The universe in its smallness presents us with a reality we simply don’t have any frame of reference for:
A single electron can do forty-seven thousand laps around a four-mile tunnel—in one second.
Protons live ten thousand billion billion billion years, while muons generally live about two microseconds—and then they’re gone.
If you’re sitting in a chair that spins and I turn you around, I have to turn you 360 degrees to get you facing the same direction again. Electrons have been discovered that don’t return to the front after being spun 360 degrees once; for that to happen you have to spin them twice.
Imagine playing tennis and discovering that sometimes you were able to hit the ball with your racquet, and other times the ball went through your racquet as if there were no webbing. You would immediately assume that there was some reason for this unexpected behavior of the ball and the racquet, and so you would work to figure out why this was happening. You’d take into account speed and force and the characteristics of the various materials: plastic and rubber and metal. All under the assumption that there was an explanation for the ball’s action. You’d apply basic laws of physics and motion, and you’d think about similar circumstances involving similar speeds and sizes and shapes.
You’d be doing what scientists have been doing for a long time: operating under the assumption that the universe functions according to particular laws of motion that can be known.
But in the subatomic world,
things come and go,
disappear and appear,
spin and leap and communicate and demonstrate awareness of each other,
all without appearing to pay any attention to how the world is supposed to work.
Niels Bohr said that anyone who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what was being said.
It’s important to pause here and make it clear that quantum theory is responsible for everything from X-rays and MRI machines and superconducting magnets, to lasers and fiber optics and the transistors that are the backbone of electronics, to computers. It’s staggering just how many features of the modern world as we know it come from the contributions of quantum theory. The Nobel Laureate physicist Leon Lederman and the theoretical physicist Christopher hill of Fermilab believe that quantum theory is arguably the most successful theory in the history of science.
Which is all rather interesting, of course, but I’m assuming by now that you have a question, something along the lines of
What does any of this have to do with what we talk about when we talk about God?
Excellent question.
Three responses, then,
beginning with
energy,
and then moving to
involvement,
and then a bit about
surprise.
Energy,
involvement,
surprise.
Let’s begin with your chair, because odds are that you’re sitting in a chair while you read or listen to this book. It’s probably made of metal or wood, foam, cloth, maybe leather. A few nuts and bolts, a screw or two, some paint, perhaps some nylon or plastic as well. If we were to take that wood or steel or cloth and put it under a high-powered microscope, we would see the basic elements and molecules and compounds that comprise those materials. And if we kept going, farther and farther into those basic materials, we would eventually be at the subatomic level, where we’d discover that the chair, like everything else in the universe, is made of atoms.
And atoms,
it turns out,
are 99.9 percent empty space.
If all of the empty space was taken out of all of the atoms in the universe, the universe would fit in a sugar cube.
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