Talk:The Dancing Wu Li Masters

The edition I had (paperback?) had good footnotes - sometimes a third of a page would be devoted to critiques and even counters to the main points

The footnotes were basically commentary by physicists on his understanding and presentation of modern (since 1900) physics.

Does anyone else's edition (mine got lost) have that? I thought it was particularly a good way to do such a New Agey physics book. When I asked Richard Feynman about it specifically he said it didn't save it, and that both it and Tao of Physics were, in his experience, unreadable. Nonetheless the author's willingness to have what seemed like more than a dozen physicists essentially saying "this is nonsense" or "this is wrong" about some of his points, right on the same page where he made various claims, was pioneering and would have been a good model for later books. I got my sister the audioboook because she wanted an overview and I would say that without the footnotes it's a completely different book.

I would like to include that if I could nail down an edition with all the notes and review it to see if my memory is right. MarionADelgado 10:47, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Not _all that_ pioneering. he's a journo, not a genuinely "committed" crackpot, so controversy helps him.137.205.183.31 (talk) 07:17, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

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External Links

Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MroBJsi9y6g

--S k4p4s (talk) 22:54, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Minor expansion based on the following:

Amazon.com Review
At an Esalen Institute meeting in 1976, tai chi master Al Huang said that the Chinese word for physics is Wu Li, "patterns of organic energy." Journalist Gary Zukav and the others present developed the idea of physics as the dance of the Wu Li Masters--the teachers of physical essence. Zukav explains the concept further:

The Wu Li Master dances with his student. The Wu Li Master does not teach, but the student learns. The Wu Li Master always begins at the center, the heart of the matter.... This book deals not with knowledge, which is always past tense anyway, but with imagination, which is physics come alive, which is Wu Li.... - Mary Ellen Curtin; from:[1]

~Eric F 74.60.29.141 (talk) 17:12, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

"New Age" sounds deriding and is inaccurate

According to New Age:

the movement is characterized by a holistic view of the cosmos, a belief in an emergent Age of Aquarius – from which the movement gets its name – an emphasis on self-spirituality and the authority of the self, a focus on healing (particularly with alternative therapies), a belief in channeling, and an adoption of a "New Age science" that makes use of elements of the new physics.

Now I've read The Dancing Wu Li Masters and consider it a personal favorite...is this really what other people think its content tends toward?

David Bohm (of hidden variables and sub-quantum processes, his work featured heavily in the book)--Robert Oppenheimer's doctoral student and a friend to and collaborator with Einstein, Bohr, and that whole bunch--reviewed The Dancing Wu Li Masters as:

Recommended highly for those who want to understand the essential significance of modern physics, and for those who are concerned with its implications for the possibly transformation of human consciousness.

Now Bohm was involved with in the whole hippie-physics movement of the 60s and 70s and 80s, including Esalen (himself incepting the Holomovement), but I think his opinion carries weight.

In particular, I think the statement:

The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav is a popular new age book about mysticist interpretations of quantum physics

Is simply false because:

Quantum mysticism is a set of metaphysical beliefs and associated practices that seek to relate consciousness, intelligence, spirituality, or mystical world-views to the ideas of quantum mechanics and its interpretations. Quantum mysticism is considered by many scientists and philosophers to be pseudoscience or "quackery".

Although the book delves into the details of mystical transitions--particularly those of Hinduism and Buddhism--it does not cover "mystical interpretations" of quantum physics if this is meant to mean actual interpretations of QM (i.e., many worlds vs. decoherence vs. pilot wave theory, etc.): Zukav presents the entire history and story of quantum physics from the point of view of the standard Copenhagen Interpretation, and the article needs to reflect this subtlety. He simply does so in light of the mystical traditions (of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism) that the founders of quantum theory--Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger--openly endorsed and made replete reference to.

Zukav was very much related to and inspired by the Parapsychology research at SRI (including Dr. Hal Puthoff, who is mentioned in a footnote and would go on to work on Breakthrough Propulsion Physics, Zero point energy, and gravity modification at NASA, and now directs the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin) and the members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, including Fritjof Capra who wrote The Tao of Physics several years earlier in 1975.

