Earlier we dismissed Bohr's planetary model of the atom with the promise that we later would see "how physicists currently think of an atom." Well, the time has come, but the task is a thorny one. We gave up our old picture of the atom so easily because we assumed that it would be replaced by one more meaningful, but equally as lucid. Now it develops that our replacement picture is not a picture at all, but an unvisualizable abstraction. This is uncomfortable because it reminds us that atoms were never "real" things anyway. Atoms are hypothetical entities constructed to make experimental observations intelligible. No one, not one person, has ever seen an atom. Yet we are so used to the idea that an atom is a thing that we forget that it is an idea. Now we are told that not only is an atom an idea, it is an idea that we cannot even picture. ...
In short, physicist still think of an atom as a nucleus around which move electrons, but the picture is not so simple as that of a tiny solar system. The electron cloud is a mathematical concept which physicists have constructed to correlate their experiences. Electron clouds may or may not exist within an atom. No one really knows. However, we do know that the concept of an electron cloud yields the probabilities of finding the electron at various places around the nucleus of an atom, and that these probabilities have been determined empirically to be accurate.
119-120 The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Gary Zukav, emphasis mine
"Reality" is merely the system of thought that we devise to make sense of (and help understand some order in) the things that we experience. The more we observe, naturally, the simpler such a system becomes, to produce with ease such a variety of observations.
10 comments:
Good old synchronicity: my wife and I were just talking about this very thing ("reality" as systems that we use to make sense of experience) as it pertains to mental illness. Seems it's applicable everywhere!
Well yes, matter is energy. It is often seen and felt physically.
The idea that the most basic constituent of matter is wave rather than particle
doesn't change the fact that life is full of suffering, even if you have plenty of money. The mind and physical body has the irreversible tendency to grow old and show signs of disintegrating and suffering growing-old pains.
Is the moon there when nobody looks?
Good post. Too few people seem to have much of an inkling about how science works. It's an approach to understanding the world that appears reality-based - it lets us do all kinds of things technologically - but it isn't The Truth that people who somehow feel religiously threatened by it make it out to be.
Most of those folks seem to be clueless about how science works. I love it when they say, "Evolution is 'just' a theory." Well, so is gravity...
(Hope that made sense, I actually have no science background, just the stuff I picked up on the streets - around bars, streetcorners, discos and the like.)
Andrew, I'm glad, how else would it be? Fondly,
Imemine, well, yes, matter is energy is matter and back. Life can be full of suffering, but needn't; money can buy many things but not the end to suffering. Of growing old I am uncertain; my family's sharp to the end.
The moon may be there, or may not - if nobody's looking, nobody can know.
Darius; good comment. I posit that the soft sciences, too, like sociology, and philosophy, and religion, as well - are all just games, systems of thinking about things, ways to try to make sense of our observations, to interpolate, to extrapolate.
To quote from page 4 of "Hardcore Zen": "Truth doesn't screw around, and truth doesn't care about your opinions. It doesn't care if you believe in it, deny it, or ignore it... the truth simply is."
Julie,
Actually, everything you've talked about is the best explanations for the indirect observations scientists have made at the atomic and subatomic levels. Likely, they've only scratched the surface and everything is in flux because another theory or observation may come along that disproves the current framework of ideas about what is going on. Scientific theories are inherently disproveable ideas although the data they are based on are a bit more concrete. In a way, you could say, that scientific theories are the best guesses we have of testable reality that we have at this time. That's all they are. They are not set in stone. They never were set in stone. But the explanations we have may be good enough for practical applications. Newtonian physics serves us well for most engineering applications although it's been surplanted by relativity. In some ways, we could call all these ideas mental tools or constructs we use to describe the world so that we can manipulate matter and energy or put reality in a useful context. No physicist in his or her right mind would claim that they have yet described all of totality. The bias is that everything should be reduced down to a simple equation or set of equations, but that isn't what is happening in Nature. Things are actually becoming more ordered and complex (localized negative entropy). Stars via nucleosynthesis create heavier elements allowing Life to evolve. Life evolves from unicellular to multicellular organisms. Multicellular organisms evolve intelligence and/or become superorganisms. Physicists like astronomers tend to look to the past for answers in a fashion. Higher and higher particle energies mimic what the early Universe was like at the Beginning just as telescopes are time scopes seeing light photons created billions of years ago. Biologists tend to have to look at the present picture to deduce what occured in the past, but molecular evolution is in its infancy. It's maybe as old as molecular biology. We are still babes in so many ways.
Duh older eye get duh more awear eye am uv the little eye no.
George Breed, a man on the way to stardom, right on.
What I say is missing here is that 'energy' is more than you give it credit for, it is 'intelligent' and you are it.
You and I and us, as Imemine put it on my blog, are the Big Bang, and we are in process of happening, hence no 'present' only becoming, no stopping and staying, only continuing to increase intelligence and knowledge of ourselves. 'Intelligent-Energy'
The jumping and moving, the dancing, the intelligence in the energy, the knowing, this is Kabbalah, it is the ability to know beyond logic, beyond science, doesn't cancel logic and science, explains it.
Actually, the picture is even more complex. Each neutron and proton are combinations of quarks. Possibly even the electrons. If you're are a string theorist, for all I know each quark may just be a string, a tiny closed loop vibrating at a particular frequency. So, even our mental constructs are are not simple any more depending upon the math and the discipline.
"Truth doesn't screw around, and truth doesn't care about your opinions. It doesn't care if you believe in it, deny it, or ignore it... the truth simply is."
I like this.
On another note, Gary Zukav has a way with words...I haven't read "Dancing" but I've read "Seat of the Soul", one of my favorite books.
Reality just blows the mind- doesn't it? One cans say, "what if it's all a dream?" Then if you can know it's a dream (this time around) know it and enjoy it.
A little different for one suffering in reality. It becomes very personal and one gets caught up, hardly escaping.
"Soul to soul can never teach what unto itself is taught."
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