Reality

Particle collisions: CERN

I dearest it when New Scientist tackles the large questions. This calendar week it is "What is Reality?" There is a novel humility inwards science, it seems. Many scientists volition forthwith acknowledge that nosotros only don't know the response to the question. Reductionism is no longer convincing. You tin test e'er smaller components of the cloth globe (so far nosotros bring boiled it downward to quarks, leptons, as well as bosons), alone to discovery that in that place may live on no bottom level, or that if in that place is, it is good beyond the hit of observation (minute vibrating strings inwards several extra dimensions).

More importantly, since everything from the around uncomplicated particles to the objects nosotros run across around us alongside the naked optic tin live on described inwards damage of "wave functions" or waves of probability, existing inwards a "superposition" of contradictory states until the business office is "collapsed" past times the human activity of observation, it seems that the consciousness of an observer has re-emerged every bit a determining factor inwards reality itself. Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, said inwards 1931, "I regard thing every bit derivative from consciousness." The
only way to avoid this is to recall inwards damage non of witting observation but of "measurement", or the interaction of the subatomic processes alongside a measuring musical instrument of only about variety – which way that the subatomic realm is no longer "more fundamental" than the globe nosotros run across alongside our naked eyes.

The around interesting shape of reductionism reduces subatomic particles to collections of space-time points, these inwards plow to sets of numbers, as well as the numbers themselves to pure logical sets. But what are sets? Like numbers themselves they be either every bit shared mental constructions, or every bit entities exterior both materiality as well as subjectivity inwards a Platonic "third realm". Either way, materialism is refuted. At to the lowest degree this would assist to explicate why the globe conforms to the rules of mathematics, which every bit the physicist Eugene Wigner pointed out inwards 1960 would otherwise hold off real similar a miracle.

Concurrently I am reading a serial of SF novels past times Stephen Baxter (the Xeelee sequence) that build on these discoveries as well as speculations of modern physics. For Baxter, life tin emerge as well as thrive wherever in that place is the correct combination of complexity as well as stability – fifty-fifty inwards the pump of a star, or inwards the starting fourth dimension few nanoseconds afterwards the Big Bang, when the universe was no bigger than an orange. Whole civilizations ascent as well as autumn earlier the formation of stars, or fifty-fifty atoms. Baxter's wildly imaginative stories characteristic creatures composed of nighttime matter, quarks, flaws inwards spacetime, as well as fifty-fifty convection currents inwards planetary oceans.

The persuasion that consciousness emerges wherever in that place is ordered complexity reminds me of Christopher Alexander's intuition inwards The Luminous Ground that degrees of beauty, of ordered complexity, are degrees of life, of connector alongside the dry reason of reality which he calls the Self, but which powerfulness every bit good live on called Being. But this does non atomic number 82 to a merging of all things into a supreme Oneness. “This is, perhaps, the fundamental mystery of the universe: that every bit things perish to a greater extent than unified, less separate, as well as thence every bit good they perish to a greater extent than private as well as around precious.” (p. 309)

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