Painful shoulder

When I woke up on Sunday morning, my right shoulder felt stiff. By lunchtime it was painful, and by the evening it was excruciating. On Tuesday the pain hadn't gone so I went to see the doctor – she said I should rest until it calmed down. On Wednesday morning it was even worse and on a recommendation from a friend, I booked to see a private physio. He said the muscles in my shoulder had gone into spasm – possibly as a reaction to the way I sit in front of my computer. He massaged the painful area which seemed to calm things down, then taped my shoulder back as a way of reminding me to hold a good posture. Today is Friday and it seems to be feeling better. More of a dull throbbing ache now.

It's amazing how something like this can bring up so much stuff! At first I was trying to work out what I did to tip the balance and make my shoulder start shouting at me. The fact that I couldn't pin it down to something specific was frustrating. Then there was the pain itself. As I've found before with pain, the more I resisted it, the more my body tightened and the worse it got! The key with pain is to do everything you can to soften around it – physically and mentally. But in those waves of excruciating sensation, it took all my concentration to stay with it. The problem with this kind of focus is that it's very narrowing. Like having blinkers on, I found it difficult to be aware of my surroundings or even hold a conversation when my focus was so tight. Pain sharpens and narrows our awareness, which is why softness and relaxation is so important.

When I heard from the doctor that it might take some time to calm down and I should just let it take its course, again up came the frustration, but also fear – what if it takes months? Can I take this kind of pain for months? What if it never heals? How can I continue working and teaching...? This is called "catastrophising", and as humans, we're very good at it!

When I saw the physio and he told me he thought it might've been brought on by poor posture... to that I reacted in indignation! "But I've done a lot over the years to make sure my posture is good... I practice yoga, I have a desk that raises up to standing height, I've been doing Rolfing over the last few months specifically to work on my postural integration, and I thought I sit at my computer with a good posture... How dare he suggest that?!" (that was just my thoughts – I didn't actually say that!).

He had this poster up on his wall (as pictured – Spinal Damage at 0 mph), and of course he's totally right. Even with the best will in the world, we all get caught out. Desks and computers are a major health risk! Hours sitting still with a bad posture puts huge strains on the body. The body was not designed to work at a desk.

Each week I volunteer with the Kings College Hospital Chaplaincy team to go in and visit people on the wards. One of the wards I go to regularly is a blood cancer ward, and now and then I meet someone who relates their story of how they first got their diagnosis. Maybe they'd had flu and got a blood test, or maybe got a test for something unrelated, and boom, it comes back saying they've got leukaemia (or similar). What I've experienced this week is so minor compared to that, but it does make me realise just how grateful I am for what I have.

In health we often go along thinking we'll be fine for ever. We forget life is so fragile. None of us are immune to pain – not even a yoga teacher that tries to take care of his body!

The Buddha described those of us that hold on to particular views, ideas, beliefs, wishes, etc, as stuck wheels (dukkha). You know, like when the brakes on your bike are done up too tight and they stick on the rims... Moving forward takes a lot of effort and we suffer. The trick is to let go and soften, and not just to know but to live the truth that everything is always in a state of change (anitya).

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I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Skinner Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

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From a clockwork universe to the uncertainty of quantum mechanics

Before the turn of the 20th century, most people (physicists included) thought the universe ran like a clockwork machine. If you could measure the properties of the universe accurately enough, you could predict how it was to behave in the future. It was, in other words, "deterministic". Much of this was down to the ideas of Newton.

Newtonian mechanics

It's probably fair to say that no single individual has had a greater influence on the scientific view of the world than Sir Isaac Newton. He was a genius (a god in the physics world!), but like all genii he lived in his particular era of history. In 1543, a century before Newton's birth, Nicolaus Copernicus launched a scientific revolution by rejecting the prevailing Earth-centred view of the Universe in favour of a heliocentric view in which the Earth moved round the Sun. Galileo was summoned to appear before the Inquisition in 1633 charged with heresy for supporting Copernicus' ideas. As a result Galileo was "shown the instruments of torture".

Newton's great achievement was to provide a synthesis of scientific knowledge to explain why the planets went round the sun (among other things). He discovered a convincing quantitative framework that seemed to underlie everything else – he proposed his law of gravity. By combining this law with his general laws of motion, Newton was able to demonstrate mathematically that a single planet would move around the Sun in an elliptical orbit. For the first time, scientists felt they understood the fundamentals, and it seemed that future advances would merely fill in the details of Newton's grand vision.

An orrery – a mechanical clockwork model of the motions of the planets in the solar system

Newton's discoveries became the basis for much more study, and the upshot of this was a mechanical world-view that regarded the Universe as something that unfolded like clockwork – predictable and mechanistic. People thought that once this mechanism had been set in motion, its future development was, in principle, entirely predictable. Hence the Universe was thought to be "deterministic", and physicists felt very safe with this idea.

