We live in a Universe of unimaginable complexity.
(note: this post is >2000 words long)
But we act as if we know everything, or that science knows everything.
Let's try to wrap our mind around the unimaginability of our physical world and why it will be some time before we are able to understand more than an infinitesimal fraction of it.
Everybody knows that the physical world is made up of matter, that matter is made up of molecules, and that molecules are made up of atoms. Furthermore, we've all seen models of atoms as little balls (electrons) whirling around little clumps in the center - the nucleus, made up of neutrons and protons.
We've come to understand that the electrons aren't in orbit, exactly, but in a cloud around the nucleus - there isn't any way to know both the location and the velocity of the electron at the same time. It's approximately in an area enclosed by a "shell." But the shell is really a mental construct - a model to help us understand approximately what we're looking at ... or at least, imagining. Those electrons are not really in some hard, well-defined shell, they're whirling around at nearly the speed of light, jumping from "shell" to shell and back at nearly unimaginable speeds.
But what are these little balls, these electrons, neutrons, and protons made up of? Humans used to think that everything was made up of water, earth, and fire, and later they added ether. Then we thought that molecules were the smallest part of matter - the elementary particles, then atoms, then the little balls we see in models of atoms, or in the logo of many companyies and organizations - like the Atomic Energy Commission. Over the past few decades, we've come to understand that electrons, neutrons, and protons were made up of smaller elementary particles - muons, gluons - all part of a class of particles called, "quarks."
Well it turns out that quarks are quirky, as are photons - the "particles" that light is made up of. Quarks have attributes that have been given quirky names like, spin or charm. Photons are hard for physicists to pin down - are they particles or waves? Waves are simply a form, a way for energy to propagate through matter. An ocean wave is the ocean moving in response to a form that is moving through it. The "wave" that we see is at the beach is not a wave at all, but the water being pushed around by a wave. Get it? It's movement of energy that moves matter. Photons can't be pinned down, so Professor Banesh Hoffman, a collaborator of Einstein, named them "wavicles." They're part wave and part particle.
Furthermore, when we look at atoms, we find that they're mostly just space. Yes, space with these little ball things whirling around in it. And when I say "mostly," I mean way more than 99%.
And those ball things? They're mostly just space themselves - way more than 99% as well.
When it comes right down to it, all "elementary particles" are not made up of matter at all. Most people have heard of the field of Quantum Physics (let's call it QP for short). Now don't go to sleep on me!! QP describes the behavior of elementary particles and the stuff that they're made up of. Lo and behold, they're not made up of matter at all, but of waves - quanta (which describes a really large number) of waves! And waves are organized energy - frequency and amplitude, or how fast & how big.
Wow! The real world is just waves! How does that work?
Well, waves are really well organized. They're organized so well that they essentially resolve to acting like solid matter. "Organization" is another way of saying "information." Between gravity, magnetic attraction and repulsion, electronic charges and things like that, most of the "real" world that we see hangs together pretty well.
But it's made up of:
So we have: energy and information make up...everything!
That's quite remarkable, don't you think?
Let's think about information.
I'm going to talk about computers for a minute so that if this kind of thing puts you to sleep, you can skip the next paragraph.
Most people have a computer. A computer is mostly measured by how much data it can store and process, and how fast. I'm writing this on an iMac, which has a 55GB hard disk, and it operates at 800 MHz. What does that mean? A byte is eight bits (like "pieces of eight" from which the term derives) and a bit is a zero or a one. That's binary computing. At its root level, a computer only knows 0 or 1, yes or no, on or off. 1 GB is about a billion bytes (it's really just under 1.1 billion bytes, but who's counting?). 55 GB is about 55 billion bytes, or about 440 billion bits. The 800 MHz means that it can flip these bits on & off at a rate of 800,000 times (cycles) per second. Newer computers do about 3 GHz, or 3 billion cycles per second. Sounds impressive, doesn't it?
A recent article in Scientific American says that physicists see everything as a computing device, even black holes. Everything processes information, just as (although not in exactly the same process) as a computer processes information. "Everything?" you ask, "even a rock?" Yup, even a rock. Shine white light on a rock, and it gives off rock-colored light. Put a rock out in the sun, and it gives off heat. Tap a rock with another rock, and it gives off sound. Hit a rock with a sledgehammer, and it rearranges itself into a bunch of small rocks (also known as dust!) as well as light, heat, and sound.
Not just every object, but every particle processes information - every quantum particle. They can process information really fast, too. At a quantum level, particles can flip states (binary computing) at a rate of 10 to the 20th power times per second. That's a big number: 100,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's more than 100 billion times faster than my computer. "Those are big numbers you're throwing around," you might say. You'd be right.
