Let's look at one aspect of the quantum, the particle/wave phenomenon, and go from there. The p/v phenomenon is this: When particles like protons, neutrons, even whole atoms, are shot through a wall with two slits, followed by another wall which is a photographic plate or made of some sensitive material that can record the impact of those particle; the particles, if their passage through the slit is recorded as to whether they are passing through the right slit or the left slit, behave like any self-respecting particle and impact the second wall directly in the line of fire of the two slits. However, and here is the weird part, when the particles are not being recorded as to which slit they are passing through, then they behave in a way that no self-respecting particle is supposed to behave at all. Unobserved particles pass through the first slit and then fan out and form an interference pattern of a whole series of stripes, which is precisely what a wave would do, but not a particle. Record them again and they go back to behaving like particles and form two stripes directly in the line of fire of the two slits. Ignore them again, and they revert to behaving like a wave and an interference pattern is formed. And these aren't some rare species of neutrons or protons that diligent researchers have happened to come across. These are every neutron and proton that are tested. What in the world is going on? How could a 'solid' particle instantly morph into a fluid wave?
To understand this phenomena it is necessary to change one's perspective, to not just entertain a new fact or an isolated insight, but to revamp, at least for a moment, one's whole way of looking at the world. If you went to school when I went to school, and it may still be going on today, the idea was that knowledge began wtih Western civilization and Western civilization began with the Greeks. Over two thousand years ago Democritus proclaimed that the world of solid objects was not really solid, but was made up of atoms. These atoms in the case of solid substances were tiny cubes connected to each other by hooks. If you broke or shattered or sliced a solid substance, you were breaking the hooks that adjoined the tiny cubes, but you were not breaking the cubes themselves which were elementary particles and indestructible. In the case of liquids, the atoms were spheres that were not hooked to each other, but rolled over each other and when you parted liquid, you were moving the balls to either side. These spherical particles were also considered by Democritus to be elementary and indestructible.
The more scientists of Western civilization continued to study the nature of matter, the smaller the atom got. In the early twentieth century a New Zealand physicist, Ernest Rutherford, opined that the atom was made up of a nucleus composed of positively charged, indestructible and indivisible proton particles that were orbited by negatively charged, indestructible and indivisible electron particles, like the planets orbit the sun. Shortly thereafter, James Cavendish, Rutherford's student, suggested that the nucleus was composed of indestructible and indivisible neutral particles, called neutrons, as well as the indestructible and indivisible positively charged proton particles, and that the great majority of the atom was not solid at all, but was empty space connected by the attracting forces of the negative electron and the positive proton. This is the set up on charts that we have all seen, that look very much like the solar system, except that instead of the sun there are a group of small balls, usually in two different colors, representing the number of protons and the number of neutrons, and orbiting far from this 'nucleus' are the electrons represented by much smaller balls. Usually, if you look carefully at the chart, it is noted somewhere that the spatial relationships and sizes between the nucleus and the electrons are not accurate. If the protons and neutrons are represented by colored balls barely large enough to be seen, then the electron would be too small to be seen. The whole atom is one hundred thousand times the size of the nucleus, like a pea in the center of a race track. The electron is so small that its size and shape are hard to determine and are the subject of debate in the scientific community; but it is at most one thousandth the size of the nucleus. So if you managed to represent all the protons and neutrons in a space the size of a pea, then the outer electron ring would be way, way off the page and the electron itself would not be visible with the naked eye.
Even though we still think of neutrons and protons as spheres, we now realize that they are not indivisible or indestructible, and each contain a whole array of even smaller subatomic particles. There are composite subatomic particles, and what are called elementary subatomic particles. These elementary subatomic particles are now considered to be, just as the atom was once considered to be, and just like the proton and neutron were once considered to be, indivisible and indestructible. They are as follows:
- Six "flavors" of quarks: up, down, bottom, top, strange, and charm;
- Six types of leptons: electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, tau neutrino;
- Twelve gauge bosons (force carriers): the photon of electromagnetism, the three W and Z bosons of the weak force, and the eight gluons of the strong force;
- The Higgs boson, which supposedly imparts mass.
- There is also expected to be discovered at some point, a particle which carries the force of gravity, a graviton.
Even though it is acknowledged that these particles appear to be waves under certain conditions, their true nature is considered to be particles that behave aberrantly as waves when they are not being observed and particles when they are. These observations, by the way, are never accomplished, in the case of these submicroscopic particles, with the naked eye but always with the use of sophisticated and highly precise scientific instruments. Some scientists refer to these subatomic particles as 'wavicles' to acknowledge both their tendency to appear like waves and their true particle identity.
I should also say that all of the above is from the Standard Model of Particle Physics which is widely accepted in the community of theoretical physicists, although, especially at the higher reaches, nagging doubts remain about the whole Standard Model Structure.
Nima Arkin-Hamed, one of the leading theoretical physicists of his generation says the following, "Since the mid-seventies we've had an amazingly successful theory of nature called The Standard Model of Particle Physics. But sitting at the heart of the theory is a sickness; very, very glaring conceptual problems that infected this fantastic understanding. Why is the universe big? Why is gravity so much weaker than all the other forces? The kinds of answers that this theory gives to these questions seems so patently absurd that we think we are missing something very, very big."
Now each of these subatomic particles are identified by three characteristics: their spin, their charge and their mass. Pictorially, they are usually represented by a sphere or some kind of capsule and encased in this capsule are a plus or minus sign (charge), a number (mass) and a curved line with an arrow pointing one way, clockwise, or another, counter-clockwise and another number, indicating the direction and force of spin. It should be noted that the 'capsule' or ball has never been seen. What has been detected are spin, charge and mass consolidated in certain areas within the proton and neutron. So I ask a simple question: If there is a capsule there, what is it made out of? Of course it's not made out of the element in which it happens to be located. The capsule that covers a quark that happens to be part of a proton that happens to be part of a silicon atom, is not made out of silicon. Neither is the proton. Protons are protons. There is nothing silicon-ish about a silicon proton as there is nothing gold-ish about a gold proton or the quarks within a gold proton. All protons are identical. All neutrons are identical. Each different type of quark is identical with the other quarks of the same type. What makes a gold atom gold and a silicon atom silicon, is the force field, the field of attraction that exists between the nucleus and the surrounding electrons. It is that force field that we experience as being of a certain density, a certain color, a certain weight, a certain texture and having certain chemical qualities. This is coming from the energy interaction between all the separate elements of the atom.