This mechanistic view still prevailed two centuries later (up to the end of the 19th century) as scientists continued to stand on Newton's large shoulders and think they just had to "fill in the details". For example, a stormy sea may look random and unpredictable, but this is just a consequence of its complexity and the huge number of water molecules involved. In the mechanistic view, if you had a big enough computer and accurate knowledge of the starting conditions, such a system would be entirely predictable.

Cracks in the clockwork

However, some cracks in Newtons clockwork mechanism were starting to appear. In the late 19th century, a number of discoveries happened that just couldn't be explained by the old model – including the discovery of the photoelectric effect by Heinrich Hertz (1887) and of the electron by J. J. Thomson (1897) and the fact that electric charge occurs in indivisible units called quanta (Millikan, 1909).

Along came Einstein in the early 20th century. He put forward new theories of gravity and energy (he won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his explanation of Hertz's photoelectric effect). In 1913, Nils Bohr explained the discrete spectral emission lines of the hydrogen atom, again by using the idea of quantization and what later came to be known as "photons" (1926). The "quantum revolution" had begun!

Over the last 75 years or so, quantum mechanics has brought a profound change in human thinking, particularly around the notion of "indeterminism".

The quantum revolution

Quantum physics is concerned primarily with things at the microscopic scale such as atoms and molecules, and how they move and interact. In the quantum world we find a very serious kind of unpredictability that cannot be blamed on our ignorance of the details or our lack of computation clout. Instead it turns out to be a fundamental feature of nature. In the realm of atoms, all we can do is calculate probabilities for different outcomes – and we can never, even in principle, do any better.

A 3D quantum view of an atom formed of protons and neutrons in the nucleus, surrounded by electrons. Electrons aren't really in orbits, but more in fuzzy "probability zones" that look like shells and lobes.

One example is the radioactive decay of an atomic nucleus. Unstable nuclei (e.g. uranium-238) will "spontaneously" decay into a more stable form by emitting a particle. Quantum mechanics allows us to predict with high accuracy the time after which half of a collection of unstable nuclei will have decayed (the half-life), but not when one particular nucleus will have decayed.

Strange behaviour

The problem is things at the quantum level just don't behave like things on a macroscopic level. One of the inherent differences is that single particles (like an electron) sometimes behave as if they're solid "particles" and sometimes behave as if they are waves. This paradoxical behaviour has been known since Thomas Young's double-slit experiment way back in 1805. The fact is they're both, and neither. The concept of a solid particle (like a snooker ball) is inadequate, and the idea of a wave (like a water wave) is also inadequate. What we call particles (like an electron) are really more like packets of wave-like energy and they just appear to behave differently in different circumstances.

We're taught at school that an atom is composed of a small, positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons that travel in circular orbits around the nucleus (similar in structure to the solar system). This model was introduced by Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford in 1913. It's a helpful way of thinking of things, but not entirely correct. The electrons are not balls whizzing around in an orbit. All we can say is that there's a certain region within which we're most likely to find the electron wave-packet when we look.

in 1927, Werner Heisenberg discovered what he called the "uncertainty principle". It says that one can never know at the same time the precise location and velocity of a "particle". The better you know one, the less certain you can be about the other. It's a consequence of their very nature.

Uncertainty

After hundreds of years of thinking of the Universe mechanistically, this old mindset has filtered down into society as a whole. We all, to some degree, view the world as acting like clockwork. If I do this, that happens; cause produces effect – it's safe, secure, predictable and dependable.

But reality isn't like that. Uncertainty and probability are built in.

Uncertainty, fuzziness, indeterminacy are wonderful things! In his essay on the "Seven Radical Principles of Wise Decision Making", Martin Boronson comments that it's because we deeply despise uncertainty that we value decisiveness so much. However it's in holding that uncertainty that and being ok with it that creativity can happen. "New ideas only emerge if we can sustain the tension and anxiety [of the uncertainty] and wait."

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I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Skinner Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

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We're all made from stardust

We're all made from the same 96 elements (like carbon, nitrogen, etc). Actually humans are only made up of about 11 of those 96, but they're the same 11 as are found throughout the Universe. It's all the same stuff!

Have you ever thought about where all these elements come from? Maybe not! The answer is they all come from space, either being formed right back at the very beginning of the Universe or in stars that have born and died through the aeons. Quite literally we're all made from stardust.

I feel some astronomy coming on...

The entire Universe is one

To all intents and purposes, the theory and our latest observations agree that the beginning of the Universe started with a Big Bang. At the point of the big bang, everything was compressed into a single point of infinite density and infinite heat (which is really just energy). Everything in the entire Universe was once compressed together into a single point. Isn't that amazing – science shows we are all one.

As you might imagine, the explosion that followed was immense. The physics implies that the Universe underwent an incredible period of what's known as "inflation", where it increased in size by an enormous amount in a very very short time.

