Steiner and Quantum Physics

"Nature is infinitely articulated"

- paraphrase of G. W. Leibniz, early 18th c.

"Years ago it was believed that one could investigate the tiniest lifeless beings, or at least produce provisional hypotheses about them, in order to find out something about the world that constitutes the immediate surroundings of our ordinary consciousness. And what, in fact, does one find out? The scientist has to admit that having penetrated this smallest of worlds, he finds nothing that is any more explicable than a Steinway piano. So it becomes quite clear that however far we are able to go by this process of division into the very smallest particles, the world becomes no more explicable than it already is to our ordinary, everyday consciousness."

- Rudolf Steiner, lecture given at Zurich, Switzerland, October 9, 1916

"Although [this] equation may look like a classical law implying pushing or pulling by the quantum potential, this would not be understandable.... We therefore emphasise that the quantum field is not pushing or pulling the particle mechanically, any more than [a] radio wave is pushing or pulling the ship that it guides. So the ability to do work does not originate in the quantum field, but must have some other origin."

The fact that the particle is moving under its own energy, but being guided by the information in the quantum field, suggests that an electron or any other elementary particle has a complex and subtle inner structure.... This notion goes against the whole tradition of modern physics which assumes that as we analyse matter into smaller and smaller parts its behaviour always grows more and more elementary.... a particle has a rich and complex inner structure which can respond to information and direct its self-motion accordingly."

To make this suggestion yet more plausible, we note that between the shortest distances now measurable in physics (of the order of 10 [to the negative 16 power] cm) and the shortest distances in which current notions of space-time probably have meaning which is of the order of 10 [to the negative 33 power] cm, there is a vast range of scale in which an immense amount of yet undiscovered structure could be contained. Indeed, this range of scale is comparable to that which exists between our own size and that of the elementary particle."

- David Bohm and B. J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory, 1993