The smallest piece of elementary 'matter' that we know of is a hydrogen atom, but hydrogen only attains solidity at impossibly cold temperatures, certainly way below anything naturally achievable on this planet. If the particle were encapsulated by anything solid, that solidity would have to consist of an atom containing several neutrons and protons and several electrons, at distances from each other that totally dwarf the size of the supposed quark particle that they would encapsulate. Even the spheres that encapsulate whole protons and neutrons could not be made of anything solid, unless there is an entirely different type of matter that has not been discovered yet, and is structured entirely differently and much, much more simply than an atom. Yet how could these subatomic particles be particles at all, how could they contain spin and charge and, especially, mass without some kind of encapsulation? And if the forces are not generated, do not emerge from the capsule, if the capsule does not exist, than what generates these forces and how are they contained in such a specific area within the proton or the neutron? Also, please note, that although force carriers have been discovered, these are not force generators. How are these forces, any forces, actually generated? Let's momentarily leave this quandary to discuss something else.
EAST vs. WEST
As shocking as this may seem, it is absolutely true that while Democritus was opining in Greece about cubes and spheres and hooks, other people in other places, like what would later be called Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, and the Indian sub-continent, were also thinking about the nature of the physical universe, and had already been doing so for thousands of years. And the answers they came up with were remarkably similar, not to Democritus, but to each other. Why this similarity exists could have been due to a global system of communication that we are not currently aware of, or a tectonic shifting of land masses, so that previously united societies with shared knowledge were gradually separated into distant continents, or it could be due to the possibility that true knowledge is received and if you begin your meditations and contemplations, not with a lot of 'discovered knowledge' from earlier 'experts', and are driven, not by a competitive desire to become an honored expert yourself, but simply by a profound curiousity and reverence and wonder for this universe, and you are feeling calm enough and centered enough to receive knowledge rather than feeling compelled to generate it; then, wherever you are on this planet, you receive, in different languages and using forms familiar to a variety of different cultures, the same knowledge.
This shared knowledge can be referred to as monistic dualism. From one comes two. That one may be referred to as the Infinite, the Atman, the Cosmic Consciousness, Holy Father, Allah, Hashem, God, and by many other names. Modern physicists, interestingly, refer to the precursor of the Big Bang as the Unity. Also from this shared perspective, the subtle creates the gross. The material world is created from the Cosmic Consciousness, just like the things that we make and accomplish in our own lives originate in desires that spring from our own individual consciousness. From there some of this unity splits into two opposing forces that interact with each other. These forces have different names in different cultures, such as the terrestrial force and the celestial force, In and Yo, Tirawa and Atira, Father Sky and Mother Earth, Shiva and Shakti, Fana and Baqa, Yin and Yang, etc. The physical universe, matter, is created by the interplay, the interaction of these two forces.
Consider the following sentences:
1. In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth (Judaism and Christianity).
2. Infinity bifurcates into yin and yang (Taoism and Confucianism).
Please keep in mind that the physical heaven with stars and nebulae and our planet, the physical earth, were not created, according to Genesis, until the third day (epoch). What the words Heaven and Earth must be referring to, then, in this very first sentence of the Bible, and three epochs before the creation of our planet and a starry sky, is a heaven force and an earth force, which makes the first sentence and the second sentence identical.
The most important thing to realize about this approach, as opposed to our Western materialist approach, is that forces can attract each other and configure. They do not emanate from matter, rather matter, or the illusion of matter, is created by the interplay of attracting and configuring forces. In short, there is no matter, no particles. What we are seeing and touching and bunking into are forces and the reason they seem solid is not because of particles, subatomic or otherwise, but because of the density of the force fields within and between these configurations of forces. Forces emanate from the Infinite, not from particles of matter.
The only real solidity that forces have is the solidity of an idea. Forces are described as laws. We have Newton's Laws and Einstein's Laws, etc. Of course Newton and Einstein never claimed that they were describing forces that they, themselves, created. They were describing forces that were already there, in nature, and that had certain consistencies and those consistencies were what Newton and Einstein called laws. With human laws, as opposed to natural laws, we can easily understand that they begin with ideas. The lawmakers have an idea that will make society function better for them and, hopefully but not always, for the other members of the society. These laws are not forces. They don't automatically enforce themselves, just by decreeing them, but they must contain some method of enforcement if they are to be effective. Many people: police officers, soldiers, judges, prosecutors, defenders and inspectors; are all employed in the service of enforcing the human laws that are already in place. The laws governing natural forces describe the working of forces that are already there. They contain their own enforcement. And they are based on ideas not to form a workable society, but to form a workable universe, and they were conceived of, or enacted, not for the benefit of a particular interest group within the universe, but for the creation and benefit of the universe itself.
YIN AND YANG
Let's talk about how these forces configure. I will be using the words 'yin' and 'yang' but they are interchangeable with all the other ways that these forces have been referred to in various cultures over time.
The most important thing to remember is that these forces, by themselves, configure. They do not emanate from matter. Yin and yang are not qualites of things; they are the things themselves. We may perceive them as things and I will talk about that in another section, but the 'thingness,' the solidity and contours of objects are not caused by matter, but by the density of mutually attractive forces and the stability of these forces held in balance.
Yin is expansive, centrifugal, outward, spacious and light. Yang is contractive, centripetal, inward, timebound and dark. Every seeming particle or object and every wave is held in place by the balance of the inward force of yang pulling inward on the outward force of yin. Without yin there would be no dimension, no space, to an object. Without yang, there would be no contours, no boundary to an object. The physical universe is created only when and where yin and yang interact and comingle. Yin and yang do not attract each other so much as they capture each other. Yin, which is expansive and moves at infinite speed, is everywhere yet detectable nowhere at the same time; yin captures and surrounds instantly any pure yang, holding it in place and preventing it from contracting further into itself. The yin force is held in place and prevented from dispersing at infinite speed through the universe by the inward force of yang at the center of any natural object. The yang force is held in place and prevented from going where it really wants to go, which is directly toward the nearest, strongest yang force. This attraction of the weaker yang force to the nearest stronger yang force is what we call gravity. Without the yin force, all natural objects on this planet would quickly collapse into the center of the earth, which would quickly collapse into the center of the sun, which would quickly collapse into the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which would quickly collapse, along with all the other galaxies, into the non-physical, yang center of the universe. Then we would be exactly as we were when that first bifurcation of yin and yang happened.
