From the Newtonian Age to the Quantum Age

Abstract

From the Newtonian Age to the Quantum Age. Classical, “mechanistic” physics, the work of many sixteenth-century scientists, was summed up and codified in Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica early in the seventeenth century. Thus, in popular form, it is often called “Newtonian physics,” and I shall follow that usage. Newton’s three Laws of Motion (plus his Law of Gravitation) described a universe that is simple, law-abiding, predictable, and controllable. His metaphor for the universe was a well-oiled “machine.” This model gave birth to the modern mind. It had such a powerful impact that Newton’s physics became the template for all subsequent thinkers, in every field of thought for the next 300 years—Freud in psychology, Comte in sociology, Locke & Mill in political philosophy, Adam Smith in economics, and Frederick Taylor in management thinking (“Scientific Management,” or “Taylorism.”). Thus, for the followers of these foundational thinkers, and for the general public at large, whether they were aware of it or not, and whether they knew anything at all about physics or not, Newtonian thinking shaped the way they thought, the way they perceived, the way they related, the way they organized themselves, the way they acted, the things they valued, & the things they invented. The eighteenth through the twentieth centuries was the Industrial Age, but it can also rightly be called the Newtonian Age. These three centuries gave us progress never seen before, producing enormous wealth and many benefits. But the same thinking, and the values associated with it, also produced the many very serious, some existential, problems that we now face in the twenty-first century: climate change, over population, mass migration, inequality, food & water shortage, threat of nuclear extinction, & the identity issues underlying the current, populist political upheavals in Europe & the Americas (Brexit & Trump, among others.). At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new physics was born. First Einstein’s relativity theory, then quantum physics and, as later off-shoots, chaos theory & complexity science. Among these, quantum physics is the most philosophically fundamental. It describes the universe as complex, uncertain, unpredictable, and self-organizing. It is also quantum physics that has given rise to all the new technology that shapes and defines twenty-first-century life. The silicon chip that enables computers, smart phones, homes & cities, the internet, and the soon-to-arrive, revolutionary 5G technology, depends on quantum processes to function. It is fair to say that with the invention of the silicon chip, we left behind the Industrial Age and entered “The Quantum Age.” In all of my previous books, I have argued that fundamental changes wrought through the discovery of quantum physics constitute the birth of a new paradigm, as powerful in every way as the Newtonian paradigm it is replacing. As with the paradigm shift experienced by the sciences themselves, a resulting paradigm shift in human thinking will turn everything with which we previously have been familiar upside down & inside out. It will create new theories, new personal, social, & political models, new solutions to problems (& a few new problems of its own), and of course, endless new technologies. We are already seeing harbingers of new Quantum Psychology, Quantum Social Theory, & Quantum Biology. This book integrates them all in a comprehensive, new Quantum Management Theory.