1. Our Concept of Reality.
Thousands of years ago we thought that our Earth was flat like a platform; with heaven above and hell underneath it. Then we realised that it was spherical and thought that it was the center of the universe. No one had any doubt, because everyone always see the Sun, the Moon and all the Stars rise from the East and set in the West.
Our “reality” was that our Earth is the center of the universe. It is stationary and all the planets, the stars and the whole sky revolves around it.
On closer observation, our astronomers detected that some planets are not moving smoothly together with the rest of the sky. Some times they move slower, as if they are moving backwards, and then suddenly they move faster again to catch up and even passed the others. To explain the puzzling “retrograde” movement of those planets, many Astronomers came up with many theories.
In 270 BC, Aristarchus of Samos came up with a simple solution by putting the Sun at the center, while the Earth and all other planets are revolving around the Sun. Unfortunately, in those days his Heliocentric theory was beyond anyone’s reality. It sounded too absurd and no one took it seriously.
The preferred theory of those days was the one suggested by Ptolemy around 100 BC. Ptolemy wrote three perplexing volumes of books “The Almagest”, which is full of complicated geometrical explanations on how the planets and stars revolve around our Earth.
The days are long gone since we left the Ptolemaic system behind. But surprisingly enough, we realised that we held on to it as the truth for more than 1600 years.
Ptolemy’s geocentric universe
In 1543, 1800 years after Aristarchus, Nicolaus Copernicus came up with the same theory again. He was more fortunate than Aristarchus, because the time was ripe and we were about ready to change our concept of reality.
However, it didn’t happen easily. It took more than a century and many many great thinkers like Copernicus himself, Descartes, Tycho Brace, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler etc. up until Isaac Newton to refine the Copernican theory and to work on our new concept of reality.
Based on Newtonian Physics, our “reality” is that:
- Time and Space are absolute.
- Atoms are the smallest, indivisible basic building blocks of everything there is.
- The whole universe is made from atoms, and it is functioning according to definite laws like a giant clock-work. (mechanistic)
In the middle of the 19th century, the current scientific revolution had started with the discovery of the electromagnetic field.
Michael Faraday, who had no scientific education discovered the electromagnetic field and its induction law, which was beyond any scientific conception at that time.
|Albert Einstein:||It is fascinating to muse: Would Faraday have discovered the law of electromagnetic induction if he had received a regular college education?|
The Newtonian Physics, which is atomistic and mechanistic, could not accommodate the nature of fields, waves and their inductions property (known as “action at distance”). In those days, light waves were considered as travelling through a media called ether (similar to sound waves travelling through the air).
In 1887, an experiment was conducted by Michelson and Morley, trying to measure the speed of light in different directions. The hypothesis was: “if the Earth is moving through the media called ether, the speed of light must measure differently in different directions due to earth’s movement.”
The result of the experiment was very crucial. The speed of light was always the same in any direction. It created a lot of controversy amongst scientists, but at the end, the conclusion was that “Ether does not exist”.
The Michelson Morley experiment gave the death sentence to the etheric hypothesis, and lead to the birth of Modern Physics.
|Albert Einstein:||Matter is regarded as being constituted by region of space in which the field is very intense . . . . . . . . . .
There is no place in this new kind of Physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.
At the turn of the century, Modern Physics was born, with the Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics as the two major pillars supporting it. The Newtonian Physics was proved to be limited and only valid for macroscopic objects – things we can see, touch and smell.
We started to realise that our mechanistic concept of reality, based on Newtonian Physics, is crumbling, but science couldn’t help us in giving us a clear new picture of reality.
In the last few decades many many theories have come up, but instead of getting clearer, our picture is getting more and more “blured”. Science, especially Physics and it’s language of mathematics, becomes more and more complex beyond layman’s comprehension. On the other hand, we are confronted with more and more phenomena, which science could not explain and prefers to ignore.
History tells us that we haven’t learnt from history, and probably we are now re-experiencing the days of Aristarchus and Ptolemy, before the turn of the millenia more than 2000 years ago.
We rejected Aristarchus and accepted the complicated Ptolemaic system, because we strongly hold our “concept of reality” that our Earth must be the center of the universe. Anything else was simply beyond our imagination.
One and a half centuries ago, Faraday introduced us to the reality of electromagnetic field and waves, which propagates at the speed of light – The reality of light. Einstein has proved that our time-space is relative, while Quantum Physics states that the whole universe is basically indivisible.
|Paul Davies:||The Universe is not a collection of objects, but is an inseparable web of vibrating energy patterns in which no one component has reality independently from the entirety. Included in the entirety is the observer.
(Bell’s theorem on the indivisibility of the Universe.)
Unfortunately, the physical world as we know it, with physical matter in our time-space continuum, is our nowadays “reality” and we are also holding it very strongly.
We have learnt that atom is no longer the smallest indivisible building block of nature. But it seems impossible for us to shed away our “atomistic” view, which has been the basic of our conceptual thought since we started to think thousands of years ago.
Instead of taking on the new concept of reality, we just replaced atoms with sub-atomic particles to keep our atomistic or now “particle-istic” view intact.
Turning the “Frame of Reference” around.
2000 years ago, Ptolemy tried to explain the “heavenly” phenomena in a very complicated way based on the “geocentric” view. It was accepted as the “Truth” for 1600 years, only because it came “in-line” with the contemporary common “reality”.
In 1543, Copernicus made the break-through, simply by turning the “reality” around and “viewed” at the whole planetary movement from the the sky down. By doing this, he came up with a very simple answer.
Similar to Ptolemy, we are now trying to understand the cosmos based on our physical view, which is materialistic / atomistic and time-space confined.
To break through the barrier, we shall try to turn our “reality” around and look at our physical world from the reality at the speed of light – from beyond our time-space continuum.
Maybe we will find that there is a much simpler explanation.
Light is free energy whereas matter/particle is confined energy.
At the speed of light, there is no such thing as “matter” there are only “patterns”.
Imagine the nature of light as in an optical telephone cable. There is a bundle of light travelling through the optic cable containing thousands of individual phone conversations at the same time.
As a bundle of light, they are all indivisible, but each phone conversation has a certain distinct pattern, so that we don’t hear thousands of conversations at once while we are on the phone.