the world is made up of networks of kisses

  

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The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. 

A stone is prototypical 'thing': we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an 'event'. It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. 

The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones. On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most 'thing-like' are nothing more than long events.

—Carlo Rovelli

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It’s not so much that we don’t have a self, rather it’s that the self we do have is not a thing. 

It is an impermanent, fluctuating activity, a process not a particle, a verb not a noun. 


—Shinzen Young

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One regret, dear world

That I am determined not to have 
When I am lying on my deathbed 

Is that 
I did not kiss you enough.


—Hafiz

 

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the complexity of a sphere

     

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The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Buckminster Fuller defines a Sphere as “a multiplicity of discrete events, approximately equidistant in all directions from a Nuclear Center.

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning top, we have understood that reality is not what it seems: every glimpse of a new aspect of it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.

But the leap made by Einstein is unparalleled: spacetime is a field; the world is made only of fields and particles; space and time are not something else, something different from the rest of nature: they are just a field among the others.


—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems

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'Does it change the way the world feels?' i ask Christopher Toth. 'Knowing that 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, that countless such particles perforate our brains and hearts? Does it change the way you feel about matter — about what matters? Are you surprised that we don't fall through each surface of our world at every step, push through it with every touch?'

Christopher nods. He thinks.  

... 'At the weekends,' Christopher says, 'when I'm out for a walk with my wife, along the cliff tops near here, on a sunny day, I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and that the cliffs we're walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air. And I wonder what it must be like, sometimes, not to know that.'

He pauses, and it is clear that he is thinking now beyond the confines of the salt cavern, beyond even the known limits of the universe. 

'But mostly, and in several ways, I'm amazed I'm able to hold the hand of the person I love.'

—Robert Macfarlane
—Christopher Toth, physicist
Underland, from Chapter 3, Dark Matter

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real(ity

  

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Einstein's General Theory of Relativity describes a colorful and amazing world where universes explode, space collapses into bottomless holes, time sags and slows near a planet, and the unbounded extensions of interstellar space ripple and sway like the surface of the sea.

And all of this was not a tale told by an idiot in a fit of lunacy or a hallucination caused by Calabria's burning Mediterranean sun and its dazzling sea. 

It was reality. Or better, a glimpse of reality, a little less veiled than our blurred and banal everyday view of it. A reality that seems to be made of the same stuff that our dreams are made of, but that is nevertheless more real than our clouded, quotidian dreaming.


—Carlo Rovelli
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

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I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.

May I not reply with a parable? 

The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. 

That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.


—Albert Einstein, when asked if he would define himself as a pantheist

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the nature of th1ngs

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Quantum mechanics teaches us not to think about the world in terms of “things” that are in this or that state but in terms of “processes” instead. A process is the passage from one interaction to another.

The properties of “things” manifest themselves in a granular manner only in the moment of interaction—that is to say, at the edges of the processes—and are such only in relation to other things. They cannot be predicted in an unequivocal way, but only in a probabilistic one.

This is the vertiginous dive taken by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Dirac—into the depth of the nature of things.


—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems

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nothing the matter

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Niels Bohr understood that the energy of electrons in atoms can take on only certain values, like the energy of light, and crucially that electrons can only jump between one atomic orbit and another with determined energies, emitting or absorbing a photon when they jump. These are the famous "quantum leaps."

Werner Heisenberg imagined that electrons do not always exist. They only exist when someone or something watches them, or better, when they are interacting with something else. They materialize in a place, with a calculable probability, when colliding with something else. The "quantum leaps" from one orbit to another are the only means they have of being "real": an electron is a set of jumps of one interaction to another. When nothing disturbs it, it is not in any precise place.

It is not in a "place" at all.

It's as if God had not designed reality with a line that was heavily scored but just dotted it with a faint outline.


—Carlo Rovelli
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, excerpts

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I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such.

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.

We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.


—Max Planck
1931 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Father of Quantum Theory

 

 

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So the subatomic particles we see in nature, the quartz, the electrons are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string.

What is physics?

Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write on vibrating strings.

What is chemistry?

Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on interacting vibrating strings.

What is the universe?

The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings and then what is the mind of God?

It is the cosmic music resonating through eleven dimensional hyperspace.


—Michio Kaku

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Concerning matter, we have been all wrong.

What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses.

There is no matter.

Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.


—Albert Einstein

 

 

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always now here and now there

    

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If we look at a stone, it stays still. But if we could see its atoms, we would observe them to be always now here and now there, in ceaseless vibration. Quantum mechanics reveals to us that the more we look at the detail of the world, the less constant it is. The world is not made up of tiny pebbles. It is a world of vibrations, a continuous fluctuation, a microscopic swarming of fleeting micro events. 

[...] As the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote in the 1950's, with a beautiful phrase: "An object is a monotonous process." A stone is a vibration of quanta that maintains its structure for a while, just as a marine wave maintains its identity for a while, before melting again into the sea.

What is a wave, which moves on water without carrying with it any drop of water? 

A wave is not an object, in the sense that it is not made of matter that travels with it. The atoms of our body, as well, flow in and away from us. We, like waves and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous.

Quantum mechanics teaches us not to think about the world in terms of "things" that are in this or that state but in terms of "processes" instead. A process is the passage from one interaction to another. The properties of "things" manifest themselves in a granular manner only in the moment of interaction—that is to say, at the edges of the processes—and are such only in relation to other things. They cannot be predicted in an unequivocal way, but only in a probabilistic one.


—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems

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Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. 

Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, 

the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.

—Nicola Tesla

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