The WorldBlu Blog

Recently I had dinner with my dear friend, mentor, and WorldBlu Global Advisory Group member Laurance Doyle. As we spoke, I became increasingly intrigued by the connections between organizational democracy and quantum physics and asked him to write a guest blog about it for us, which he kindly did below.

Laurance is a Principal Investigator at the SETI Institute just outside of San Francisco, the founder of PlanetQuest, and an absolutely fascinating individual. He was also the person who inspired me to see democracy as more than just a political system but a life-system by pointing me in the direction of the Iroquois and how they influenced the shaping of the US Constitution. Jack Weatherford has written a very intriguing book about the subject, which I invite you to explore.

So for those of you who like to think really big, read on about the relationship between “Quantum Physics, Relativity and Democracy” as explained by Laurance Doyle:

At the moment the two most successful fields in physics—Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity—are incompatible with each other. Somehow, of course, they both get along because the universe works. But it seems, to our present limited understanding, that they disagree at some basic levels. For example, General Relativity is very democratic in that there is no preferred reference frame—all observers (and their velocities) have equal validity. And, as far as we know to date, Quantum Physics is quite democratic as well, since (according to the scientifically popular Copenhagen Interpretation) nothing really has existence until it is observed, and anyone can apparently be that observer.

In a way, General Relativity imples destiny, because it indicates that the space-time continuum already exists; “Time is an illusion, albeit a tenacous one,” as Albert Einstein said. In General Relativity time is just another direction. Contrarywise, Quantum Physics would indicate that even time is quantized (comes in little packets) and therefore is also subject to what might be called total free will, that is, nothing—including time—is pre-determined or exists until the observing starts. So can total destiny (but equal footing) and total free will (but equal participation) be compatible?

General Relativity thus enforces a kind of democracy of space and velocity, while Quantum Physics can be seen to enforce a democracy of the observer—everyone seems to have equal access to what physics have called “collapse of the wave function” where probability is turned into things. As Werner Heisenberg wrote of the old physics, “Some physicist would prefer to come back to the idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist independently of whether we observe them. This however is impossible.”

Some historians do not think it was a coincidence (at least in European history) that while gods were the general model for the causes behind events, that monarchies were the main form of government. And that when laws (for example Newton’s discovery of gravity) began to be the model for how the universe ran, that democracy was not far behind. Does one’s conception for how the universe runs effect the social and governmental structure of that society? How could it not?

I can hardly wait to see what happens next. Perhaps we are already beginning to see it in the universal access to information this blog represents. So as you read this from your very own totally valid spacetime coordinates, and collapse the probability wave function of the electrons that constitute this blog just by reading it at the present moment, you can appreciate your uniqueness. No one can take your place in being, and perhaps that is the most important lesson of democracy; the unique value of everyone, and their invaluable contribution—just by being themselves—to the dance of being.

On a final note, from optical physics we know that one’s head is always at the exact center between the Sun and the middle of a rainbow. So everyone has their very own rainbow. Even though no two viewpoints can ever be exactly the same, each rainbow viewpoint is just as beautiful and completely valid as the next. The universe is very democratic that way. ~ Laurance R. Doyle