Somebody needs to invent a new reality. Or maybe there’s one already lying around that hasn’t been discovered yet. Like all those herds of buffalo before they were slaughtered for the railroad.
The reality of the railroad is that it’s in disarray. The U.S. rail network is comprised of over 140,000 miles of track. But it relies on a decaying infrastructure. Civil engineers warn that many bridges are structurally deficient, like the eight-lane, steel-truss I-35W Mississippi River arch bridge across Saint Anthony Falls in Minneapolis that collapsed on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 with rush hour traffic that killed thirteen people and injured 50. Or the drinking water of Flint, Michigan which is full of heavy metal neurotoxins. The Edenville and Sanford dams in central Michigan failed on May, 2020, flooding towns on the Tittabawassee River causing the evacuation of over 10,000 people. Reality is mostly comprised of chinless, spineless, money-grubbing politicians. It’s like something Shakespeare wrote. Richard III kind of stuff. But is that truly reality? I sincerely hope not.
Reality, according to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, is not what it seems. He asserts that reality is a weave of vibrating quantum grains. That it’s a network of granular events and the dynamic that connects them is probabilistic. That between one event and another space, time, matter and energy melt into a cloud of probability. That a Thracian named Democritus born around 460 was the first to develop – albeit highly influenced by his mentor Leucippus - the currently accepted theory that atoms are the elementary grains of reality and are indivisible. That the existence of atoms is revealed by the Browning motion of minute particles immersed in a fluid (a theory traced back to the Roman poet Lucretius).
And then, of course, Plato. He always pops up. Plato believed mathematics to be the language best adapted to understand and describe the world. So there’s that: figures. Sums. Equations. Algorithms. Asymptotes. Axioms.
Congruences, fractals, parabolas and irrational numbers.
And then, of course, Plato. He always pops up. Plato believed mathematics to be the language best adapted to understand and describe the world. So there’s that: figures. Sums. Equations. Algorithms. Asymptotes. Axioms.
Congruences, fractals, parabolas and irrational numbers.
Platonic solids, polar coordinates, symmetries, topologies, vectors and tensors and magic squares.
And what holds it all together is an interaction of electric currents and magnetic fields. That this is the force that holds together the matter that forms solid bodies: atoms in molecules, electrons in atoms. It is this force that operates in the neurons of our brains and organizes our processing of stimulus coming in from the world – that big beautiful ball of water and dirt we’re riding on through space – and animates and guides and colors the way we think. The way we understand, fathom, digest, appreciate and value and grasp. We’re a strand in the great loom of creation, a warp in the woof of reality. It’s all a matter of interaction. Interplay. Strings in a symphony set aswirl by an influx of woodwinds and drums.
More precisely, an invisible gigantic cobweb filling space and transmitting electric and magnetic forces from one body to another as if they were cables pulling and pushing. Space isn’t static it’s frequencies of visible light. Our perception of light is a psychophysical reaction of the nerve signals generated by the receptors of our eyes which are able to distinguish electromagnetic waves of different frequencies.
Reality – Rovelli maintains – is an “extended present.” A time dilation. Time stretches and contracts varying with velocity. The faster you move through space the slower you move through time. Your head is slightly older than your feet. That reality is mass and energy and mass and energy are one and the same. The chair I’m sitting in is real but it’s essentially energy, a bundle of energy in a shape that I recognize and value as a chair. A recently reupholstered chair. Reupholstered with arabesques. Because arabesques best define reality.
Or should I say describe reality? Because reality must be defined as a gravitational field which moves and undulates. And the universe is expanding and was born out of a cosmic explosion fourteen billion years ago. Old enough to drink and drive and obtrude black holes.
That reality, avows Rovelli, is the sensation in brushing against one another’s skin. Encounters and exchanges. Seas and microchips. Fluctuations and fields.
That light is simultaneously an electromagnetic wave and a swarm of photons falling like hail on a surface. So you see it’s all interaction. Interplay and combination. Friction and fiction and diction and glue. Gnosis diagnosis osmosis neurosis halitosis symbiosis.