The physical universe is described as being curved, flat and expanding outward like the surface of a balloon. This expansion is supposedly due to the effects of the Big Bang. If we can locate the origin of an explosion by tracing back the direction of the debris from that explosion, and if the universe is, in fact, the debris of the Big Bang, then the origin of that explosion is the non-physical center of that expanding balloon, which is the central yang of the universe. The reason the earth is expanding at a rate much slower than modern physics would predict, is not because it is being slowed down by an abundance of dark matter that no one can detect, but because the universe is expanding against the pull of the non-physical yang center of the universe.
At the center of the earth is a strong pure yang. The center of our planet is filled with hot molten heavy metals. The gravitational pull of the earth is not due to the weight or mass or heat at the center of the earth. It is due to the non-physical yang force at the center of the earth which attracts all the yang in every object in its vicinity and creates the heat, and the heavy metals, by compressing protons and neutrons into heavier atoms. At the center of the sun is a much greater yang, which creates a much greater gravitational attraction, a much greater heat and a compressive force that is so strong that it breaks down the heavier elements so that what is left at the center are the two lightest elements, hydrogen and helium, with hydrogen atoms fusing to make helium atoms and releasing the enormous heat and energy that warms all the planets of the solar system and energizes all the life on our planet. At the center of black holes is a still greater yang force. This force is so compressive that no atoms can exist in its vicinity. It is held in place by strong yin forces that combine with yang forces to make objects including stars, but all of this takes place at a far enough distance so that the yang force of these objects (all objects, even if more yin, must still have a yang component) are not pulled into the yang center of the black hole. At the center of the universe is the greatest pure yang. From this perspective, the entire universe is a black hole, with the distance from the non-physical yang center of the expanding balloon of the universe to the surface of the balloon (the physical universe) being the closest distance that an object, which must have a yang center, can be without being sucked into the giant black hole at the universe's center.
Pure yang is at the center of all natural objects. This does not include man made objects, although the components of man made objects are made of multitudes of atoms and molecules which are, themselves, natural objects and which are more yang at their center. It does include organisms, like human organisms, which are all pure yang at their center. Remember, no thing can exist as pure yin or pure yang. Things are always combinations of yin and yang. But we are most yang at our center and most yin at our extremities. As I said before, yin and yang are not things. They form things when they interact. Yin and yang cannot, by themselves be measured or observed, but they can be experienced. In terms of our experience, we find ourselves being more yin or more yang depending on our constitution, our mood, the time of day and a whole series of factors. Yang is concentration, power, focus and direction. A more yang person, or a person in an overly yang state, is driven, finds it hard to relax, lacks patience, and is very conscious of time. A person in an overly yin state lacks ambition, has a lot of circular thinking, little to no awareness of time, and is physically lazy. As I said, most of us are more yin and more yang at different times, and we have all probably experienced, in varying degrees, both of these states. And I should mention that there is a balanced state, neither overly yin or overly yang, in which we accomplish things, we are able to do what we intend to do, but with patience and flexibility, allowing ourselves to adjust our strategies effortlessly in response to any unplanned contingencies that the universe throws at us, which it always does.
When yin surrounds yang, a spiral is formed. This spiral can spin in either direction depending on the angles and relative strengths of this first encounter. The spirals can be very tight and pulled into themselves, like circles, but not perfect circles, or they can be very elongated, like straight lines, but not perfectly straight lines. Matter, or the illusion of matter, is formed by the force fields of attraction within these spirals. Living organisms, which are natural objects, are formed by a series of connecting spirals of yin and yang. The human body is composed of several spirals. This is most easily seen at birth when the infant arrives curled in the fetal position (a spiral). One spiral starts at the brain and ends at the base of the spine. One starts at the hip and ends at the toe. One starts at the shoulder and ends at the finger tips. Finger and toe prints are also spirals, as is the digestive system, starting at the mouth and ending at the anus. This is not to discount all the findings of modern biology. Cells migrate and mitotically divide and differentiate according to genetic timing patterns and genetic blue prints, but how the cells are arranged, the contours that they take once they reach the place that they are chemically and electro-magnetically driven to, are dictated by the particular combination of variously shaped interconnected spirals of yin and yang that is already there before these embryological events occur. It is not just the human genome, but the spirallic yin/yang formations associated with the human genome, or the spiral yin/yang formations associated with any genome, that determines these particular shapes. It is these shapes, the morphology of organsims, even more than the cellular components of these shapes and the protein components of these cells, that yield the distinctive traits and distinctive ways of organizing biological systems that we recognize as distinct species.
I will talk more about the shaping of organisms in another post, but please realize now that there is no acceptable explanation for it being offered by modern science. There is just an argument. One side contends that all structures are formed by adaptation to specific needs. This explanation is woefully inadequate and fails to explain why species in their basic body structures and forms do not undergo any change whatsoever, for millions and hundreds of million years. A grasshopper has the same body that it had four hundred million years ago. Countless modern animals are recognized in the fossils of very ancient animals. Why is the shape of the maple leaf, the shape of any leaf, for that matter, unchanging over countless centuries? What adaptive function does that serve? The other side contends that new arrangements and traits are the result of forces within the organic chemicals themselves, that necessitate development much like a crystal will form, lawfully and necessarily, from certain elements and molecules in a particular environmental and chemical condition. This approach fails to explain why different species and body plans took billions of years to arrive here. If there are inherent qualities in organic materials that foster development of particular pathways, weren't those qualities there from the beginning? Did those qualities change and what made them change? The most glaring characteristic of both these approaches is what they fail to explain. Something huge is missing in our understanding at the very center of this problem. That shapes and traits change as a result of changes in the interlocking spirallic formations that form the shape and shapes within shapes of an organism, and that those shapes are changed by the Infinite as a response to a changing environment and as a way to use an environmental change as an opportunity to advance the complexity and richness of the experience of an organism as well as its survivability, is the answer that I am providing. As I say, I will discuss this more, but if you have any answer that is different from mine and that actually solves the dilemma, please let me know.
