Everywhere we look in nature, we see the dynamic co-existence of opposing tendencies. This creative tension is what gives life and motion. That was already understood by Heraclitus 2,500 years ago. It is even present in embryo in certain Oriental religions, as in the idea of the ying and yang in China, and in Buddhism. Dialectics appears here in a mystified form, which nonetheless reflects an intuition of the workings of nature. The Hindu religion contains the germ of a dialectical idea, when it poses the three phases of creation (Brahma), maintenance or order (Vishnu) and destruction or disorder (Shiva). In his interesting book on the mathematics of chaos, Ian Stewart points out that the difference between the gods Shiva, “the Untamed”, and Vishnu is not the antagonism between good and evil, but that the two principles of harmony and discord together underlie the whole of existence:

In the same way mathematicians are beginning to view order and chaos as two distinct manifestations of an underlying determinism. And neither exists in isolation. The typical system can exist in a variety of states, some ordered, some chaotic. Instead of two opposed polarities, there is a continuous spectrum. As harmony and discord combine in musical beauty, so order and chaos combine in mathematical beauty.[32]

In Heraclitus, all this was in the nature of an inspired guess. Now this hypothesis has been confirmed by a huge amount of examples. The unity of opposites lies at the heart of the atom, and the entire universe is made up of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. The matter was very well put by RP Feynman: “All things, even ourselves, are made of fine-grained, enormously strongly interacting plus and minus parts, all neatly balanced out.”[33]

The question is: how does it happen that a plus and a minus are “neatly balanced out?” This is a contradictory idea! In elementary mathematics, a plus and a minus do not “balance out”. They negate each other. Modern physics has uncovered the tremendous forces which lie at the heart of the atom. Why do the contradictory forces of electrons and protons not cancel each other out? Why do atoms not merely fly apart? The current explanation refers to the “strong force” which holds the atom together. But the fact remains that the unity of opposites lies at the basis of all reality.

Within the nucleus of an atom, there are two opposing forces, attraction and repulsion. On the one hand, there are electrical repulsions which, if unrestrained, would violently tear the nucleus apart. On the other hand, there are powerful forces of attraction which bind the nuclear particles to each other. This force of attraction, however, has its limits, beyond which it is unable to hold things together. The forces of attraction, unlike repulsion, have a very short reach. In a small nucleus they can keep the forces of disruption in check. But in a large nucleus, the forces of repulsion cannot be easily dominated.

Beyond a certain critical point, the bond is broken and a qualitative leap occurs. Like an enlarged drop of water, it is on the verge of breaking apart. When an extra neutron is added to the nucleus, the disruptive tendency increases rapidly. The nucleus breaks up, forming two smaller nuclei, which fly apart violently, releasing a vast amount of energy. This is what occurs in nuclear fission. However, analogous processes may be seen at many different levels of nature. Water falling on a polished surface will break up into a complex pattern of droplets. This is because two opposing forces are at work: gravity, which tries to spread out the water in a flat film spread over the whole surface, and surface tension, the attraction of one water molecule to another, which tries to pull the liquid together, forming compact globules.

Nature seems to work in pairs. We have the “strong” and the “weak” forces at the subatomic level; attraction and repulsion; north and south in magnetism; positive and negative in electricity; matter and anti-matter; male and female in biology; odd and even in mathematics; even the concept of “left and right handedness” in relation to the spin of subatomic particles. There is a certain symmetry, in which contradictory tendencies, to quote Feynman, “balance themselves out”, or, to use the more poetical expression of Heraclitus, “agree with each other by differing like the opposing tensions of the strings and bow of a musical instrument”. There are two kinds of matter, which can be called positive and negative. Like kinds repel and unlike attract.

  1. Stewart, I. Does God Play Dice? p. 22.

  2. Feynman, R. op. cit., chapter 2, p. 5.