Mayonnaise and the very idea of a sandwich which makes you sigh when you’re hungry and the sandwich is beautifully made. The sound of the bells of Saint Sulpice in Paris on a Sunday in August. And above and below have no meaning except for the surface of earth. Above and below have no meaning in space. There’s no up or down.
Only in relation with one thing and another thing does anything begin to be real.
And between one interaction with something and another something an electron can literally be nowhere.
And nowhere is fine. It’s where reality lives. If you want to find reality and bring home a souvenir you’ll find it in DNA, nervous systems and books. Sparklers and crickets. It’s the grammar of stars and the syntax of space.
Reality is a sprawl of continuous events. Perfect for a picnic. Ideal for the growth and care of adjectives. You can hear it in a beard. You can see versions of it in a moose. You can grip it or think you grip it when it’s gripping you. Reality is in the hop of a kangaroo and the kangaroo is a field of electrons with fur and marsupial inclinations.
Please. Before you go, take this. It’s a piece of reality. I found it under my chair.
And what holds it all together is an interaction of electric currents and magnetic fields. That this is the force that holds together the matter that forms solid bodies: atoms in molecules, electrons in atoms. It is this force that operates in the neurons of our brains and organizes our processing of stimulus coming in from the world – that big beautiful ball of water and dirt we’re riding on through space – and animates and guides and colors the way we think. The way we understand, fathom, digest, appreciate and value and grasp. We’re a strand in the great loom of creation, a warp in the woof of reality. It’s all a matter of interaction. Interplay. Strings in a symphony set aswirl by an influx of woodwinds and drums.
More precisely, an invisible gigantic cobweb filling space and transmitting electric and magnetic forces from one body to another as if they were cables pulling and pushing. Space isn’t static it’s frequencies of visible light. Our perception of light is a psychophysical reaction of the nerve signals generated by the receptors of our eyes which are able to distinguish electromagnetic waves of different frequencies.
Reality – Rovelli maintains – is an “extended present.” A time dilation. Time stretches and contracts varying with velocity. The faster you move through space the slower you move through time. Your head is slightly older than your feet. That reality is mass and energy and mass and energy are one and the same. The chair I’m sitting in is real but it’s essentially energy, a bundle of energy in a shape that I recognize and value as a chair. A recently reupholstered chair. Reupholstered with arabesques. Because arabesques best define reality.
Or should I say describe reality? Because reality must be defined as a gravitational field which moves and undulates. And the universe is expanding and was born out of a cosmic explosion fourteen billion years ago. Old enough to drink and drive and obtrude black holes.
That reality, avows Rovelli, is the sensation in brushing against one another’s skin. Encounters and exchanges. Seas and microchips. Fluctuations and fields.
That light is simultaneously an electromagnetic wave and a swarm of photons falling like hail on a surface. So you see it’s all interaction. Interplay and combination. Friction and fiction and diction and glue. Gnosis diagnosis osmosis neurosis halitosis symbiosis.
Mayonnaise and the very idea of a sandwich which makes you sigh when you’re hungry and the sandwich is beautifully made. The sound of the bells of Saint Sulpice in Paris on a Sunday in August. And above and below have no meaning except for the surface of earth. Above and below have no meaning in space. There’s no up or down.
Only in relation with one thing and another thing does anything begin to be real.
And between one interaction with something and another something an electron can literally be nowhere.
And nowhere is fine. It’s where reality lives. If you want to find reality and bring home a souvenir you’ll find it in DNA, nervous systems and books. Sparklers and crickets. It’s the grammar of stars and the syntax of space.
Reality is a sprawl of continuous events. Perfect for a picnic. Ideal for the growth and care of adjectives. You can hear it in a beard. You can see versions of it in a moose. You can grip it or think you grip it when it’s gripping you. Reality is in the hop of a kangaroo and the kangaroo is a field of electrons with fur and marsupial inclinations.
Please. Before you go, take this. It’s a piece of reality. I found it under my chair.
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