Wolfgang Smith For Everyone
A brief (well) introduction
The late Wolfgang Smith was fond of quoting St Thomas Aquinas from Summa Contra Gentiles (Book II, ch. 3):
It is absolutely false to maintain, with reference to the truths of our faith, that what we believe regarding the creation is of no consequence, so long as one has an exact conception of God; because an error regarding the nature of creation always gives rise to a false idea concerning God.
In other words, if we get Science wrong, we get God wrong, too. We get Science wrong in two main ways: scientism and misunderstanding or neglecting cause.
About scientism, Smith himself said: “The refutation of scientistic belief proves thus to be a sine qua non for the restoration and indeed the survival of the Church on Earth: no wonder its presently visible manifestation hardly seems like the Church anymore…that the expulsion of the scientistic heresy is today, for the Church at large, a matter not only of urgent necessity, but actually of survival. “
All this and more can be found in the new book from Angelico Press Wolfgang Smith for Everyone: Science, Metaphysics, and Religion (with Testimonials and Tributes), edited by Bruno Bérard & Marie-José Jolivet, a volume in honor of the mathematician-physicist-philosopher who died in July 2024 at 94. The book, originally planned as a festschrift for Smith’s 95th birthday, came out first last year in French.
I have a short chapter on Smith’s physics, which I reproduce below. (I don’t receive any proceeds from the book. I have published here before early portions of this essay.)
As the subtitle says, there are a number of reminiscences and testimonials about Smith’s life and work. There is also a biography and “essential bibliography”, a valuable guide to Smith’s voluminous writings.
Dr Sebastian Morello in the book sums Smith up well:
Were I (perhaps foolishly) to attempt a summary of Smith’s key contribution to our civilisation’s intellectual culture, I would say that contribution was threefold: 1) a new, richer dialogue between, and reconciliation of, modern science and classical philosophy (occasioning the overcoming of reductionist materialism); 2) a creative dialogue between the Catholic intellectual tradition and the great spiritual and philosophical traditions of the world; and 3) a retrieval of gnosis as integral to the Christian weltanschauung.
A return of the aeviternal world, the passage from the Eternity of God, to our material existence. By gnosis, Smith did not mean occult secrets whispered only to chosen initiates, but knowledge, the participatory knowing of divine realities, the complete Christian life.
There is a lot of good science in book. Explanations of Smith’s irreducible wholeness from John Taylor (a version of form and matter), the quantum measurement problem from Charles Upton, the puzzlements and fascinating discussion of philosophy of measurement itself from Richard Smith, the De Broglie–Bohm and many worlds interpretation from Ali Sebetci, the reconciliation of Newtonian and quantum physics from John Taylor, the strict limits of scientism from Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, and much more on Smith’s cosmology from John Taylor and others.
Smith was Catholic, but naturally sought wisdom in tradition, quoting Maharajas of Benares that “There is no religion higher than Truth,” as Samuel Bendeck Sotillos tells us.
He imparted the advice, on several occasions, that when it comes to our spiritual life, we need to “read selectively,” which was an important lesson for him to learn as, early in his life, he read everything of interest that he could get his hands on. He added that “one will drown no matter how far they can swim; you cannot reach the shore because there is no way to assimilate it all.” For this reason, he had learned—through the course of his long and blessed life—that what was of utmost importance was to focus our spiritual life on Christ, in order to return to God.
His books, and this book, are such selective reading.
I was on Driving Home the Faith on Sacred Heart Radio with Ken Craycraft yesterday to plug the book. Nothing actually caught fire, and I remembered I was supposed to speak in English, but my router chose that very moment live on air to malfunction. Thankfully, or perhaps miraculously, I was able to restore it. You can listen here. I'm at about 37 minutes after the hour.
My Essay
METAPHYSICS INTO PHYSICS
Top Down
One of the proofs of God’s existence given to us by our good saint Thomas Aquinas is the argument from essential causal chains. This proof has deep implications for physics.
The classic example is a man using a stick to move a stone. The stone’s movement is caused by the stick. The stick’s movement is caused by the hand and arm. But inside the hand and arm are muscles, and these are moved by individual cells. The cells are “moved”, i.e. changed, by the chemicals in the cells. The chemicals in the cells are changed or moved by the protons, neutrons, and electrons in them. These particles are themselves moved by quarks. The quarks are moved, some say, by strings. The strings are moved by possibly something underneath them.
And so on. But not and-so-on forever. This simultaneous chain of essential causes has to bottom out somewhere. It cannot proceed to infinity, or no movement would ever get started. There has to be a base first cause in this chain. Without (again) going into the details, it turns out this first cause has to be the same first cause in all change. And, as the man says, we call this first cause God.