As the Universe then continued to expand and cool after this rapid inflation, the pure energy began to condense out into subatomic particles. In 1905, Einstein published his theory of special relativity, stating that energy is equivalent to mass (multiplied by the speed of light). Energy is equivalent to mass – it's another incredible concept! Essentially, mass (basically all "things") is just condensed, solidified energy. It blows my mind every time I think of it!

The Big Bang element factory

So as the Universe was cooling from it's infinitely high temperature, pure energy started solidifying into particles – first into things like quarks and other exotically named particles, then into more common or garden protons and neutrons, etc. At these high temperatures, a series of reactions started to convert single protons into atoms of hydrogen (two protons together) and helium (four protons and some neutrons), and a small fraction of lithium and beryllium. At the end of this cooling off period, the Universe contained about 75% hydrogen and about 24.99% helium.

So we've now got 4 of our elements (albeit not much of the other two). The big bang couldn't produce any elements heavier than beryllium due to a bottleneck in the reaction (as it happens, the absence of a stable nucleus with 8 or 5 nucleons).

The stellar element factory

Now we need to fast-forward about 200 million years to when the first stars formed. (This is a mere blink of the eye for the Universe, bearing in mind it is currently 13.5 billion years old.) So these large clouds of hydrogen and helium were floating around, getting bigger because gravity was pulling in more material, and gently cooling. Eventually, one clump somewhere deep inside one of these clouds got big enough to start collapsing in on itself. One of the things about gravitational collapse is that it really starts to heat things up. Right in the middle it got hot enough to start a totally new type of reaction – that of compressing 4 hydrogen atoms together to form helium. Stellar nuclear fusion was born and indeed the first star was born.

Stars can be thought of as giant furnaces that convert lighter elements to heavier elements and in the process release energy that radiates out (some of which we see). The reaction bottleneck that the plain Universe got stuck on was overcome in this fusion reaction.

Stars spend the majority of their life converting hydrogen into helium because it's extremely efficient, and there's so much hydrogen (even in a star like our own Sun) that this reaction can continue for billions of years. There are two main fusion reactions that are important inside of stars. For stars of small-medium size with (comparatively) low core temperatures, a reaction known as the p-p chain dominates. For medium-big starts with much higher core temperatures, a process known as the CNO cycle (standing for carbon-nitrogen-oxygen) dominates.

Both the p-p chain and the CNO cycle have the same effect though. Four protons are combined to form a helium atom, liberating energy (and a few other bits). The difference is that the CNO cycle requires the presence of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen to act as catalysts, thus producing energy more efficiently than in the p-p chain.

So where does this carbon, nitrogen and oxygen come from if all stars do is convert hydrogen into helium? Some of it is produced very near the end of a small-medium size star's life. The majority, however, is formed in a supernova.

The supernova element factory

A nova is a burst or explosion in a star. Some stars undergo regular nova outbursts. A supernova, as you might imagine, is a much bigger version of a nova, and it tends to be catastrophic. There are two main types of supernovae. The first happens when there are two stars in orbit around one another, and the more massive star is sucking material from the smaller one. At some point so much material accumulates on the bigger star that it can't cope with the pressure (literally) and it implodes. The second type concerns very massive single stars (typically bigger than around 8 times the mass of our Sun). These massive stars consume their hydrogen fuel fast. At the end of their lives, as the fuel runs out, the outward force holding the star up fades and again the star implodes. A supernova happens when the imploding material rebounds to produce one of the Universe's most energetic explosions.

Binary star where one star is sucking material from the other

It's in this second type of (so-called "core collapse") supernova that many of the heavier elements we know and love are formed. In fact all the elements from carbon up to and including iron are produced in supernovae through various processes. For example, large amounts of radioactive (and therefore unstable) nickel can be produced, which would quickly decay into stable iron.

The periodic table indicating the main origin of elements found on Earth (source).

For the elements heavier than iron another process is needed, and this is called r-process neutron capture (r for rapid). This can only work in the super-high density and high temperature conditions of a supernova. Lighter elements rapidly accumulate neutrons to create particular very heavy isotopes, which then decay to the first stable isotope. All the "heavy" elements from iron up to about plutonium are made this way.

The remnant of a core-collapse supernova explosion

When the supernova explodes, it blasts all this enriched material out into its environment. It stirs up the gas and mixes everything together. This is another reason why supernovae are so important – they get the newly enriched material back out into space.

Generations of stars forming and exploding

So let's say you have a big gas cloud that initially forms a few million stars. After some time a few of the big ones will go supernova. Leave it another few million years and some of that expelled gas will come together again and form a new generation of stars enriched by the previous generation of supernovae. After a few times through the cycle you collect up enough material to start forming rocky planets – and eventually (maybe) life.

Our Sun is thought to be a 3rd-generation star and has been shining for about 5 billion years.

Look around you right now. Everything you see is made of material that was forged in the furnace of past stars and supernovae. And who's to say that all this stuff may be swept up in some future event and incorporated in a new star and planet system...

As the Buddha said, all things are subject to change, even if it takes millions of years.

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I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Skinner Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

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Leave a comment below, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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