An atom, in the end, is a thing. But a thing that is made up mostly of empty space, which is commonly believed to not be a thing. So what exactly are you sitting on?
A chair—a tangible, material, physical object—is made up of particles in motion, bouncing off each other, crashing into each other, coming in and out of existence billions of times in billionths of a second, existing in ghost states and then choosing particular paths for no particular, predictable reason.
Your chair appears to be solid,
but that solidity is a bit of an illusion.
It has weight and mass and shape and texture, and if you don’t see it in the dark and stub your toe on it, that chair will cause your toe great pain, and yet your chair is ultimately
a relationship of energy—
atoms bonded to each other in a particular way that allows you to sit on that chair and be supported. Things like chairs and tables and parking lots and planets may appear to be solid, but they are at their core endless frenetic movements of energy.
I talk about all of this red shifting and dark matter and uncertainty and particle movement because most of us were taught in science class that ours is a hard, stable, tangible world that we can study and analyze because it’s there, right in front of us, and we can prove it in a lab.
Which is true.
But often another perspective came along as well, the one that declared that there is a clear distinction between the material world and the immaterial world, between the physical world and the spiritual world.
What we’re learning from science, however, is that that distinction isn’t so clear after all.
In other words, the line between
matter
and
spirit
may not be a line at all.
In an article about physicists searching for the Higgs Boson, Jeffrey Kluger writes in TIME magazine that they’re “grappling with something bigger than mere physics, something that defies the mathematical and brushes up—at least fleetingly—against the spiritual.”
Now obviously there are scientists who would bristle at any suggestion that this field of study has anything to do with the spiritual, pointing out that it’s not mystical at all but very straightforward science, but for others, brushing up against the spiritual is a great way to put it because the primary essence of reality is energy flow. Things, no matter how great their mass is or how hard or solid or apparent their thingness is, are ultimately relationships of living energy.
This energy isn’t destroyed or created—it simply changes form as it’s conserved. If you’re reading this book in printed form on paper and you were to burn it, the sum total of the book’s energy would not change; it would simply go off and be other things than this book.
The amount of actual energy in the universe would stay the same.
And you wouldn’t find out how the book ends.
Now, from energy,
let’s move to involvement.
In the common view of the world most of us grew up with, there was a clear division between the subject and the object. Think of the stereotype of the objective scientist, standing cool and detached behind a glass wall, jotting observations onto a clipboard about whatever it is being studied. There is nothing wrong with this image; in fact, we owe this kind of thinking and practice a huge debt for the stunning array of technologies and inventions and luxuries we benefit from every day.
Somebody figured out how to fit a thousand songs in our pocket. Well done there.
But this image of detachment,
standing back at a distance,
watching and examining and analyzing things from a perceived place of noninvolvement, lives on in a number of ways that aren’t true.
At the quantum level, to observe the atom is to affect it. The particle is a cloud of possibilities until it’s observed, and then it chooses a particular path. The question you ask light determines whether it will answer as a wave or a particle.
In the view many have been taught,
the world is out there,
stationary and unmoved,
unaffected by us.
But in the quantum world,
observing changes things.
Matter is ultimately energy, and our interactions with energy alter reality because we’re involved, our world an interconnected web of relationships with nothing isolated, alone, or unaffected.
Even when there is an actual glass wall—
as helpful and accurate as traditional scientific
understandings are—
there is no glass wall in the end.
Central to the isolated, detached, common modern worldview is the assumption that things exist in empty space. Us outside, looking in. Studying, analyzing, standing at a distance—observing the world that is out there in empty space.
But the quantum world teaches us that space is—what’s the best word here?—alive. Particles can be found in what appears to be empty space. The invisible substance between us and the things and people around us actually contains something.
We are enmeshed in the world around us, not outside looking in, but inside looking . . . inside.
It’s all energy,
and we’re all involved.
These two truths,
the one about energy and the one about involvement, lead us to a third truth, this one about surprise.
Your toaster doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Seriously.
As things heat up, they register different colors, each new color representing an increase in temperature. And so, according to the standard assumptions about heat and corresponding color, your toaster should glow blue.
But it doesn’t;
