What is real? It’s all an Illusion If you doubt that reality as it reveals itself to us is an illusion, consider this; for almost the entirety of human history, we witnessed the sun rise every morning in the east, travel across the sky, and set in the west. By night the stars followed this same journey, east to west, rotating across the sky. Our ancestors observed this daily procession, and took it for reality. Then along came Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo etc, and showed us that the sun and stars did not rise in the east nor set in the west. Nor did they move across the sky. They didn’t move at all, we did. The Great Magician had played a trick on us. The stars, relative to the earth, were fixed - though as we shall see, in reality nothing is fixed. Everything is connected Non-locality in quantum mechanics renders obsolete, the old classical paradigm of a world populated by objects, interacting through contact. Linear causality (A causes B causes C) is broken. The universe is in a state of quantum entanglement*, preserved since the Big Bang, in the manner described by Schrodinger’s Equation. Entangled states are fundamental wholes. Thus, the universe is a fundamental whole. Fundamental wholes cannot be divided into component parts, and still be understood. A carburettor makes no sense unless understood as part of an engine. Any account of one part of the whole is incomplete and misleading, unless it accounts for the entirety of the whole - including, and this is the important part - the consciousness of the observer. Distinctions are arbitrary. This brings us back to the illusion that the world is composed of separate entities all following their own path, going their own way, often oblivious of each other until obliged not to be, by proximity (things bump into each other). What we see as separate objects acting independently, is in reality a vaste and bewildering molecular soup, or if you prefer, a complex web of never resting waves in space. The particles to which the molecules are reducible, do not exist consistently as objects; think of them more as spontaneous excitations of a field. That’s what stuff is made of - particles flickering in and out of a field, born along on waves of probability. Nothing is real. There’s nothing to get hung about. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement More to come, if I can be arsed
You're part of the greater interconnectedness whether you like it or not, so you best get with the programme man
In his book “What is Real - The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics”, Adam Becker devotes a chapter to advances in interpretation of QM, which occurred at Caltech in the 1960s. He notes that pretty much everyone in California at that time, including theoretical physicists, were taking acid.
Ive made a summer pledge of riding to and from work as long as its under half an hour. Been doingbthat for 3 weeks now, cant say i feel any fitter like but its deffo quicker cheaper and more reliable than public transport. And environmentally chill
You haven't seen me on as pushbike bro, unless you want me to kill myself, then it's a way to make it happen lol. Think of some old biddy who really shouldn't be driving, driving down the centre of the road at you, and you'll get the picture.
Purple light isn't real. Or at least it's an illusion. When you see purple at the bottom of the rainbow you're actually seeing blue with red at the same time. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue: all real colours that have a measurable wavelength... But there is no wavelength of light that is purple. (True purple)... Sure... They called the bluer end "Indigo" and "ultra violet" but no wavelength is actually purple. When you see purple light you're really just seeing a mix of red and blue. Purple light doesn't exist, it's just our brains playing tricks on us.
Our eyes are only capable of seeing a tiny stretch of the spectrum in any case. Those fantastic pictures of galaxies you see taken by the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes are mostly taken by cameras adjusted to record infra red and ultra violet light the human eye couldn’t see.
It's also how we know what elements of the periodic table are present. Because each element gives off its own light iirc. So we can look for things like carbon, oxygen, hydrogen (to make water) and see where life may exist or be possible to survive.
Yeah, Fraunhofer lines - broadband emission and absorption spectra. It’s how we know that H2O, for example, is ubiquitous throughout the universe. Amazing stuff.
I heard about it from Brian Cox (soz brb). But in my mind I thought how do we know if there are other elements we don't know about which could exist out there? I think Cox said something like, the fact only those colours are seen show there are no other elements. But I'm not entirely convinced by that tbh.
Astronomers work on the assumption that the laws of physics, and the equations and mathematical models which describe them, apply equally throughout the universe, but really who knows? We haven’t detected a single dark matter particle yet, despite the consensus being that it accounts for 85% of all the matter in the universe…
They become unstable over 82 protons due to binding energy, though there is a theory that there's a sweet spot far up the scale where the elements become stable again.