As I said earlier, subatomic particles are identified by their spin, their charge and their mass. When yin and yang configure, they form spirals, just like when two opposing forces meet on a larger scale, they form whirlpools or tornadoes or dust devils. The direction of the spin of that spiral is dependent on the angle at which they first encounter each other and the relative strengths of the two forces. The charge corresponds to whether their combination is more yin, a negative charge, or more yang, a positive charge. Positive and negative correspond to yin and yang with the following exceptions: Positive and negative charges are considered to be a quality of the matter, or the particle that they are associated with. From the yin/yang perspective, there is no matter. The charge is merely a preponderance of one force over the other. Also, a neutrally charge particle is considered to be neither positive nor negative. From a yin/yang perspective, such a particle, or, really, such a configuration of forces, has both yin and yang and can have them in great force; it's just that the two opposing forces are of equal strength and balance each other. If a particle, a neutron or proton or atom is split, then enormous forces that had been tightly bound and balanced with each other are released.
What about the mass of the particle then? Isn't mass a measure of the amount of matter in a particle? Obviously not. As we discussed above, If there were matter in a particle, what would it be made of? Mass is the measure of the force, the pull, that the yang at the center of the object exerts on all the other configurations of energy within the surface of the object itself. This is distinct from gravity, which is the pull that the yang center of an object pulls on other objects beyond the surface of the original object. Gravity is a much weaker force than mass because the pull of the yang center past the surface of the object is much weaker, after it has been reduced and to a great degree neutralized by all the yin components that are located toward the periphery of that object.
If you were in a gravity free zone, objects would have no weight, which is, in the vicinity of this planet, the pull on objects from the yang center of the earth. Objects would still have mass, however. You could float in a gravity free zone on a normally heavy object which would also be floating. The object exerts no pressure on you, whether you are above it or below it. However, if you try to accelerate that object, if you try to push it across a gravity free room, it will be more difficult the more mass it has. As I said, mass is the pull of yang at the center of that object, which has nothing to do with the earth and is still there in a gravity free zone. The pull of the yang center on all the elements of an object creates its mass, which we could also call its inertia. The attraction of the yang center of an object toward the closest strong yang, in our experience, the center of the earth, is the gravitational pull or what we call its weight.
Yet physicists tell us that there are massless particles. How could that be? Every configuration must have a yang component, otherwise there would be no boundaries and the yin force would just disperse into the Infinite. Light is supposedly a massless particle. Yet when light passes near a very large yang center, like the center of a galaxy, it bends in the direction of the galaxy. This is because there is a very small amount of yang in light, too small to be detected in earth's gravitational field, but large enough to be attracted to and pulled toward the strongest yang centers in the universe. The speed of light is the fastest time that an object can travel. That object is yin force with the absolute minimal amount of yang to create contours. Without any yang, yin moves at infinite speed, making it unfathomably fast and absolutely still at the same time, since it takes no time, traveling at infinite speed, to transverse the entire universe and return to the same spot. Also, yin is not a thing, so there is no separation between one 'part' of pure yin and another 'part.' There are no parts. Yin only separates when some of it surrounds and is held in place by yang.
WAVES AND PARTICLES
Returning to the orignal particle/wave dilemma, from this perspective there are no particles. What we are calling a particle is merely a more condensed form of a wave. The so-called particle is really a tighter, more yang, more circular spiral of yin and yang. It is our act of observation, whether with the naked eye or with a recording device, that yangizes, or contracts, this yin/yang configuration. And this is what we, that is all living organisms, do. We experience the world as particles, not waves. We are each particular organisms, belonging to a particular species and experiencing this world in a particular way. A particular organism with a particular genome and a particular brain and nervous system, is a particular way of experiencing the universe. Our brains record our experience in snapshots. Waves or processes are frozen in time. That is why, when we see someone we haven't seen for many years, or see a neighborhood that we haven't seen for many years, we are pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised, but always surprised. We may know that everything changes, but we still experience things as unchanging particles and not changing waves and processes. So when we re-encounter a young child as a young adult, we are momentarily shocked, just as when we re-encounter a young adult as a senior citizen.
Our focus, our concentration, yangizes, contracts, particularizes, whatever it is that we are perceiving. When we are not focussed on it, it still exists but not in a solid, particle form. When it emerges into our consciousness, it does so as a solid particle. Let's take a very common example: our bodies. Now are bodies are always there, but we are not always conscious of our bodies. Suppose we are at a party. If we are engaged in conversation then our bodies are, of course, still there, but they are part of the automatic responses that we have to whatever is being said to us. Our bodies are fluid and responsive. They are light. We are not aware of them as physical objects. They are open and the conversation and the music and the atmosphere of the room just enters them as if they are open waves and not closed particles. If, for whatever reason, we become conscious of our bodies, then our bodies take on physicality, become, in our experience, solid particles, which will not admit or receive the waves of feeling, intention and rhythm that are coming at us. Our bodies are then impediments to the free flow of conversation, or the free flow of rhythm and music if we are dancing. We can still respond if we are being spoken to, but the response does not come from how the other's words affected us, or moved us. We hear the words, separately from our bodies and our response is measured and prepared. The conversation becomes stilted and heavy without the flow and lightness of intermingling waves, but the isolation and collision of two separate particles.
At this party, your body could also be observed by another person who focusses on it because it is, for them, an object of admiration or disdain. If you are not aware of this observation, then, for you, in terms of your experience at that moment, your body is in a fluid wave state, while, in terms of the observer's experience, your body is in a particle/ object state. You may call this a superposition of states, but it is really two different experiences of a body which is in reality a wave, but has become objectified, or particularized, only in the experience of one observer.
At any given moment our focus contains a very limited content of things that we deal with and imagine as particles. Everything else in the universe, past, present or future, is in wave formation, and is part of the context, not the content, of our existence at that moment. It is there, to be called into consciousness at any moment for an infinite variety of reasons, but it is only particularized, only comes into focus, when we are conscious of it. When we are not conscious of it, it is there, but lightly, immaterially. Each person carries an enormous amount of contextual information that can be particularized at any moment, but that doesn't necessarily weigh us down, or burden us in any way. It all can exist without weight, without burden, to be called into consciousness at any moment from this immaterial, wave state. This doesn't mean that we cannot be burdened by what we know. Most of us are to some degree. If we are worried about something, if we regret, if we are haunted by something that we have done, or afraid of something that might happen, then all of these things protrude into our conciousness, particularize and weigh us down, make us heavy and less buoyant with their weight. Even if we attempt to avoid thinking about any of those things that bother us, we are particularizing them and giving them weight in our imagination and the effort of pushing them away, as if they were real particles, burdens us. Trying not to think about something is often as onerous as thinking about it. It is only when we realize that all objects are not frozen, solid particles, but fluid, changeable waves, that we can focus on them with lightness and clarity, and are able to change those conditions or change the way that we think about them.
