real(ly

   

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Explain quantum mechanics in 5 words or less.

"Don’t look : waves.
Look : particles."

(an answer to a challenge asked by Sean Carroll on Twitter, originally posed by physicist John Wheeler) 

There is a lot to say about quantum mechanics, perhaps the most mysterious idea ever to be contemplated by human beings, but all we need is one simple (but hard to accept) fact: 

How the world appears when we look at it is very different from how it really is.


—Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist
The Particle at the End of the Universe - The Hunt for the Higgs and the Discovery of a New World

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The view of things that all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike; this theory … may be carried back to the remotest antiquity. 

It is the alpha and omega of the oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas, whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the Upanishads. There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies enshrined; with tireless repetition, in countless adaptations, by many varied parables and similes it is expounded and inculcated.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788–1860)

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The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an 

atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

—Werner Heisenberg, 1901-1976
Pioneer of Quantum Mechanics,
Pantheist

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the stuff of reality

  

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Particle physics has taught us that every atom in the periodic table of the elements is an arrangement of just three basic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Every object you have ever seen or bumped into in your life is made of just those three particles.

At a fundamental level, there aren’t separate “living things” and “nonliving things,” “things here on Earth” and “things up in the sky,” matter” and “spirit.” There is just the basic stuff of reality, appearing to us in many different forms.

Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web. [It] presents a hugely grandiose claim, and we have every right to be sceptical. When we look into the eyes of another person, it doesn’t seem that what we’re seeing is simply a collection of atoms, some sort of immensely complicated chemical reaction. 

At the moment, the dominant image of the world remains one in which human life is cosmically special and significant, something more than mere matter in motion. We need to do better at reconciling how we talk about life’s meaning with what we know about the scientific image of our universe.

There’s an older thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus. Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens, had an impressive ship in which he had fought numerous battles. To honor him, the citizens of Athens preserved his ship in their port. Occasionally a plank or part of the mast would decay beyond repair and have to be replaced. We have a question of identity: is it the same ship after we’ve replaced one of the planks? If you think it is what about after we’ve replaced all of the planks, one by one? And (as Thomas Hobbes went on to ask) what if we then took all the old planks and built a ship out of them? Would that one then suddenly become the Ship of Theseus?

Narrowly speaking, these are all questions about identity. When is one thing “the same thing” as some other thing? But more broadly, they are questions about ontology, our basic view of what exists in the world. 

What kinds of things are there at all?

—Sean Carroll
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and The Universe Itself

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At the quantum level, no part of the body lives apart from the rest. There are no wires holding together the molecules of your arteries, just as there are no visible connections binding together the stars in a galaxy. 

Yet arteries and galaxies are both securely held together, in a seamless, perfect design. The invisible bonds that you cannot examine under a microscope are quantum in nature; without this “hidden physiology,” your visible physiology could not exist. It would never have been more than a random collection of molecules.


―Deepak Chopra

Perfect Heath

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When you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything. 

—Lao Tzu

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