The object, however, is the real truth, is the essential reality; it is, quite indifferent to whether it is known or not; it remains and stands even though it is not known, while the knowledge does not exist if the object is not there.

– Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind

The existence of past, present and future is deeply engraved on the human consciousness. We live now, but we can remember past events, and, to some extent, foresee future ones. There is a “before” and an “after”. Yet some philosophers and scientists dispute this. They regard time as a product of the mind, an illusion. In their view, in the absence of human observers, there is no time, no past, present or future. This is the standpoint of subjective idealism, an entirely irrational and anti-scientific outlook which nevertheless has attempted for the last hundred years to base itself in the discoveries of physics to lend respectability to what is essentially a mystical view of the world. It seems ironical that the school of philosophy that has had the biggest impact upon science in the 20th century, logical positivism, is precisely a branch of subjective idealism.

Positivism is a narrow view that holds that science should confine itself to the “observed facts”. The founders of this school were reluctant to refer to theories as true or false, but preferred to describe them as more or less “useful”. It is interesting to note that Ernst Mach, the real spiritual father of neo-positivism, opposed the atomist theory of physics and chemistry. This was the natural consequence of the narrow empiricism of the positivist outlook. Since the atom could not be seen, how could it exist? It was regarded by them at best as a convenient fiction, and at worst as an unacceptable ad hoc hypothesis. One of Mach’s co-thinkers, Wilhelm Ostwald actually attempted to derive the basic laws of chemistry without the help of the atomic hypothesis!

Boltzmann sharply criticised Mach and the Positivists, as did Max Planck, the father of quantum physics. Lenin subjected the views of Mach and Richard Avenarius, the founder of the school of Empirio-criticism, to a devastating criticism in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism, (1908). Nevertheless, the views of Mach had a big impact and, among others, impressed the young Albert Einstein. Setting out from the view that all ideas must be derived from “the given”, that is, from the information provided immediately by our senses, they went on to deny the existence of the natural world, independent of human sense-perception. Mach and Avenarius referred to physical objects as “complexes of sensation”. Thus, for example, this table is no more than a collection of sense-impressions such as hardness, colour, mass and so on. Without these, they maintained, nothing would be left. Therefore, the idea of matter (in the philosophical sense, that is, the objective world given to us in sense-perception) was declared to be meaningless.

As we have already pointed out, these ideas lead directly to solipsism – the idea that only “I” exist. If I close my eyes, the world ceases to exist. Mach attacked Newton’s idea that space and time are absolute and real entities, but he did so from the standpoint of subjective idealism. Incredibly, the most influential school of modern philosophy (and the one that had the biggest influence on scientists) was derived from the subjective idealism of Mach and Avenarius.

The obsession with “the observer” which is a thread running through the whole of 20th century theoretical physics is derived from the subjective idealist philosophy of Ernst Mach. Taking his starting-point from the empiricist argument that “all our knowledge is derived from immediate sense-perception”, Mach argued that objects cannot exist independently of our consciousness. Carried to its logical conclusion, this would mean that, for example, the world could not have existed before there were people present to observe it. As a matter of fact, it could not have existed before I was present, since I can only know my own sensations, and cannot therefore be sure that any other consciousness exists.

The important thing is that Einstein himself was initially impressed by these arguments, which left their mark on his early writings on relativity. This has, beyond doubt, exercised the most harmful influence upon modern science. Whereas Einstein was capable of realising his mistake, and attempted to correct it, those who have slavishly followed the master, have been incapable of sorting out the chaff from the grain. As often happens, over-eager disciples become dogmatic. They are more Papist than the Pope! In his autobiography, Karl Popper shows clearly that in his later years Einstein regretted his earlier subjective idealism, or “operationalism”, which demanded the presence of an observer to determine natural processes:

It is an interesting fact that Einstein himself was for years a dogmatic positivist and operationalist. He later rejected this interpretation: he told me in 1950 that he regretted no mistake he ever made as much as this mistake. The mistake assumed a really serious form in his popular book, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. There he says ‘I would ask the reader not to proceed farther until he is fully convinced on this point.’ The point is, briefly, that ‘simultaneity’ must be defined – and defined in an operational way – since otherwise ‘I allow myself to be deceived…when I imagine that I am able to attach a meaning to the statement of simultaneity.’ Or in other words, a term has to be operationally defined or else it is meaningless. (Here in a nutshell is the positivism later developed by the Vienna Circle under the influence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and in a very dogmatic form).

This is important, because it shows that Einstein in the end rejected the subjectivist interpretation of relativity theory. All the nonsense about “the observer” as a determining factor was not an essential part of the theory, but merely the reflection of a philosophical mistake, as Einstein frankly confirmed. That, unfortunately, did not prevent the followers of Einstein from taking over the mistake, and blowing it up to the point where it appeared to be a fundamental cornerstone of relativity. It is here that we find the real origin of Heisenberg’s subjective idealism. Popper continued:

But many excellent physicists, were greatly impressed by Einstein’s operationalism, which they regarded (as did Einstein himself for a long time) as an integral part of relativity. And so it happened that operationalism became the inspiration of Heisenberg’s paper of 1925, and of his widely accepted suggestion that the concept of the track of an electron, or of its classical position- cum-momentum, was meaningless.[44]

The fact that time is an objective phenomenon, reflecting real processes in nature was first demonstrated by the laws of thermodynamics, which were worked out in the 19th century and which still play a central role in modern physics. These laws, particularly as developed by Boltzmann, firmly establish the idea not only that time exists objectively, but that it flows in only one direction, from past to future. Time cannot be reversed, nor is it dependent upon any ” observer“.

  1. Popper, K. Unended Quest, pp. 96-7 and 98.