We are free when we are able to focus on the things that we want to focus on and focus on the conditions that we really need to focus on, without the weight and burden of solidifying, in our imagination, the condition that we are concerned about. This condition is always, in reality, fluid and changeable, but in our experience of it, it is only fluid and changeable if we recognize it as such. Those conditions will, eventually, change anyway, but if you want to become an agent of change and not wait passively for change, then you have to approach these situations with the understanding that, even though they appear solid and stuck and immobile, they are in reality light and fluid and changeable, held in place simply because we perceive them as solid, weighty and incapable of change. If you perceive them that way and act when you are dealing with them and with the other people involved with them, in that manner, lightly, clearly, respectfully, without being weighed down by their seeming solidity, then you will be able to affect change and not just helplessly and passively wait for it.
SCHRODINGER'S CAT
Just a final word about another quantum mystery, Schrodinger's cat. Physicist Schrodinger initially postulated his cat thought experiment to point up the absurdity of some quantum thinking, but since then it has been picked up by many physicists as a genuine outcome of quantum mechanics. Suppose a cat was locked in a box in which there was a radioactive atom. If the atom decayed and admitted radiation the cat would die. If it didn't, the cat would still be alive. According to many physicists, the cat is both alive and dead simulatenously, a superposition of conditions until the box is opened and the cat is observed. The observation of the cat is the thing that detemines whether it is alive or dead, and until the cat is observed, it continues in this superposition of being simultaneously, both alive and dead. Of course, from this anthropocentric perspective, what the poor cat is observing is never considered.
This thinking comes directly from the idea that our observation is creating something new, a particle that wasn't previously there. But, as we discussed, our observation doesn't create anything new. The wave, just in our perception of it, collapses into a particle. The wave is still there. The wave has not changed. Nothing has changed. All that happens is that the way we perceive it is different from the way that it is. Whether or not a radioactive atom decays is a result of the passage of time and the condition of the atom. These processes are totally unaffected by our observation. (Thankfully, so. Otherwise, what havoc could our enemies wreak by simply focussing on our nuclear stockpiles!) If it is time for that radioactive atom to decay, then the cat will die. If it is not time, then it won't . But what it is really time for is to open up that damn box and let that poor cat out after all these years!
As usual, your comments are always welcome.
Nima Arkin-Hamed, one of the leading theoretical physicists of his generation says the following, "Since the mid-seventies we've had an amazingly successful theory of nature called The Standard Model of Particle Physics. But sitting at the heart of the theory is a sickness; very, very glaring conceptual problems that infected this fantastic understanding. Why is the universe big? Why is gravity so much weaker than all the other forces? The kinds of answers that this theory gives to these questions seems so patently absurd that we think we are missing something very, very big."
Now each of these subatomic particles are identified by three characteristics: their spin, their charge and their mass. Pictorially, they are usually represented by a sphere or some kind of capsule and encased in this capsule are a plus or minus sign (charge), a number (mass) and a curved line with an arrow pointing one way, clockwise, or another, counter-clockwise and another number, indicating the direction and force of spin. It should be noted that the 'capsule' or ball has never been seen. What has been detected are spin, charge and mass consolidated in certain areas within the proton and neutron. So I ask a simple question: If there is a capsule there, what is it made out of? Of course it's not made out of the element in which it happens to be located. The capsule that covers a quark that happens to be part of a proton that happens to be part of a silicon atom, is not made out of silicon. Neither is the proton. Protons are protons. There is nothing silicon-ish about a silicon proton as there is nothing gold-ish about a gold proton or the quarks within a gold proton. All protons are identical. All neutrons are identical. Each different type of quark is identical with the other quarks of the same type. What makes a gold atom gold and a silicon atom silicon, is the force field, the field of attraction that exists between the nucleus and the surrounding electrons. It is that force field that we experience as being of a certain density, a certain color, a certain weight, a certain texture and having certain chemical qualities. This is coming from the energy interaction between all the separate elements of the atom.
The smallest piece of elementary 'matter' that we know of is a hydrogen atom, but hydrogen only attains solidity at impossibly cold temperatures, certainly way below anything naturally achievable on this planet. If the particle were encapsulated by anything solid, that solidity would have to consist of an atom containing several neutrons and protons and several electrons, at distances from each other that totally dwarf the size of the supposed quark particle that they would encapsulate. Even the spheres that encapsulate whole protons and neutrons could not be made of anything solid, unless there is an entirely different type of matter that has not been discovered yet, and is structured entirely differently and much, much more simply than an atom. Yet how could these subatomic particles be particles at all, how could they contain spin and charge and, especially, mass without some kind of encapsulation? And if the forces are not generated, do not emerge from the capsule, if the capsule does not exist, than what generates these forces and how are they contained in such a specific area within the proton or the neutron? Also, please note, that although force carriers have been discovered, these are not force generators. How are these forces, any forces, actually generated? Let's momentarily leave this quandary to discuss something else.
EAST vs. WEST
As shocking as this may seem, it is absolutely true that while Democritus was opining in Greece about cubes and spheres and hooks, other people in other places, like what would later be called Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, and the Indian sub-continent, were also thinking about the nature of the physical universe, and had already been doing so for thousands of years. And the answers they came up with were remarkably similar, not to Democritus, but to each other. Why this similarity exists could have been due to a global system of communication that we are not currently aware of, or a tectonic shifting of land masses, so that previously united societies with shared knowledge were gradually separated into distant continents, or it could be due to the possibility that true knowledge is received and if you begin your meditations and contemplations, not with a lot of 'discovered knowledge' from earlier 'experts', and are driven, not by a competitive desire to become an honored expert yourself, but simply by a profound curiousity and reverence and wonder for this universe, and you are feeling calm enough and centered enough to receive knowledge rather than feeling compelled to generate it; then, wherever you are on this planet, you receive, in different languages and using forms familiar to a variety of different cultures, the same knowledge.