Neuroscience325 (talk) 18:43, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

• The Dancing Wu Li Masters - Focuses on New Age quantum physics
• Thus, if we look at the promoters of New Age Physics, we see that they are often oriented toward Easter religions or the occult ... Gary Zukav has been associated with the Eastern-oriented Esalen Centers"
• [http://books.google.com/books?id=uvnYaN8VnesC&pg=PA81 Following the successes of New Ag popularizations The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, by Gary Zukav"'

It seems to be quite widely referenced as new age. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 04:42, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

Let's see if we can renew this stale discussion and get some meaningful improvement from it

@Neuroscience325 and TheRedPenOfDoom: Not withstanding the fact that I haven't read this book in twenty years (other than a hefty little refresher on certain sections before commenting here) I'd like to discuss this wording as well, as it does not seem quite accurate to the book's tone, nor consistent with it's notability. Mind you, this is not the most formalistic or traditional discussion of theoretical physics around, but "new age" is surely a mischaracterization of Zukav's exploration of that topic, which really is rooted firmly in scientific consensus on the topic (albeit now 30 years out of date). The discussion of the perspectives of eastern spiritual traditions are utilized as metaphors for actual concepts in quantum physics, not as some sort of pseudo-science/metaphysics that muddles actual science with spiritualism; one can go thirty pages without seeing reference to a single "tantric" or dharmic concept, while reading solely about subatomic particles and conventional hard science. Here's a passage that exemplifies probably 95%+ of this work:

"In the left half of the diagram, a proton emits a positvely charged pion, momentarily transforming itself into a neutron. Before the pion can be re-absorbed, however, it is captured by a nearby neutron. This pion capture causes the neutron to transform itself into a proton. The exchange of the positive pion causes the proton to become a neutron and the neutron to become a proton. The two original nucleons, now bound together by this exchange, have changed roles."

In other words, while this may not be Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking, nor even Fritjof Capra or Simon Singh or any of a number of other popular science authors who have tried to impart the conceptual weirdness of quantumn phenomena accurately to a general audience without conventional mathematical framework, it is a far, far cry from a Deepak Chopra or some other similar purveyor of the kind of psuedoscience and spiritualism that is usually meant when one uses the terms "quantum mysticism" or even New Age broadly. And speaking of hard science educators no less principled and illustrious than Sagan, he frequently pointed out the coincidental and poetic symmetry between some traditional eastern cosmology and emerging concepts in physics--again strictly as metaphor. Numerous chapters in Cosmos begin with or are fixated upon some piece of eastern religious imagery or traditional philosophy, and that's the seminal work of the world's greatest modern rationalist scientific educator. Lastly, there's the matter of how the book was received by scientists; as our article on Zukav himself states (in quotes that really would be better placed int his article than that one, by the way), mathematicians and physicists mostly embraced the book as an accurate (if simplified and incomplete) rendering of concepts that are difficult to impart to people without some background in mathematics or the physical sciences; the book won the National Book Award in the science category for the same reason.

I think the confusion here mostly arises from....well, the entire rest of Zukav's career and, to some extent, the way this book was marketed; having been featured on Oprah a bazillion times tends to make scientists skeptical of your empirical chops, given how many absolute quacks and flim-flam men have gained fame for their confused notions of science on that show. Zukav is undeniably a spiritualist first and foremost, whose other works seem to be typified by colorful spiritual notions. But with this, his first book, he made it clear that he does have a decent grasp of the actual physical concepts explored and the history of the researchers who have grappled with them (again, up to 1979 anyway). TRPoD is right to focus on the fact that we must be consistent with what our sources say on the topic, but if we look through the great wealth of reviews of this book in the popular press (of which there are plenty), and comments from experts in the salient fields, I think we'll quickly see that WP:WEIGHT does not fall on "new age" as the best primary descriptor of the book. I'd not propose a seismic shift here; the spiritual metaphors do set the tone in the early chapters and there should be some reference to this twist on the dialogue in the lead. But to not give this book credit as a genuine popular science book--given its accolades and reception--is inappropriate, I feel. Snow ^{let's rap} 04:30, 15 July 2016 (UTC)