Hold that in mind and let’s next recall a version of an EPR experiment. Two entangled photons are released, one heading north and the other south. According to quantum theory, neither of these photons has a single state of polarization, but each photon has all possible polarizations, represented by its wave function. Eventually, the northward bound photon is interacted with, or “measured”, which causes its wave function to “collapse” to a definite polarization. This interaction “causes”—the scare quotes are justified—the southward bound photon to take the opposite polarization instantly, even if the photons are so far apart that no signal could possibly communicate between them in time.
This fact about the world bothers many, because it doesn’t appear there is any theory involving ordinary essential causes that can explain it. Bell even proved no such essential cause can exist, not if one embraced locality. And locality is definitely out: there’s just no way for the photons to talk to each other.
Not if you heed exclusively to what Wolfgang Smith calls “horizontal causality”, which is the type of causation ordinarily encountered in physics—the science, that is. However, if you allow “vertical causality”, a metaphysical concept like, say, ordinary essential causality, the problem of how those photons can talk to each other goes away.
Smith does not mention the stick-moving-stone type of “horizontal” causal chains in Physics & Vertical Causation: The End of Quantum Reality, but these chains, which are in every movement or change everywhere and everwhen, point to a simple “vertical” cause that is omnipresent, like we met above, a cause not in space or time, a cause not limited by locality, because, as it were, all points and all times are available to this vertical cause always.
Physicists can’t see this cause in their metaphysics, which excludes the spiritual in what Smith calls the corporeal world. If in your science all you have is a yardstick, then all that can exist is length. All other properties vanish, or rather are invisible. It would be an obvious fallacy to say that these other properties have no existence because they cannot be measured in your yardstick-science. But that is the central mistake Descartes built into physics when he separated the world into two domains, res extensa and res cogitans.
The first, res extensa, is the realm of the yardstick, the second, res cogitans, is the playground of the mind, where all those things that cannot be measured live. That is, the non-length properties are only in the mind, or are a projection of the mind, and are not in things themselves.
The opposite philosophy is realist and rejects these categories: it is the corporeal world of experience that is tangible, and it is the mathematical abstraction of the corporeal world’s measurable or physical properties which is not. In other words, the modern science of physics rests on the Deadly Sin of Reification.
You can only get so far with horizontal causality. It nicely explains many measurable phenomenon of interest, but it can’t explain everything. It can’t, for instance, explain us, our consciousness. No yardstick or probe can ever exist to measure vertical causality, but we can still prove it is there. Prove it to yourself: that stone never would have moved by the stick if you didn’t first will it. Will moves by vertical causality.
We also know the qualities the corporeal world are there, because we experience them, even if they cannot be measured. Of course, we have met many examples of attempts to quantify the unquantifiable—how sanguine are you on a scale of -42,003.7 to e^??—and we have seen how they all ultimately come to grief.
Smith’s Physics & Vertical Causation is a culmination of his life’s work, with each chapter referring to his more detailed earlier writings. He introduces hylomorphism, giving its outlines but not bogging the concept down with excessive detail, which would distract new readers. There are plenty of other texts that provide formal proofs of these concepts. Smith gives enough material to allow the reader a grip, and then moves on.
Bottom Up
Physics is stuck because of neglecting these matters. Ever since the so-called standard model settled into its comfortable form in the 1970s, not much new, or not much new that turned out true, has happened. This hasn’t stunted the flow of activity or papers, of course, which is greater than ever. Academics must publish or perish. But there is an awareness something has gone wrong. That something, said Wolfgang Smith and others, was a faulty starting point.
Smith was one of the first in the movement to restore classical metaphysics to physics, as detailed above. Even though some strangely deny it, all physics must operate with a metaphysics, a philosophy of nature, even when this is denied or the metaphysics or philosophy is unspoken. The classical metaphysics which Smith championed is now re-blossoming, and this is in great proportion due to Smith.
He was humble to the point of shyness about his efforts. No, that’s not the right word. “Fear and trembling” are better, and blessed with a superior provenance. Indeed, his writings evince a deep concern to reconcile his work with Catholic dogma, a set of beliefs consonant with his philosophy of nature. This is expressed best in the book In Quest of Catholicity, a collection of correspondence between Smith and Fr Malachi Martin. Smith had just given the 1998 Templeton Lecture on Christianity and the Natural Sciences, “From Schrodinger’s Cat to Thomistic Ontology“, which he had earlier worried his colleagues would not take well.