This shared knowledge can be referred to as monistic dualism. From one comes two. That one may be referred to as the Infinite, the Atman, the Cosmic Consciousness, Holy Father, Allah, Hashem, God, and by many other names. Modern physicists, interestingly, refer to the precursor of the Big Bang as the Unity. Also from this shared perspective, the subtle creates the gross. The material world is created from the Cosmic Consciousness, just like the things that we make and accomplish in our own lives originate in desires that spring from our own individual consciousness. From there some of this unity splits into two opposing forces that interact with each other. These forces have different names in different cultures, such as the terrestrial force and the celestial force, In and Yo, Tirawa and Atira, Father Sky and Mother Earth, Shiva and Shakti, Fana and Baqa, Yin and Yang, etc. The physical universe, matter, is created by the interplay, the interaction of these two forces.
Consider the following sentences:
1. In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth (Judaism and Christianity).
2. Infinity bifurcates into yin and yang (Taoism and Confucianism).
Please keep in mind that the physical heaven with stars and nebulae and our planet, the physical earth, were not created, according to Genesis, until the third day (epoch). What the words Heaven and Earth must be referring to, then, in this very first sentence of the Bible, and three epochs before the creation of our planet and a starry sky, is a heaven force and an earth force, which makes the first sentence and the second sentence identical.
The most important thing to realize about this approach, as opposed to our Western materialist approach, is that forces can attract each other and configure. They do not emanate from matter, rather matter, or the illusion of matter, is created by the interplay of attracting and configuring forces. In short, there is no matter, no particles. What we are seeing and touching and bunking into are forces and the reason they seem solid is not because of particles, subatomic or otherwise, but because of the density of the force fields within and between these configurations of forces. Forces emanate from the Infinite, not from particles of matter.
The only real solidity that forces have is the solidity of an idea. Forces are described as laws. We have Newton's Laws and Einstein's Laws, etc. Of course Newton and Einstein never claimed that they were describing forces that they, themselves, created. They were describing forces that were already there, in nature, and that had certain consistencies and those consistencies were what Newton and Einstein called laws. With human laws, as opposed to natural laws, we can easily understand that they begin with ideas. The lawmakers have an idea that will make society function better for them and, hopefully but not always, for the other members of the society. These laws are not forces. They don't automatically enforce themselves, just by decreeing them, but they must contain some method of enforcement if they are to be effective. Many people: police officers, soldiers, judges, prosecutors, defenders and inspectors; are all employed in the service of enforcing the human laws that are already in place. The laws governing natural forces describe the working of forces that are already there. They contain their own enforcement. And they are based on ideas not to form a workable society, but to form a workable universe, and they were conceived of, or enacted, not for the benefit of a particular interest group within the universe, but for the creation and benefit of the universe itself.
YIN AND YANG
Let's talk about how these forces configure. I will be using the words 'yin' and 'yang' but they are interchangeable with all the other ways that these forces have been referred to in various cultures over time.
The most important thing to remember is that these forces, by themselves, configure. They do not emanate from matter. Yin and yang are not qualites of things; they are the things themselves. We may perceive them as things and I will talk about that in another section, but the 'thingness,' the solidity and contours of objects are not caused by matter, but by the density of mutually attractive forces and the stability of these forces held in balance.
Yin is expansive, centrifugal, outward, spacious and light. Yang is contractive, centripetal, inward, timebound and dark. Every seeming particle or object and every wave is held in place by the balance of the inward force of yang pulling inward on the outward force of yin. Without yin there would be no dimension, no space, to an object. Without yang, there would be no contours, no boundary to an object. The physical universe is created only when and where yin and yang interact and comingle. Yin and yang do not attract each other so much as they capture each other. Yin, which is expansive and moves at infinite speed, is everywhere yet detectable nowhere at the same time; yin captures and surrounds instantly any pure yang, holding it in place and preventing it from contracting further into itself. The yin force is held in place and prevented from dispersing at infinite speed through the universe by the inward force of yang at the center of any natural object. The yang force is held in place and prevented from going where it really wants to go, which is directly toward the nearest, strongest yang force. This attraction of the weaker yang force to the nearest stronger yang force is what we call gravity. Without the yin force, all natural objects on this planet would quickly collapse into the center of the earth, which would quickly collapse into the center of the sun, which would quickly collapse into the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which would quickly collapse, along with all the other galaxies, into the non-physical, yang center of the universe. Then we would be exactly as we were when that first bifurcation of yin and yang happened.
The physical universe is described as being curved, flat and expanding outward like the surface of a balloon. This expansion is supposedly due to the effects of the Big Bang. If we can locate the origin of an explosion by tracing back the direction of the debris from that explosion, and if the universe is, in fact, the debris of the Big Bang, then the origin of that explosion is the non-physical center of that expanding balloon, which is the central yang of the universe. The reason the earth is expanding at a rate much slower than modern physics would predict, is not because it is being slowed down by an abundance of dark matter that no one can detect, but because the universe is expanding against the pull of the non-physical yang center of the universe.
At the center of the earth is a strong pure yang. The center of our planet is filled with hot molten heavy metals. The gravitational pull of the earth is not due to the weight or mass or heat at the center of the earth. It is due to the non-physical yang force at the center of the earth which attracts all the yang in every object in its vicinity and creates the heat, and the heavy metals, by compressing protons and neutrons into heavier atoms. At the center of the sun is a much greater yang, which creates a much greater gravitational attraction, a much greater heat and a compressive force that is so strong that it breaks down the heavier elements so that what is left at the center are the two lightest elements, hydrogen and helium, with hydrogen atoms fusing to make helium atoms and releasing the enormous heat and energy that warms all the planets of the solar system and energizes all the life on our planet. At the center of black holes is a still greater yang force. This force is so compressive that no atoms can exist in its vicinity. It is held in place by strong yin forces that combine with yang forces to make objects including stars, but all of this takes place at a far enough distance so that the yang force of these objects (all objects, even if more yin, must still have a yang component) are not pulled into the yang center of the black hole. At the center of the universe is the greatest pure yang. From this perspective, the entire universe is a black hole, with the distance from the non-physical yang center of the expanding balloon of the universe to the surface of the balloon (the physical universe) being the closest distance that an object, which must have a yang center, can be without being sucked into the giant black hole at the universe's center.
