Where We Stand
Mathematicians spend a lot of time thinking about time and space. Their thoughts are often abstract and dreamlike. I encounter their ideas and find myself fascinated by concepts like infinity. Why would anyone care about infinity? I’m not sure I do, but imagining it interests me. I find that thinking about ideas impossible to wrap my mind around serves a different purpose for me. It excites the poet in me; that part of my brain that wants to poke around in unknown and even unfathomable realms. After all, I try to reason, aren’t exploring the universe and the journey into self-understanding similar in many respects? There are certainly as many unknown aspects to each, which we humans can barely resist. And they can be equally scary.
Mathematicians and physicists have another trajectory, which is the opposite of infinity. They call it the infinitesimal. This is the journey down into the atomic world. Instead of telescopes, those looking into the micro-world use electron microscopes. Here, they encounter the bizarre world of electrons, protons and quarks. It’s the world of quantum mechanics. Forget Newton’s design of the universe! In this domain all bets are off. Meeting up with this dimension of reality is like dreams that seem, on the surface, to be madcap adventures inhabited by faceless characters, strange emotions and chaos. And yet, on reflection, a sense of meaning begins to emerge. In dreams, houses represent the structure of our lives; individuals that show up suggest a variety of qualities we own; we become the only character, defined by all the attributes that arrive with each character. We get to watch ourselves interact with aspects of our own personalities. The dream begins to make sense. Our brains are trying to tell us something. We learn to observe our dreamworld like scientists examining unknown dimensions of reality. Like all of us, they must formulate new hypotheses to explain what’s happening in the new domain.
When scientists observe the quantum world, they realize that, in this dimension, all the old rules are useless. Things do not behave as expected. It occurs to them that they often see what they are looking for. When they decide to find a particle, for example, they see it. When they seek a wave, one appears. They begin to suspect that they may be creating what they are observing. One physicist coined the phrase: “Observer created reality.” They experience that particles sometime behave like particles and at others times, like waves. Oddly, particles can appear to be in two places at the same time! Great trick. How does one begin to think about creating reality? It seems absurd on the surface, yet there are annoying pieces of evidence all around us that make us pause. Three people see an accident and report different events. They are each convinced that they are truthfully and accurately describing reality. Siblings compare stories of their childhoods and discover each seemed to have grown up with different parents. Why do their stories differ? Particles? Waves? Is truth in part or entirely subjective? It’s enough to give you a migraine! But we count on life to be reliably close to what we see. Facts are facts. Even Einstein struggled with the discoveries of quantum science because he believed there was an underlying order that has not yet been discovered. Does our perception alter reality or are we creating it?
It should be no surprise, then, that we each create a story about our lives, which appears to be true until it is examined. Like both the exploration of space and the atomic world, we are faced with anomalies that do not square with prior knowledge. We are resistant to altering our perspective. However much we may find our old narrative to be obstructing our progress, it remains so familiar that it is hard to change. Best leave it alone and carry on. I imagine this attitude is what Socrates meant when he observed that, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” A good scientist must protect against biases and anticipate that established ideas and theories about the true nature of things might be wrong! As evolving human beings, we can expect no less. We can cherish the possibility that a new understanding of our lives may be waiting around the next corner. Our hearts and minds must be cracked open for the light of self knowledge to enter. It is never too late.
We stand between the vast envelope of an endless universe and the maze of our inner existence. The heavens have been seen through the ages as following a set of discernible and reliable rules. The clockwork design Newton discovered gave us some comfort; things behave as expected. Planets appear on schedule repeating their journeys around the central star of our solar system. We are told that it is gravity that keeps them on course. Then Einstein shows up and asks us to consider another story. Maybe the universe curves in on itself and the planets ride the inside of a conch-like curve, like a surfer beneath the lip of a powerful wave. What then? Can we no longer simply believe the mechanical universe is behaving the way we thought? And what have we understood about the workings of our inner existence? Are we, like the electrons and protons spinning around inside invisible atoms, occasionally colliding and becoming visible to the observer? Is reality only the result of these interactions? Is it all about relationships, after all?
Where we stand affects what we see. Between the limitless universe and the infinitesimal world of our atomic essence, we gaze. In one direction, the limitless world outside us waits to be discovered; in the other, an unseen world deeply embedded in the our quantum selves, reshaping itself moment after moment. Holding both realities in counterbalance defines not only where we stand, but who we are.
