(This is Part 2 of a 2-part article. Go back to Part 1.)
No, this article isn't about finance, but it's about something just as strange—developments in quantum physics.
Quantum physicists are playing a little game with the public. Publicly, they're pretending that way down there at the root of things that there are little particles moving here and there. Trouble is, they know that's not true, but what they're really seeing is just too strange to talk about.
A little history: There was a raging argument in physics for a couple of centuries about whether light was a wave or a particle. There were good experiments pointing to one or the other.
Finally, in the mid-twentieth century, physicists decided that light had a dual nature, that is, that it was both a particle and a wave.
Then they saw evidence that every kind of elementary particle had this dual nature. Okay, fine.
Trouble is, the quantum wave function that describes a "particle" isn't really a particle at all; it's just a wave. Physicists are beginning to confront a reality where there aren't really any such things as "particles" —there are only waves, waves upon waves upon waves.
It's all just waves.
Then it gets even stranger, really Alice-in-Wonderland. You see, normally waves occur in something. For instance, a wave on the ocean is a wave moving through a medium, in this case a medium of water. By vibrating, molecules of water "hand off" the wave to the next ones as the wave passes through.
As another example, a sound wave in air is using the medium of air to "carry" the wave. The sound wave is actually a vibration passed along from one air molecule to another.
Trouble is, down at the really elementary level, it turns out that there is no medium, or rather, that the medium is a vacuum. It's emptiness, nothingness.
So now it turns out that deep down at the bottom of things that reality is waves of nothingness propagating through nothingness. It's all just nothingness.
How can you have something composed entirely of nothing? Don't ask me, I have no idea. Of course, I could come up with some plausible-sounding explanation, but really, what can you say? It's just part of the mystery that any of this—what we call "reality"—exists at all.
That reality at bottom is nothingness—emptiness—is what the mystics have been saying for millennia. But of course, what else could reality be made of but nothingness?
Nothingness, Emptiness, the Void—that is the ultimate reality.
As the Buddha said, this whole existence is a bubble, a dream, a fantasy. Yet what a beautiful one. Even its ugliness is beautiful.
And yet this leela of emptiness is also real. You only have to stub your toe to know that. The pain is real, real in the sense that it hurts.
So the challenge of reality is to operate within it while perceiving this dual nature—that it's absolutely empty, and also "real" at the level where we interact and have names and pretend that we're separate.
—jim sloman, 9.29.06
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