The anticipated opposition—for which I had prepared—did not materialize…In the course of my lecture I sensed that the audience was attentive to every word; there seemed to be a certain “magic” in the air, an angelic presence I like to think. I felt that something was being transmitted and received. The questions which followed were the most part intelligent and searching, never antagonistic.
The lecture followed 1995’s The Quantum Enigma, Smith’s first major work. Reading the lecture now (which you must), it seems wholly non-offensive. But you have to remember something about academics. Querulous is the nice word. The natural instinct of many is to snootily doubt everything you say, to dismiss it as useless, or to think they already thought of it. This is because, like every other human endeavor, academics is a competitive and often vicious sport. I do not say this is a bad thing: in fact, this fading confrontational approach is necessary to test theory against nature.
More Than Matter
“According to vulgar belief, there is color, the sweet and the bitter; but in reality, only atoms and the void.”
So said Democritus, and so say many modern scientists. Smith was fond of this quotation. He argued the vulgar are right and the (materialist) scientists wrong: there is more than atoms and void. Or, rather, Smith said Democritus’s critics were right, but only up to a point. That point is that where metaphysics necessarily takes over from physics. Smith realized that the solution to the many enigmas of quantum mechanics could not to be derived from an atomistic metaphysics. He urged, right up until the end, a return to the beginning, which is to say to an Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics, which Heisenberg himself first suggested.
There are two main curiosities about discrete-movement (i.e. quantum) physics. The first is the peculiar behavior of certain small things when they are (seemingly) separated from big things. They can at times appear to be many places at once. Only when they are interacted with by measurement do they take measured values. Their “wave function collapses”, some say. This, following Heisenberg, Smith realized, as many now agree, could be explained by grasping being can possess degrees of actuality and potentiality, Aristotle’s solution to certain classical paradoxes. It’s not that these tiny entities are now waves, and now particles. It’s that “quantum” fuzz is part of their being. Quantum objects have much less actuality, like large objects have, and much more potentiality. An interaction, such as measurement, removes potentiality and forces an actuality.
Smith’s resolution to quantum mechanical measurement is much easier, relatively speaking (he punned). This is to return to the beginning, to Aristotle and Heisenberg, to the idea that substances are composed of both potentiality and actuality. Even you, dear reader, have the potential to be somewhere other than where you are now, and it takes something actual to get you there, something actual to actuality the potentiality in you. This potentially is part of you, in a very real sense.
The quantum world is unfamiliar because it is composed of objects with much more potentiality than actuality. There is no wavefunction “collapse”, but a potentiality becoming an actuality by something actual—that interaction or measurement. We spent a lot of time with this elsewhere, and there is no reason to repeat it here.
Smith’s big idea, and one we share, is the return of the spiritual to scientific discourse. We all know it’s there. “The first point to be made is that this reduction of the animate to the inanimate—of the living to the merely ‘complex’—so far from being based upon scientific fact, is actually a groundless assumption, which gains strength from the fact that it is beyond our means to grasp whatever it may be that distinguishes the two.”
One moment your crazy uncle is raving about BLM, the next moment he is not. His soul has departed. Living beings are more than their constituent parts working together, just like water is more than just hydrogen plus oxygen. “This soul-generated [vertical causation] constitutes in fact the life force or élan vital of the organism, which both ‘produces’ its body or ‘corporeal sheath’ and renders it animate.” Any science that does not acknowledge this, and many other like things, is incomplete.
It is probably clear by now that vertical causality, unmeasurable in the traditional sense, is “what gives rise to horizontal causality.” Look: you knew this was true before you here today. All the gloried “laws” of physics and the nature of the world had to come from something. They could not make themselves. And we all know what this something is. Every attempt by scientists to explain this uncomfortable truth away has been an embarrassment. And always will be.
Enigmas
One can read Smith’s Quantum Enigma to get detailed understandings of things, but for strictly introductory books, see Ed Feser’s The Last Superstition and Aristotle’s Revenge, as these assume little background outline the philosophy more broadly, and not just for quantum mechanics. But if you already know physics, get Smith’s. Indeed, get that book into the hands of working physicists, if you can.
The second mystery, and the one to which Smith devoted much of his efforts, is to explain how two “entangled” entities can communicate faster than the speed of light. The solution certainly isn’t “many worlds”, which Smith dismissed (as do I). The answer, with reference to Bell’s theorem, is (again) that reality is more than atoms, or strings or whatever, bumping into one another. The visible cosmos is only the surface of reality. Underlying it is in Intermediate Realm, which itself is connected to the Prime Mover. This philosophy accords with all known observations, whereas the Democritian ideas do not.
