Quantum Living - Part Ten - A World Most Bizarre

THE BIZARRE WORLD

Quantum reality is a hard thing to accept. At the level of the micro-atomic world, the particles which make up the larger atomic particles are more wave than particle, more energy than matter. They appear to arise out of a background 'soup' of much huger, higher-energy particles which seethe at the level of spacetime itself, and mostly cancel one another out.

It is like a quantum spacetime 'ocean' full of water, and our world, indeed our universe, is made up of the few droplets which splash up out of the waves into the air.

Once formed, our particles are made up of stringlike loops of energy, like a wave looped back on itself, with the loop so tiny that the whole particle looks like a single point. Without violating any laws of Quantum mechanics, each particle is able to wink in and out of existence, provided it is back within a tiny length of time called the Planck Interval. It can re-appear at another point in space, provided that point lies within something called the Plank Length.

This strange feature is actually used to make certain electronic devices. The chip that provides the tuning in modern electronically tuned radios and television sets, called a varactor, uses a process call 'electron tunnelling', in which electrons vanish on one side of a boundary, and reappear on the other side within the Planck interval, provided the boundary is smaller than the Planck Length. The boundary size is varied by applying a voltage to the chip, thereby controlling the frequency being tuned. Such a boundary layer within a chip is called a Josephson junction, after British pysicist Brian David Josephson, who discovered the effect.

By now you can see that the world we think we know is insubstantial. What we think we see is merely a function of the limitations of our senses. Eastern philosophies call our world maya, or illusion; so if science and religion are to meet, they meet somewhat in the East. Western philosophy mainly accepts the illusion, and treats as eccentric anyone who describes it otherwise.