy to their highly illogical conclusion. No one can say how that unlikely concentration of energy that, according to physicists, gave rise to a primordial explosion from which both space and matter developed, could have come into being in the first place.
William Day approaches the problem from a different angle. In his books, and now in a paper titled Holistic Physics in a Self-Organizing Universe, he argues that we must look at hierarchies, at systems and patterns of organization. Instead of trying to understand matter in terms of its parts, we must look at how things fit together. Non-Newtonian Physics is a way of looking at the universe as a system, not just an accumulation of material parts that interact and that can be understood by putting them under a microscope.
My favorite analogy for the universe has been that of a tv screen.
What we perceive as a picture in motion is nothing but a clever manipulation of pixels of light. We can create, on a perfectly immobile screen, successive images that our eyes and brain put together into a representation of moving scenes of life. Granted, the physical universe is much more detailed and more “real” than any movie, but we are still looking at the same principle.
What we see on the screen cannot be fully understood by analyzing the details of the single pixels and in a similar way, we can’t understand the universe by analyzing matter, by looking at particles and splitting them up into their constituent parts.
William Day’s paper details his approach to modeling physical reality by looking at how the screen is made, rather than just analyzing the picture and finding out what its parts are composed of and how they interact with each other …