What is 100 billion times bigger? To illustrate, imagine the plight of we Californians, with our earthquakes. The Richter scale (how we measure earthquake size) is logarithmic: a 3.0 is 10 times a 2.0 quake, a 4.0 is ten times a 3.0, and so forth. Almost nobody feels a 3.0. We recently had a couple of quakes that were a little bigger than 5.0, a hundred times bigger than a 3.0. A 5.0 makes people get a little worried, and probably make ready to run outside. A 7.0 is a hundred times that. In a 7.0, buildings, overpasses and bridges are falling here and there. Houses are moving off their foundations and grocery stores are a complete mess, their aisles covered with broken jars of goo and powder. A 9.0 is 100 times bigger than that - everything is flattened and there are monster tsunamis. The southeast Asia tsunami of December 26, 2004 was caused by a 9.0 quake.
A 9.0 that flattens everything around is a million times bigger than a 3.0 that almost nobody even feels. Are you still with me?
The Richter scale tops out at 10.0. We don't bother to measure anything more than ten times bigger than the Dec 26 quake. But what would a thousand times bigger do? Well, we wouldn't have such an event, because I think the Earth would shake apart long before then, and there wouldn't be anything left to shake - just dust and random rocks where we all used to be. If this is so, then a quake a billion times bigger than one we don't even feel would pulverize the planet. Do you get a sense of the scale?
Now, any single particle can process information 100 billion times faster than my computer. Hmmm. How many particles are there? Let's start with something easy: sand. Glenn Mackie says that there are 2,000 billion billion (that's a billion times a billion!) grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth. That's just on the beaches. Our planet is 8,000 miles across, and it's not mostly beaches.
Our planet is one of nine in our solar system, and it's one of the smaller ones, all of which are dwarfed by the sun. Mackie says that there are 50,000 billion billion stars, each of which may have its own planets. And don't even get me started on intergalactic gases!
We talked about grains of sand, but even a grain of sand contains millions of atoms, many millions of particles. David McEcoy, a Physics undergrad says there are 23 billion billion.
Can we cut to the chase here? Well, Jefferson labs says that there are 133,000 billion billion billion billion billion atoms on Earth. Yikes!
What does that give us?
John Dreyer, an astronomer at the SETI Institute estimates that there are 1.2 x 10 to the 79th power (12,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ) atoms in the universe, as related in "Mad Sci Network, the Laboratory that never sleeps!"
Each of these atoms contains a bunch of subatomic particles, each of which can process information at 10 to the 20th power ( 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 ) cycles per second.
How long has this been going on? Believe who you will, but About.com says that the universe is about 14 billion years old. In seconds, that's roughly 4.4 x 10 to the 17th power. Oops! There goes another one!!!
Okay, how many calculations in the Universe so far?
That would be somewhere around 4.4 x 1.2 x 10 to the17th x 10 to the 79th x however many subatomic particles are in an atom (let's just use 1,000 for fun), or:
5.28 x 10 to the 99th
5,280,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Wow!
Oh no! One more concept! Quantum entanglement.
I promise that this will be the last bit of heavy lifting for your brain.
Photons and quarks have different quantum characteristics. Remember - spin, charm, cute things like that. And two quantum particles can be entangled - have complementary characters. Like partners in a marriage, like Democrats and Republicans, like siblings in a family, one set balances out the other set (we can only hope!). And, like sides in an argument, when one side takes a position the other side takes the opposite one. It's not exactly like that, but you get the idea.
When a photon in a quantum entangled pair takes one form, its partner takes the complementary one. Change one, the other one changes. This even works when the photons are very far away. This was proved in an experiment in Bern, Switzerland just a few years ago. It appears to happen instantly and, as far as we know, over any distance. This should be impossible, right? How does the one particle tell the other one to switch? Nothing travels faster than light. Einstein thought the effect was a mistake in his calculations. He called it "spooky interaction at a distance." But it's now been proven to work. How?
It seems that information is not traveling, but that the photons, when they get quantum entangled, are part of the same system. Try this little experiment. Hold a pencil at its middle, between your thumb and forefinger. Push one end of the pencil down, and the other end moves up. Of course. So what. One end of the pencil said to the other end of the pencil, "I'm moving down - you better move up." Of course not. It's all part of the same system, it all acts like it's one thing - like it's one particle - like quantum entangled photons. Our planet works the same way. Mt. Everest is about 8,000 miles across the Earth from Mt. McKinley, but they both spin at the same speed around the Earth, and when the planet wobbles, both peaks do the same. If your pencil were as far across as the Universe is, and you were able to hold it in the middle and push one end, the other end would move the opposite way at the same moment.
We have no idea how many quantum-entangled the particles in the Universe are - how many paths of information there are. But we know about how many particles there are, and how many calculations they could make.
What could be figured out, what could be created, what could be imagined in that number of calculations? Angels, spirits, other universes, auras, chakras, energy fields, our current model of science, the vast majority of reality - the mind of God. We hardly have any idea.
Well, that's the point of this whole essay. We have only begun to imagine.
