Eidolons

Spooky electron behavior suggests hidden wholeness

By RICH HEFFERN

In 1982 an experiment was conducted by a team led by French physicist Alain Aspect. They found that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them, whether an inch, 100 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. This spooky occurrence violates Einstein’s speed limit, the linchpin of his theory of relativity that is really about an absolute -- namely, the speed of light. It’s a long-held tenet that nothing can travel faster than that speed of 126,000 miles per second.

Physicists began scrambling for ways to explain this “non-local causality” found in nature. An interesting explanation is that of University of London physicist David Bohm, an American, who jumped into the chase and concluded that our universe is at heart a phantasm made up of eidolons, or in other words, a vast and detailed hologram.

A hologram is a light wave interference pattern, formed out of reflected light from an object interfering with a reference laser beam and recorded on film that can produce a three-dimensional image under illumination. Interestingly, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

Bohm’s theory, like Jesus’ parables, turns everything upside down. Science has believed the best way to understand a physical phenomenon is to dissect and study its parts. If we try to take something constructed holographically apart though, we get not pieces but rather smaller wholes.

Bohm believed the reason subatomic particles can communicate instantaneously regardless of distance apart is because their separateness is an illusion. At some basic level, such particles are not individual entities but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

Michael Talbot, Bohm’s student, explains: “Faster-than-light communication between subatomic particles is telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we’re not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own. We view particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate ‘parts,’ but facets of a deeper, more underlying unity that is ultimately holographic, indivisible.”

When speaking of the apparent independent aspect of a particle’s reality, Bohm uses the term “eidolon,” the ancient Greek term for a spirit.

In his view, these eidolons, all the separate objects, entities, structures and events in the visible or explicate world around us, are relatively autonomous, stable and temporary subtotalities derived from a deeper, implicate order of unbroken wholeness. He gives the analogy of a flowing stream:

“On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behavior, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances.”

Categorize, pigeonhole and subdivide till the cows come home, all of nature is ultimately a seamless web. Everything interpenetrates everything else.

Bohm died in 1992. In his career he worked indirectly on the atom bomb. In 1949 he refused to testify against Robert Oppenheimer before the House Un-American Activities Committee and had to leave the country. His life work bridged the fields of philosophy, science and cognition.

He should be better known than he is in religious circles.

Thomas Aquinas once said that an error about the universe means a mistake about God. If we believe, as we once did, that the sun and stars revolve around us, then our concept of God’s nature will develop accordingly. Correcting this view of the universe will mean a more accurate picture of God and all else. As it slowly sinks in that everything is part of undivided wholeness in flowing movement, that influential scheme that sees the universe as a pyramid with God at the top, humans in the middle, then rocks and dirt at the bottom, dies a well-deserved death, replaced by the web model that recognizes God dwells in the “lowest” effects as well as in the “highest” causes.

Bohm’s science simultaneously supports the Catholic mystical tradition, interreligious dialogue, process theology and the need for “orthodoxy.” If you want religious language that echoes Bohmian implicate order, look to Meister Eckhart, Juliana of Norwich, “The Cloud of Unknowing,” or contemporary writers like Thomas Merton, Joyce Rupp, Diarmuid O’Murchu.

As Luke Timothy Johnson just reminded us in a Commonweal essay, “Keeping spirituality sane,” individual Catholic spirituality can get goofy and Gnostic if it doesn’t have “a bit of creed, canon and even episcopacy (taken in moderate doses)” as corrective. In a spirituality modeled on wholeness, one needs perhaps to take individual religious experience and bounce it off a solid tradition for critique and validation. This is what monasteries, schools and theology tomes are for.

In Ephesians (4:4-6) Paul writes: “There is one body and one Spirit ... one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all and in all.” It’s the ‘through all and in all” that David Bohm was talking about.

Rich Heffern is NCR assistant opinion editor. His e-mail address is rheffern@ncronline.org.

National Catholic Reporter, February 2, 2007