The Strangeness of Reality
We live our lives thinking of them to be a mundane routine and forever seeking higher goals and so-called intellectual high ground. Only a very small fraction of us ever get ourselves to think that our mere existence is so intriguing and complex, that it would not be wrong to ask the question: Why is reality the way it is? Are our entire lives and the whole universe a paradox?
I was always interested and intrigued by the concepts of quantum physics and the strange possibilities it entailed. However, I never possessed the amount of grey matter that is needed to understand the complex subject that only the best scientists of modern physics can. However, during the past few years, similar concepts (not mathematical) started coming to my mind again and again: perhaps the only time when I would be in a state of deep focus and thought. People may think that I have become delusional, but I know these ideas about reality are not gibberish. Only a very small section of people I know, might understand the deeper meaning of it all. Anyway, continue reading and see if any of these compel you to think deeper about what’s written below:
Two things never touch each other
Assume that I am at a distance of one meter from you. Now we move towards each other and stop when we are half a meter apart. Then we move towards each other again and this time stop when we are quarter of a meter apart. We continue doing this every time, halving the distance between us. The question is: when do we touch each other? Do we ever touch each other? (I first stumbled upon this concept while watching the movie, IQ.) If your answer is that we would never touch each other, you belong to the small fraction of people I was talking about earlier. Two things never touch each other. They get infinitesimally close, but never take the jump and close the gap. It’s because when we start observing things at smaller and smaller levels until we reach the atomic level, we realize that there are no hard boundaries. Matter behaves as waves and vice versa. When two things get infinitesimally close, they cease to be pure matter and act as waves which are just interfering. To put it differently, you and I are composed of atoms. When we get too close, your atoms and my atoms are very close. But atom is not the end state. Atoms are composed of the nucleus and electrons. Alright, you would say, so the electrons will eventually touch. Well the electrons are further made of something and that something is further made of something and so on. (Strictly speaking, electrons cannot be further subdivided as they are fundamental particles, but the moment you start imagining them too close, you try to define their exact position which is impossible. Same holds for nucleons, even though they can further be subdivided into smaller “particles”. So, the smaller your scale of observation, smaller is the distance between the 2 things, but never zero. Another way of understanding this concept is that we can never measure the exact distance between 2 objects. You and me can never be exactly 1 meter apart, as we can never define our exact boundaries. In our mundane everyday lives, “some” distance of 1 meter is agreeable to all parties involved. Alright, so even if you reluctantly agree that 2 things don’t touch each other, you would ask, “So what?”. Consider the following:
- We love our comfortable and cozy couch, without ever even touching it
- People get angry and get into fistfights. Do they touch? Of course not.
- The most passionate kiss between lovers does not involve any touching. Yes you guessed it: Even sex does not involve any touching. And yes, you guessed it right again: even babies are born without two people ever touching each other
- We meet a dear friend after a long time and hug them. Nope, we are not touching
- A person commits a murder by stabbing his neighbor. He is sent to jail for what? The poor chap did not even touch the other guy
Another way of looking at this paradox is that we all are essentially a bunch of large number of waves. (It took the genius of Werner Heisenberg to come up with a theory about something as fundamental as this) The waves come very close and the interference between them increases so much that our mind tells us that we are touching each other. All matter in the universe behaves as waves though not perceivable to the human mind at a macro scale. Well, each one of us and every conceivable “thing” are a part of the universe, though we define boundaries where the probabilities of finding electrons or our “waves” falls significantly. So, while two things never touch each other, the exact boundary where a thing starts and ends is also not defined. That’s the paradox of our mundane lives.
There is no “present”
We should live in the moment, we say: make the most of the present, learning from the past and not worrying about the future. Sure, we can do that if there was a “present” at all. Today you woke up at 6 AM. That was 2 hours ago. You started reading this article 5 minutes ago. That’s also past. You finished reading the last line a second ago. Well, that’s in the past too. You finished reading the word “word” 10 milliseconds ago. In the past again. Ok, what about the future? At 9:30 sharp, you would start working. That’s in the future. At 8:15, you would finish reading this article. In the future again. At 8:10:000000001, you would start reading the next word. In the future again.
What time interval is the present then? Is it .0000000001 sec or .0000000000000001 sec or 1X10^-10000 sec? The time interval dt as per calculus is smaller than the smallest time interval that can be imagined. Certainly, our minds cannot process the time interval dt, nor any instrument ever made or will be made that will be able to measure it. Our mind does an integration of the time differential dt, from timestamp1 to timestamp2 which we call an event. We have a whole array of feelings: joy, sorrow, anger, pain, disgust. It’s necessary to be in the “present” to feel anything or that “feeling” would be in the past. So, even if we can’t be in the present time, we claim that we feel things. No, we don’t feel anything because whatever happened, happened in the past or will happen in the future. So, stop feeling sad or happy or romantic. All that is in the past and there is no present. You’re a slave of your mind, fooling you into being in the “present”. So, much for living in the moment!
