OUR MAGICAL WORLD - 2

All these cells are made of organized molecules, collections of atoms that operate in that fluid environment that we were born into a couple of billion years ago. The atoms that make up our molecules are no different that the atoms that are all around us in the world. These atoms interact in a simple and predictable way, as chemistry dictates. The result is very complicated, as we can see. Just why is that we can see that?

Oh, the molecules…. They are made of a standard set of atoms, which were made in the giant suns of the early universe, between ten and fifteen billion years ago. We are made of very standard building blocks, found around the Earth and around the universe. Nothing very fancy about that.

Inside our atoms – all atoms, there is mostly empty space – almost ALL empty space, and a collection of things that act sometimes like particles, and sometimes like waves – you could call them wavicles, I suppose. You see, they are particles, only when we try to locate them; the rest of the time they aren’t. They are waves only when we try to measure them; the rest of the time they’re not. When they are particles, they bump into things and bounce; but when they are waves, they go right through things.

In fact, sometimes they don’t actually go through things, but they disappear from our universe on one side of a boundary, and reappear on the other side. This is called tunneling, but some think that the tunnel is through some other universe. This was discovered by a Welsh physicist, Brian Josephson, who earned a Nobel prize along with Leo Esaki of Sony Corporation in 1973.

(In my fourth year of Engineering in about 1967, a friend and I became interested in 'tunnel' diodes, or Esaki diodes, and borrowed a rare one from a graduate research lab to build a simple FM radio tuner on our lab bench. It worked quite well, receiving several local stations, but we were sworn to return it to the lab ASAP. Inside the Esaki diode, the 'magic' that made it work was something called a "Josephson Junction.")

Dr Josephson, by the way, currently researches psychic phenomena, and runs the mind-matter unification project at Cambridge in England as part of his quantum physics research, according to Wikipedia.