Pure yang is at the center of all natural objects. This does not include man made objects, although the components of man made objects are made of multitudes of atoms and molecules which are, themselves, natural objects and which are more yang at their center. It does include organisms, like human organisms, which are all pure yang at their center. Remember, no thing can exist as pure yin or pure yang. Things are always combinations of yin and yang. But we are most yang at our center and most yin at our extremities. As I said before, yin and yang are not things. They form things when they interact. Yin and yang cannot, by themselves be measured or observed, but they can be experienced. In terms of our experience, we find ourselves being more yin or more yang depending on our constitution, our mood, the time of day and a whole series of factors. Yang is concentration, power, focus and direction. A more yang person, or a person in an overly yang state, is driven, finds it hard to relax, lacks patience, and is very conscious of time. A person in an overly yin state lacks ambition, has a lot of circular thinking, little to no awareness of time, and is physically lazy. As I said, most of us are more yin and more yang at different times, and we have all probably experienced, in varying degrees, both of these states. And I should mention that there is a balanced state, neither overly yin or overly yang, in which we accomplish things, we are able to do what we intend to do, but with patience and flexibility, allowing ourselves to adjust our strategies effortlessly in response to any unplanned contingencies that the universe throws at us, which it always does.
When yin surrounds yang, a spiral is formed. This spiral can spin in either direction depending on the angles and relative strengths of this first encounter. The spirals can be very tight and pulled into themselves, like circles, but not perfect circles, or they can be very elongated, like straight lines, but not perfectly straight lines. Matter, or the illusion of matter, is formed by the force fields of attraction within these spirals. Living organisms, which are natural objects, are formed by a series of connecting spirals of yin and yang. The human body is composed of several spirals. This is most easily seen at birth when the infant arrives curled in the fetal position (a spiral). One spiral starts at the brain and ends at the base of the spine. One starts at the hip and ends at the toe. One starts at the shoulder and ends at the finger tips. Finger and toe prints are also spirals, as is the digestive system, starting at the mouth and ending at the anus. This is not to discount all the findings of modern biology. Cells migrate and mitotically divide and differentiate according to genetic timing patterns and genetic blue prints, but how the cells are arranged, the contours that they take once they reach the place that they are chemically and electro-magnetically driven to, are dictated by the particular combination of variously shaped interconnected spirals of yin and yang that is already there before these embryological events occur. It is not just the human genome, but the spirallic yin/yang formations associated with the human genome, or the spiral yin/yang formations associated with any genome, that determines these particular shapes. It is these shapes, the morphology of organsims, even more than the cellular components of these shapes and the protein components of these cells, that yield the distinctive traits and distinctive ways of organizing biological systems that we recognize as distinct species.
I will talk more about the shaping of organisms in another post, but please realize now that there is no acceptable explanation for it being offered by modern science. There is just an argument. One side contends that all structures are formed by adaptation to specific needs. This explanation is woefully inadequate and fails to explain why species in their basic body structures and forms do not undergo any change whatsoever, for millions and hundreds of million years. A grasshopper has the same body that it had four hundred million years ago. Countless modern animals are recognized in the fossils of very ancient animals. Why is the shape of the maple leaf, the shape of any leaf, for that matter, unchanging over countless centuries? What adaptive function does that serve? The other side contends that new arrangements and traits are the result of forces within the organic chemicals themselves, that necessitate development much like a crystal will form, lawfully and necessarily, from certain elements and molecules in a particular environmental and chemical condition. This approach fails to explain why different species and body plans took billions of years to arrive here. If there are inherent qualities in organic materials that foster development of particular pathways, weren't those qualities there from the beginning? Did those qualities change and what made them change? The most glaring characteristic of both these approaches is what they fail to explain. Something huge is missing in our understanding at the very center of this problem. That shapes and traits change as a result of changes in the interlocking spirallic formations that form the shape and shapes within shapes of an organism, and that those shapes are changed by the Infinite as a response to a changing environment and as a way to use an environmental change as an opportunity to advance the complexity and richness of the experience of an organism as well as its survivability, is the answer that I am providing. As I say, I will discuss this more, but if you have any answer that is different from mine and that actually solves the dilemma, please let me know.
As I said earlier, subatomic particles are identified by their spin, their charge and their mass. When yin and yang configure, they form spirals, just like when two opposing forces meet on a larger scale, they form whirlpools or tornadoes or dust devils. The direction of the spin of that spiral is dependent on the angle at which they first encounter each other and the relative strengths of the two forces. The charge corresponds to whether their combination is more yin, a negative charge, or more yang, a positive charge. Positive and negative correspond to yin and yang with the following exceptions: Positive and negative charges are considered to be a quality of the matter, or the particle that they are associated with. From the yin/yang perspective, there is no matter. The charge is merely a preponderance of one force over the other. Also, a neutrally charge particle is considered to be neither positive nor negative. From a yin/yang perspective, such a particle, or, really, such a configuration of forces, has both yin and yang and can have them in great force; it's just that the two opposing forces are of equal strength and balance each other. If a particle, a neutron or proton or atom is split, then enormous forces that had been tightly bound and balanced with each other are released.
What about the mass of the particle then? Isn't mass a measure of the amount of matter in a particle? Obviously not. As we discussed above, If there were matter in a particle, what would it be made of? Mass is the measure of the force, the pull, that the yang at the center of the object exerts on all the other configurations of energy within the surface of the object itself. This is distinct from gravity, which is the pull that the yang center of an object pulls on other objects beyond the surface of the original object. Gravity is a much weaker force than mass because the pull of the yang center past the surface of the object is much weaker, after it has been reduced and to a great degree neutralized by all the yin components that are located toward the periphery of that object.
If you were in a gravity free zone, objects would have no weight, which is, in the vicinity of this planet, the pull on objects from the yang center of the earth. Objects would still have mass, however. You could float in a gravity free zone on a normally heavy object which would also be floating. The object exerts no pressure on you, whether you are above it or below it. However, if you try to accelerate that object, if you try to push it across a gravity free room, it will be more difficult the more mass it has. As I said, mass is the pull of yang at the center of that object, which has nothing to do with the earth and is still there in a gravity free zone. The pull of the yang center on all the elements of an object creates its mass, which we could also call its inertia. The attraction of the yang center of an object toward the closest strong yang, in our experience, the center of the earth, is the gravitational pull or what we call its weight.
Yet physicists tell us that there are massless particles. How could that be? Every configuration must have a yang component, otherwise there would be no boundaries and the yin force would just disperse into the Infinite. Light is supposedly a massless particle. Yet when light passes near a very large yang center, like the center of a galaxy, it bends in the direction of the galaxy. This is because there is a very small amount of yang in light, too small to be detected in earth's gravitational field, but large enough to be attracted to and pulled toward the strongest yang centers in the universe. The speed of light is the fastest time that an object can travel. That object is yin force with the absolute minimal amount of yang to create contours. Without any yang, yin moves at infinite speed, making it unfathomably fast and absolutely still at the same time, since it takes no time, traveling at infinite speed, to transverse the entire universe and return to the same spot. Also, yin is not a thing, so there is no separation between one 'part' of pure yin and another 'part.' There are no parts. Yin only separates when some of it surrounds and is held in place by yang.