Schrodinger’s Cat
Perhaps the most widely quoted (and not as well understood) of the quantum concepts is that of the Schrodinger’s cat. I am not going to state the setup of the thought experiment as it can be searched on Google. This thought experiment is the most fundamental concept of quantum physics. The occurrence of an event solely depends on the exercise of observing it. Whether an event (an event denotes the change in position or time of the thing being observed) has occurred or not depends on who is observing it. You and I are sitting in a room with just a table with an old-style desk phone on it. You can hear but I am deaf. We are asked (me in sign language), if the phone rang. Your response would be yes or no. My response would be indeterminate. It would not be “no”. Whether an event has occurred (or not occurred) depends on an observer’s ability to measure it. Take another scenario: You love your dog a lot and can’t get him out of sight even for a short while. But, you must go to London. Your dog is in New York. One day he decides to eat something poisonous and dies. Do, you know whether he has died? Not until someone calls you and tells you. Event 1 equals your dog dying. This event is observed by your mom. Event 2 equals your mom speaking on phone. Observation of event 2 is essentially sound waves hitting your ears and being processed by your brain. So, how do you make sure, that your dog lives until you’re back from London? Don’t let anyone talk about him. For you, your dog is both dead and not dead as long as you can’t see him or hear him (or hear about him or see his picture where he is alive and kicking or dead). You don’t have to go to London for that. You just need to step outside the house. If you love someone, talk to them often.
All of us may not agree with big bang but all of us can certainly agree on the big end
There was a singularity and then there was a big bang and that’s how the Universe started. For lack of better alternative theories, that’s what we accept about the origin of the Universe. Some of the more inquisitive amongst us ask what was before the big bang and what was outside the boundary of singularity. Mathematically both space and time were undefined outside the singularity (in terms of co-ordinates and seconds) with the singularity itself having immeasurable mass and undefined past, future and present. A question worth pondering is: how would the universe end, if at all? Here’s my hypothesis: The existence of the universe depends on ability of someone to observe it (both space and time) which is us humans. Consider a thought experiment like the Schrodinger’s Cat, where the entire human race enters into a pact that they would end their lives the same day. How that would be achieved is something that I would leave to the imagination of the reader. So, when the last person dies, there is no one left to observe the universe (assuming other forms of life do not have the intelligence to understand the meaning of existence). But, there would still be the stars and planets and galaxies and earth with other life forms, right? Right. But who would be left to observe them? There you have it. The universe goes poof! Reality and the entire universe only exist so long as life forms with brains that are developed enough to grasp the concept of reality, exist. So, we may not agree on how it all began, but we can certainly, if we want, decide when and how it will end. Relax, such a thing won’t happen as humans cannot be programmed to have a consensus on self-destruction.
There is no soul
What happens to us when we die? Do we go to heaven or hell? Are we re-born after a brief sabbatical where our soul takes a break and floats around in no man’s land? If there was a soul, is it able to see or hear or touch? If yes, does it have eyes? How does it form an image which is processed by the brain? Oh wait, it has a brain too?? Does gravity act on it or it just floats around? Do souls come in different shapes and sizes? Is my soul bigger or fatter than yours? Imagine that you have a dreamless sleep. What do you feel when you wake up? You feel as if you woke up right after you slept with 0 seconds spent in between. Anyone who has been under the influence of general anesthesia would relate to it. Now, imagine that you go to a dreamless sleep that you cannot wake up from. That is death my dear. There is no soul.
Heaven and Hell don’t exist
How is it that almost all cultures and religions have a concept of heaven or hell or something similar? The human mind is not able to fathom the concept of a state of permanent unconsciousness: like the infinite dreamless sleep I just talked about. Therefore, civilizations the world over developed the concept of consciousness beyond death. They even started assigning places like heaven and hell for the soul based on how one behaved on earth. Some even kept household articles to be used in the afterlife. They were so sure that the person would feel hungry, need slippers and clothes to protect from the cold in the afterlife. The bad guys on earth would burn in hell, which means they would carry their brains and skin and neurons to transmit the heat signal to the brain to “feel” the burning. You die, you cease to exist. End of story. Do all the bad deeds while you can. You ain’t going to hell and certainly not burn in it. (You ain’t going to heaven either)
If you have to die, now is the time
Have you ever felt that if you suddenly die, what would happen to your loved ones? How grief-stricken would they be? Wouldn’t the loss be unbearable for them? If your family is dependent on you, who would take care of them after you’re gone? If you were able to even partially grasp the gist of the 4 pages so far, you would tend to agree that the concept of good & bad, joy & sorry, beauty & ugliness, soft & hard and every imaginable feeling and experience is a result of observation done by our sensory organs and processed by our brains. If all of them stop working which is what dying is all about, you cease to experience anything at all. The experience is indeterminate for you because there is no you. People want to be remembered for their good deeds. They want their lineage, their blood to continue after they are gone. What are they thinking…that they would wake up from their endless sleep to observe all that? Don’t tell this to the insurance companies. If this belief finds wide acceptance, no one would buy life insurance.
I am crazy, you are crazy, everyone is crazy
An often-stated paradox is that if a mad person thinks he is normal, how do we know if we are normal or crazy? Alternatively, if a mad person knows he is mad, he is not mad at all….he is normal enough to sense that he is crazy. Then how is he crazy? You are normal, but I am crazy or I am normal and you are crazy. Neither you, nor me nor anyone in the world would ever know. And yet we judge people because they don’t act or behave in a way we define normal or good. We start a war on things which no one can put into a “right” or “wrong” bucket because there is nothing like an absolute right or absolute wrong. You can’t touch anything, you can’t live in the present, you don’t have a soul, you die and that’s the end of the universe for you. When you are alive, love people, embrace what you like about them, ignore what you don’t like because that is likeable by someone else. That’s how you would find some meaning in the “undefinable” concept we call reality.
That is the strangeness of reality!!