A favorite image of Smith’s was a circle, the circumference of which is, well, us. And bugs, rocks, stars, and all the rest. The interior in intermediate realm that communicates with the Center. This is an apt metaphor. Think of two particles on the circumference, separated by a far distance, much too far for a signal to pass between them in good time. Attached to each particle is a line that plunges to the depth of the interior. The two lines are connected. It is here that vertical causation, said Smith, instantaneously interacts with the particles. There is no light speed barrier in the intermediate realm. Physicists say that interactions like this must mean reality is “non-local”. Smith carried out the implications of that thought. Vertical causation, which is the result, is different than ordinary horizontal causation, which takes place only on the circumference and in time.
For those who have some background in physics, this quotation from Quantum Enigma might help:
…[I]t is nonetheless a mistake to speak of ‘chance’ in reference to the microworld. As I have pointed out before, the collapse of the state vector—which signals out an eigenstate from an ensemble of eigenstates—is not actually comparable to the toss of a die; for whereas the latter constitutes a temporal process, indeterminate though it may be, the collapse of a state vector cannot thus be conceived. Let it be said apodictically that state vector collapse is not the result of a temporal process, be it deterministic, random, or stochastic. A higher order of causality enters the picture, which needs to be distinguished categorically from temporal causality in any of its modes; the so-called ‘collapse’, it turns out, can be attributed no more to chance than to determinism, but actually entails a kind of causality which, strange to say, is ‘not of this world’. [p. 110]
The indeterminism of a die toss comes because we do not know all the causes and conditions of the toss. But when we 54take careful note of them, that indeterminism becomes determinism, as is easy to show. For instance, I with my father built a coin-flip machine that controls all important causes and conditions of a flip and makes the coin come up heads every time. But there is no knowing all the causes and conditions of certain quantum mechanical entities; this has been proved, too. There have been many theories about this, but, I submit, only the account of classic metaphysics, as Smith insists, holds up.
Alas, the concepts Smith explicates, important as they are, will not appeal to many working scientists, because they do not come obviously equipped with formula that can be manipulated. We have only begun to work practical ideas out. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t bear research fruit. R.E. Kastner and others have a recent Arxiv paper “Taking Heisenberg’s Potentia Seriously”. They demonstrate how “actual events can instantaneously and acausally affect what is next possible”, which might bear fruit in showing the Intermediate realm works. If the reader has a solid physics background, get Robert Koons’s Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? I’ll let you guess the answer.
There is, of course, much more to all this. We have not even begun to sketch out what he defined to be corporeal objects, i.e. those of our ordinary perception, and physical objects, which are those parts of the corporeal that are amenable to quantification. A great fallacy of our age is to assume these are the same, that the unquantifiable can be quantified (by questionnaires, even!), or that all that is not quantifiable is unworthy of study. There is also Smith’s concept of irreducible wholeness, which is related to hylomorphism, the idea that all objects are composed of matter and form.
Think Of That
There are many proofs our minds are not machines. The simplest is that machines have no self-awareness. We do. Some attempt an escape by saying our awareness is “illusion”—not grasping that it takes self-awareness to be able to have illusions.
One that will be new to some is that visual perception requires a “transcendence of temporal bounds.” We do not see movement like a camera, frame by frame, but “all at once“. See is doing double duty here. Parts of the body process the images, if you like, but it still takes a mind to see the images, and understand them for what they are.
There is a neat explication of Gödel’s theorem, which again shows that we need a mind to see, and thus we are more than “collections of particles”. I quote it Smith from QE in full because it is familiar territory for us.
By virtue of Part I [showing that proofs in an axiomatized math can be numbered], we may assume that there exists a function P(m,n), defined for all natural numbers m and n, such that, for every m, P(m,n) is a propositional function of n (an algebraic statement depending on n, which may be true or false) and a function ?(k) which orders all mathematical proofs in the given axiom system.
We now define the following propositional function: “There exists no k such that ?(k) proves P(w,w).” Since our enumeration P(m,n) of arithmetical propositions is complete, there must exist a natural number s such that P(s,n) is the aforesaid function. Now consider the proposition P(s,s): the first thing to note is that this proposition is unprovable (since our construction entails that “there exists no k such that ?(k) proves P(s,s)”; and the second is that P(s,s) is true: for indeed there exists no k such that ?(k) proves P(s,s).
