The Non-Solid Universe 1

Put your finger against a surface and push.  Your finger is solid and the surface is solid so nothing happens.  Yet, what is solid?  And what has this to do with living sustainably?  Just enjoy the ride and the scenery as I lead you down this path of the rabbit hole – all will become clear.  It has to do with how we relate to each other and how we will live with each other in the future, which is a central part of what sustainable living is about.  But first we have to understand this reality we live within.

Have you ever ridden a bicycle with a wind from the side?  Despite the wheel being mainly space with several thin spokes, it acts like a solid wheel.  Reality is like that, Nearly ALL space but it feels solid. I’ll keep it really simple (apologies to my physicist friends). The quantum physics isn’t the important part, it merely puts what I will say into a scientific framework.  Imagine that we had a microscope that could zoom down beyond the sub-atomic level.  First you focus on an atom – any atom will do but let’s choose a carbon atom.  The carbon atom that you ate for breakfast from your wheat cereal, and then later exhaled as Carbon dioxide, that was then taken in by another plant.  This is how we envision a cycle of solid matter.  Now let’s take that carbon atom and zoom in.  What we expect to see is a nucleus of protons and neutrons with electrons spinning around the nucleus.  Now zoom in again on any one particle and we would expect to find a trio of quarks that make up the particle.  Zoom in again and you might expect to see leptons, bosons and other particles.  The crazy thing is that no matter how much you look, you will always find particles simply because you are looking for them!  But if you could put your attention elsewhere and do one more zoom, you would see……. no particles, only a field of energy.  The most simple fact in the universe is that the base of everything in the universe is energy, pure and simple.  At this point our quantum science is mostly theoretical but the last statement about energy is pretty much a fact we can accept.  To mess with our minds more, the particles we think we see and that comprise the physical universe we observe with our five senses, do not actually exist as particles.  They are really waveforms of energy that become particles when we observe them.

This field of energy is everywhere and is everything.  It is the alpha and the omega, it is all that is.  Name it how you will, I’ll simply refer to it as ‘The universe.’  Older Newtonian physics had a central assumption that everything was separate and unconnected.  Yet, if this field of energy is the base of all existence, then everything, everywhere, is connected at the quantum energy level.  Albert Einstein who worked with the Newtonian assumptions was perturbed by what he called, “Spooky action at a distance.”  He was obsessed with finding a unified theory that explained the quantum particle universe, but he and many of his colleagues recognized that something more fundamental was at the core of it all.  Currently we have String Theory that tries to explain this ‘Field.’  Another feature of the field is that it is holographic and it acts like a simulation.  The field is information and it is also pure consciousness.  If you explore enough, you end up reaching the frontier of what is regularly accepted and begin to sail in to the unknown where all manner of new discoveries await you.  If you remain skeptical enough to continue you end up down a very deep rabbit hole where nothing is what it seems.  I have always been fascinated by the question, “Who am I really?” and the idea of consciousness beyond the Pentium chip we call the brain.  Fred Alan Wolf, Amit Goswami, and many other theoretical physicists have dared to reach beyond the fringes to explore quantum physics and its relationship to consciousness.  If you need a starter text, I recommend ‘The Holographic Universe’ by Michael Talbot.  If your belief structures are flexible enough you will find a wonderful universe that is both loving and purposeful.  If greed, hate, fear, and disempowerment are your thing, you might want to turn around and put your blinders back on.   Inventor and consciousness researcher Itzhak Bentov had this to say: “We human beings consider ourselves to be made up of ‘solid matter.’ Actually, the physical body is the end product, so to speak, of the subtle information fields, which mold our physical body as well as all physical matter. These fields are holograms which change in time (and are) outside the reach of our normal senses. This is what clairvoyants perceive as colorful eggshaped halos or auras surrounding our physical bodies.”  Now this last sentence will define you:  1. Are you a doubter that denies anything not within your frame of beliefs, 2. Are you a true skeptic that doesn’t know if it is true or not and retains an open mind, 3. Do your personal experiences show you the statement is true, 4. Do you accept it because it agrees with much of what you have studied with a critical eye outside the mainstream, or 5. Do you believe it regardless because your belief structure is locked in with these contrary ideas. 

In 1887, two scientists, Michaelson and Morley, tried to ‘find’ existence of this ‘universal field’ by studying how light behaves in ‘the ether’ using interference patterns from the timing of reflected split light beams.  The instrumentation was crude and the results showed no difference, hence, no ether (field).  The same experiment was repeated by a conglomerate of physicists (c.f. Silverton et al. in Nature, 1986, with modern very sensitive equipment and now we find that this energy field does exist.  And everything exists as energy within this infinite field.  More about this quantum reality in the next post.

How the mainstream see ‘Spooky action at a distance’ – Principia Cybernetica Web- The elements of the Newtonian ontology are matter, the absolute space and time in which that matter moves, and the forces or natural laws that govern movement. No other fundamental categories of being, such as mind, life, organization or purpose, are acknowledged. They are at most to be seen as epiphenomena, as particular arrangements of particles in space and time.  The reason for this pervasive influence is that the mechanistic paradigm is compelling by its simplicity, coherence and apparent completeness. Moreover, it was not only very successful in its scientific applications, but largely in agreement with intuition and common-sense. Later theories of mechanics, such as relativity theory and quantum mechanics, while at least as successful in the realm of applications, lacked this simplicity and intuitive appeal, and are still plagued by paradoxes, confusions and multiple interpretations.  In other words, mainstream physicists could understand the mechanistic universe with random physical interaction, but had a hard time breaking past their beliefs to see a quantum universe governed by consciousness.   In the Newtonian belief system, spirituality is merely a fanciful philosophy of little consequence.  In the quantum belief system, spirituality is a central component of how the system functions!  And the evidence for the latter is quite compelling.   To be continued……