Deep Thoughts or Daft Ideas? Part V

These are the things I know and surmise about quantum physics. It’s not much, I’ll admit, but it is elemental and well sourced. The fact that physicists often refer to the Higgs Boson as the “god particle” is kind of a leaping off point for me. The fact that light sometimes behaves like a stream of particles and sometimes behaves like a wave is another. Theoretical physics can be as opaque, confusing, and malleable as theology if you dig deep enough. As I like to say, since God is the author of religion and of the laws of nature that are the subject of science, whenever science and religion seem to disagree, either the science is incomplete or the religion has been wrongly interpreted.

From Quantum Theory

• Every thing we know is made up of chemical compounds, which are made up of elements, which are made up of atoms, which are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, which are made up of sub-atomic particles. (Click HERE for a fascinating updated and more comprehensive map along with explanations of all these sub-atomic and force carrying particles and their relationships from Quanta Magazine. Despite graphics and animation, it is every bit as abstruse as a gilded Church Father.)
• So every thing we know is a peculiar, perhaps unique, combination of these same subatomic particles – different amounts of them in different relationships – but the same stuff. There is no qualitative difference then between, say, a Lamborghini and Stormy Daniels or a flat cap or a dog turd. The perceived difference is purely, although thankfully, quantitative.
• All of these particles are extremely small. They whiz about within the structures of which they are a part at breakneck speeds so as to create the illusion of substance. If you were to shrink yourself to the size of a single atom, enter its space, and then stop all of its particles from whizzing about, you wouldn’t be able to see the particles. They are that small. The atom itself would appear to be nothing but space. If you were able to stop all the particles of all the atoms from whizzing about, you would be able to walk through what you had heretofore perceived to be solid objects with no resistance.

From String Theory

String theory sprang up at least in part to explain gravity, which was not adequately explained by particle physics or general relativity. According to a wonderfully lucid article at Space.com:

String theory turns the page on the standard description of the universe by replacing all matter and force particles with just one element: tiny vibrating strings that twist and turn in complicated ways that, from our perspective, look like particles. A string of a particular length striking a particular note might gain the properties of a photon, another string folded and vibrating with a different frequency could play the role of a quark, and so on.

The problem with string theory as the hoped for unifying theory of everything, at least so far, is that it doesn’t really work once you try to apply math to it. This is perplexing to physicists, who are way more enthralled with math than even we accountants, though we both use math to illuminate reality. This does not, however, diminish it it any way as pillar of my own theory of the way things are. As I discovered, Albert Einstein had already embraced some fundamental tenets of string theory before string theory even existed. Math be damned. I never cared for it anyway.

Albert Einstein on Physics

Here are some insights from Albert Einstein, a mind for the ages, who provided the basis for my own understanding of all these very complicated yet very simple things: (emphasis is mine)

• “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.”
• “Time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes by which we think. Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, determined by the external world.”
• “Time does not exist – we invented it. Time is what the clock says. The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
• “When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.”
• “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”
• “Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can not help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”

Albert Einstein on the Theological and Philosophical Ramifications of His Physics

• “A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
• “Our separation from each other is an optical illusion.”
• “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
• “We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”
• “When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.”
• “The more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.”
• “The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It will transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology.”

My Personal Leap of Faith

So here, finally, is the place where I fear I am going to get into trouble with heretical notions.

Once we accept that there is in fact no matter, but only energy vibrating at different frequencies and folded into different configurations, and that time and space do not exist, a lot of theology becomes inherently more possible and even plausible:

• God creates the entire universe from nothing by organizing his own creative Spirit into resonant strings of energy that He can shuffle and combine in an infinite number of ways.
• God creates mankind in His own image and likeness so that mankind can experience the wonder of creation in the way God intends, that is as material occupying time and space.
• God expects, and rightly so, that mankind will, through his sensory experience of creation, come to know God in all His holy luster.
• Miracles that seem to countermand the natural order of things, including and especially the miracle of transubstantiation that is our Eucharist, become a simple matter of God reorganizing the shape and frequency of His Spirit within the material that we humans percieve.

The heretical danger here is that considering the universe in this particular way comes close to pantheism. I don’t think it quite crosses the line, but then I don’t want to be a heretic. There is a distinction, but that distinction is ethereal at best as explained here from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Traditional theism asserts the omnipresence of God and, while it strongly wishes to maintain that this is not equivalent to pantheism, the difference between saying that God is present everywhere in everything and saying that God is everything [true pantheism] is far from easy to explain. If omnipresence means, not simply that God is cognisant of or active in all places, but literally that he exists everywhere, then it is hard to see how any finite being can be said to have existence external to God. Indeed, for Isaac Newton and Samuel Clarke divine omnipresence was one and the same thing as space, which they understood as ‘the sensorium of God.’ 

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Pantheism

I’ll let you chew on this while I work on the last installment of this thought experiment, which will present my conclusions and, hopefully, congeal the rambling mess into a cohesive whole. Stay tuned.

As usual, if you found any of this enlightening, amusing, interesting, or scandalous, please consider sharing it with your friends and acquaintances by clicking on one or all of the social media buttons below. If nothing else, it will give you something to talk about besides politics.