Now if you can see that—comprehend it, grasp it, own it—you can also see that no computer ever can. It involves infinities of thought, which is impossible for any computer, which would be set chugging along never to realize the answer. Never as in never.
I like to say Gödel did it the hard way. We already knew there are true but unprovable statements in any axiom system. The axioms themselves. These are propositions everybody believes, but for which there is no proof. Not in the ordinary sense of that word. Again, we need to touch an infinite mind to know what cannot be proved by ordinary methods.
That’s Heavy
Hold onto your black holes. Smith really does put some difficult questions to Einstein. “Either Einstein is right and the equations of classical mechanics need indeed to be revised, or the equations of classical mechanics are correct as they stand, and it is actually his ‘relativistic’ mechanics that prove to be false.”
Here, dear reader, I am on less stable ground, not knowing as much about relativity as quantum mechanics, so I am not in a position to intelligently critique Smith. Einstein rejected the idea of absolute rest: Smith does not. Smith’s argues Einstein assumed too much: given the Mchelson-Morley experiment did not find an orbital velocity of the earth, yet Einstein still assumed it was there, and so forth.
But it didn’t stop with M&M. Others have since at least claimed to measure orbital velocity by, for instance, looking at Doppler shifts in starlight as (it is presumed) the earth moves. However, it is a possibility that the earth sits still and stars move. The measurements would be the same.
What I wish to emphasize is that Einsteinian relativity is actually predicated upon the assumption that there can be no such thing as an immobile reference frame, a K0 “at rest”: it is this denial that leads quite naturally to at least the special theory of relativity. But given that there exist not a shred of empirical evidence in support of that denial, one sees that Einsteinian physics cannot but be based ultimately on ideological grounds.
Well, what about that “not a shred”? Empirical verification of relatively must involve very sensitive measurement, given the effects are almost completely negligible for most things. “Misconceptions aside, the question whether special relativity has passed empirical muster proves an incurably technical issue. And no wonder, if at a speed of 1000 km/hr one needs to differentiate between 1 and 0.99999945!”
From here, Smith provides details of experiments (starting with the 1913 Sagnac experiment) showing anisotropy in light speeds. “Ruyong Wang et al. conducted an experiment in 2003, in which the ‘Sagnac effect is also obtained on a two-way linear path, by reversing a light beam sent out on a straight line on a moving platform and measuring the difference in return time.’ What the Wang experiment indicates is that the speed of light is not in fact c in every inertial reference frame, as Einsteinian physics demands.”
Science Is Not The Answer
Smith’s other great passion, and perhaps yours, too, dear reader, was scientism. He didn’t like it. We don’t either. The idea that science has the last word on everything was to Smith, and to us, absurd. Science cannot even explain its own premises. This area is so large, and so dear to our hearts, that we will in future articles spell out Smith’s objections. For now, one quotation from Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions: A Critique of Contemporary Scientism on the consequences of scientism:
It Is obvious to all our outer lifestyles are being drastically altered as a direct consequence of the scientific advance. What we generally fail to realize, on the other hand, is that the impact of this same development on our inner lives—yes, on the condition of our soul—is no less pronounced. To begin with, the mechanization of our work environment, the phenomenon of urban sprawl, the rising congestion and perpetual noise, the proliferation of concrete, steel and plastic, the loss of contact with Nature and with natural things, the invasion of our homes by the mass media—all this in itself is bound to have its effect on our mental and emotional condition. Add to this the uprooting of people from their ancestral environment, and unprecedented mobility which shuffles populations like a deck of cards!…For it must not be forgotten that people too have to be standardized, like interchangeable parts of a machine, so that the wheels of the mechanized civilization may run smoothly and efficiently.
Guided, he didn’t have to say, by Experts under the thrall of utilitarianism, another gift of the Enlightenment. Of that, we know too well.
His books on this are Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief, from which that passage was taken, Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions, and Christian Gnosis: From Saint Paul to Meister Eckhart. The last, and Vedanta in Light of Christian Wisdom, might be more properly classed as theo-philosophical.
I only “met” Wolfgang a few times, and only over Zoom and by email, where he very patiently and kindly corrected some of my misunderstandings of his work. I stress kindly. This attitude was ever present, and obvious, in his writings and personal interactions. His correspondence with Fr Martin is saturated in humility. I look forward to science (re-)discovering his work.
Video
Here are the various ways to support this work:
Excellent summary. I learned about Dr. Smith a few years back and bought several of his books including his public letters to Malachi Martin.
The interplay of potential and actual states in physics and their interconnectedness in the quantum field may be seen as the ongoing creative act of God as the ultimate cause that sustains all existence.