WAVES AND PARTICLES
Returning to the orignal particle/wave dilemma, from this perspective there are no particles. What we are calling a particle is merely a more condensed form of a wave. The so-called particle is really a tighter, more yang, more circular spiral of yin and yang. It is our act of observation, whether with the naked eye or with a recording device, that yangizes, or contracts, this yin/yang configuration. And this is what we, that is all living organisms, do. We experience the world as particles, not waves. We are each particular organisms, belonging to a particular species and experiencing this world in a particular way. A particular organism with a particular genome and a particular brain and nervous system, is a particular way of experiencing the universe. Our brains record our experience in snapshots. Waves or processes are frozen in time. That is why, when we see someone we haven't seen for many years, or see a neighborhood that we haven't seen for many years, we are pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised, but always surprised. We may know that everything changes, but we still experience things as unchanging particles and not changing waves and processes. So when we re-encounter a young child as a young adult, we are momentarily shocked, just as when we re-encounter a young adult as a senior citizen.
Our focus, our concentration, yangizes, contracts, particularizes, whatever it is that we are perceiving. When we are not focussed on it, it still exists but not in a solid, particle form. When it emerges into our consciousness, it does so as a solid particle. Let's take a very common example: our bodies. Now are bodies are always there, but we are not always conscious of our bodies. Suppose we are at a party. If we are engaged in conversation then our bodies are, of course, still there, but they are part of the automatic responses that we have to whatever is being said to us. Our bodies are fluid and responsive. They are light. We are not aware of them as physical objects. They are open and the conversation and the music and the atmosphere of the room just enters them as if they are open waves and not closed particles. If, for whatever reason, we become conscious of our bodies, then our bodies take on physicality, become, in our experience, solid particles, which will not admit or receive the waves of feeling, intention and rhythm that are coming at us. Our bodies are then impediments to the free flow of conversation, or the free flow of rhythm and music if we are dancing. We can still respond if we are being spoken to, but the response does not come from how the other's words affected us, or moved us. We hear the words, separately from our bodies and our response is measured and prepared. The conversation becomes stilted and heavy without the flow and lightness of intermingling waves, but the isolation and collision of two separate particles.
At this party, your body could also be observed by another person who focusses on it because it is, for them, an object of admiration or disdain. If you are not aware of this observation, then, for you, in terms of your experience at that moment, your body is in a fluid wave state, while, in terms of the observer's experience, your body is in a particle/ object state. You may call this a superposition of states, but it is really two different experiences of a body which is in reality a wave, but has become objectified, or particularized, only in the experience of one observer.
At any given moment our focus contains a very limited content of things that we deal with and imagine as particles. Everything else in the universe, past, present or future, is in wave formation, and is part of the context, not the content, of our existence at that moment. It is there, to be called into consciousness at any moment for an infinite variety of reasons, but it is only particularized, only comes into focus, when we are conscious of it. When we are not conscious of it, it is there, but lightly, immaterially. Each person carries an enormous amount of contextual information that can be particularized at any moment, but that doesn't necessarily weigh us down, or burden us in any way. It all can exist without weight, without burden, to be called into consciousness at any moment from this immaterial, wave state. This doesn't mean that we cannot be burdened by what we know. Most of us are to some degree. If we are worried about something, if we regret, if we are haunted by something that we have done, or afraid of something that might happen, then all of these things protrude into our conciousness, particularize and weigh us down, make us heavy and less buoyant with their weight. Even if we attempt to avoid thinking about any of those things that bother us, we are particularizing them and giving them weight in our imagination and the effort of pushing them away, as if they were real particles, burdens us. Trying not to think about something is often as onerous as thinking about it. It is only when we realize that all objects are not frozen, solid particles, but fluid, changeable waves, that we can focus on them with lightness and clarity, and are able to change those conditions or change the way that we think about them.
We are free when we are able to focus on the things that we want to focus on and focus on the conditions that we really need to focus on, without the weight and burden of solidifying, in our imagination, the condition that we are concerned about. This condition is always, in reality, fluid and changeable, but in our experience of it, it is only fluid and changeable if we recognize it as such. Those conditions will, eventually, change anyway, but if you want to become an agent of change and not wait passively for change, then you have to approach these situations with the understanding that, even though they appear solid and stuck and immobile, they are in reality light and fluid and changeable, held in place simply because we perceive them as solid, weighty and incapable of change. If you perceive them that way and act when you are dealing with them and with the other people involved with them, in that manner, lightly, clearly, respectfully, without being weighed down by their seeming solidity, then you will be able to affect change and not just helplessly and passively wait for it.
SCHRODINGER'S CAT
Just a final word about another quantum mystery, Schrodinger's cat. Physicist Schrodinger initially postulated his cat thought experiment to point up the absurdity of some quantum thinking, but since then it has been picked up by many physicists as a genuine outcome of quantum mechanics. Suppose a cat was locked in a box in which there was a radioactive atom. If the atom decayed and admitted radiation the cat would die. If it didn't, the cat would still be alive. According to many physicists, the cat is both alive and dead simulatenously, a superposition of conditions until the box is opened and the cat is observed. The observation of the cat is the thing that detemines whether it is alive or dead, and until the cat is observed, it continues in this superposition of being simultaneously, both alive and dead. Of course, from this anthropocentric perspective, what the poor cat is observing is never considered.
This thinking comes directly from the idea that our observation is creating something new, a particle that wasn't previously there. But, as we discussed, our observation doesn't create anything new. The wave, just in our perception of it, collapses into a particle. The wave is still there. The wave has not changed. Nothing has changed. All that happens is that the way we perceive it is different from the way that it is. Whether or not a radioactive atom decays is a result of the passage of time and the condition of the atom. These processes are totally unaffected by our observation. (Thankfully, so. Otherwise, what havoc could our enemies wreak by simply focussing on our nuclear stockpiles!) If it is time for that radioactive atom to decay, then the cat will die. If it is not time, then it won't . But what it is really time for is to open up that damn box and let that poor cat out after all these years!
As usual, your comments are always welcome.
