What We Talk About When We Talk About God (3 page)

That
small.

But atoms, it was discovered, are made up of even smaller parts called
protons, neutrons,
and
electrons
. The protons and neutrons are in the center of the atom, called the
nucleus,
which is one-millionth of a billionth of the volume of the atom.

If an atom were blown up to the size of a stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a grain of rice, but it would weigh
more
than the stadium.

The discoveries continued as technology was developed to split those particles, which led to the discovery that those particles are actually made up of even smaller particles. And then technology was developed to split those particles and it was discovered that those particles are actually made up of even smaller particles. And then technology was developed to split
those
particles . . .

Down and down it went,

smaller and smaller,

further and further into the
sub
atomic world.

The British physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, which led to the discovery of an astonishing number of new particles over the next few

years, from

bosons and

hadrons and

baryons and

neutrinos

to

mesons and

leptons and

pions and

hyperons and

taus.

Gluons were discovered, which hold particles together, along with quarks, which come in a variety of types—

there are up quarks

and down quarks

and top quarks

and bottom quarks

and charmed quarks

and, of course,

strange quarks.

When an inconceivably small particle called a
muon
was identified, the legendary physicist Isaac Rabi is known for saying, “Who ordered that?”

By now somewhere around 150 subatomic particles have been identified,
with new technology and research constantly emerging, the most impressive example of this happening at a facility known by the acronym CERN, which is near the Swiss–French border. Workers at CERN, an international collaboration of almost eight thousand scientists and several thousand employees, have built a sixteen-mile circular tunnel one hundred meters below earth's surface called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). At the LHC they fire two beams at each other, each with 3.5 trillion volts, hoping that in the ensuing collision particles will emerge that haven't been studied yet.

Physicists have talked with straight faces for years about how with this unprecedented level of energy and equipment and billions of dollars and the brightest scientific minds in the world working together they might be able to finally discover that incredibly important, terribly elusive particle called the . . .

Higgs Boson.

(Which they did. Go ahead, Google it. It's incredible. Even if it sounds like the name of a southern politician.)

Now, the staggeringly tiny size of atoms and subatomic particles is hard to get one's mind around, but it's what these particles
do
that forces us to confront our most basic assumptions about the universe.

Many popular images of an atom lead us to think that it's like a solar system, with the protons and neutrons in the center like the sun and the electrons orbiting in a path around the center as our planet orbits the sun.

But those early pioneering scientists learned that this is not how things actually are. What they learned is that electrons don't orbit the nucleus in a continuous and consistent manner; what they do is

disappear in one place and then appear in another place without traveling the distance in between.

Particles vanish and then show up somewhere else, leaping from one location to another, with no way to predict when or where they will come or go.

Niels Bohr was one of the first to come to terms with this strange new world that was being uncovered, calling these movements
quantum leaps.
Pioneering quantum physicists realized that
particles are constantly in motion, exploring all of the possible paths from point A to point B
at the same time
.
They're simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

A given electron not only travels all of the possible routes from A to B, but it reveals which path it took
only
when it's observed
. Electrons exist in what are called
ghost states,
exploring all of the possible routes they could take, until they are observed, at which point all of those possibilities
collapse
into the one they actually take.

Ever stood on a sidewalk in front of a store window and seen your reflection in the glass? You could see the items in the display window, but you could also see yourself, as if in a fuzzy mirror. Some of the light particles from the sun (called
photons
) went through the glass, illuminating whatever it was that caught your eye. Some of the particles from the sun didn't pass through the glass but essentially bounced off it, allowing you to see your reflection. Why did a certain particle go through the glass, and a certain other particle not?

It can't be predicted.

Some particles pass through the glass;

Some don't.

You can determine possibilities,

you can list all kinds of potential outcomes,

but in the end, that's the best that can be done.

The physicist Werner Heisenberg was the first to name this disturbing truth about the quantum world: you can measure a particle's location, or you can measure its speed, but you can't measure both. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, along with breakthroughs from Max Planck and many others, raised countless questions about the unpredictability of the universe on a small scale.

As more and more physicists spent more and more time observing the universe on this incredibly small scale, more truths began to emerge that we simply don't have categories for, an excellent example of this being the nature of light.

Light is the only constant, unchanging reality—all that curving and bending and shifting happens in contrast to light, which keeps its unflappable, steady course regardless of the conditions. But that doesn't mean it's free from some truly mind-bending behavior. Because things in nature are either waves or particles. There are dust particles and sound waves, waves in the ocean and particles of food caught in your friend's beard. That's been conventional wisdom for a number of years.

Particles and waves.

One or the other.

Particles are like bullets;

waves are spread out.

Particles can be only in specific locations;

waves can be everywhere.

Particles can't be divided; waves can.

But then there's light.

Light is made up of particles.

Light is a wave.

If you Ask light a wave question, it responds as a wave. ask light a particle question, and it reveals itself to be particles.

Two mutually exclusive things, things that have always been understood to be either/or,

turned

out

to

be

both
.

At the same time.

Niels Bohr was the first to name this, in 1926, calling it
complementarity
.

Complementarity, the truth that something can be two different things at the same time, leads us to another phenomenon, one far more bizarre, called
entanglement
.

Communication as we understand it always involves a signal of some sort—your voice, a telephone, a wire, a radio wave, a frequency, a pulse—something to transmit whatever it is from one place to another. Not so in the subatomic realm, where particles consistently show that they're communicating with one another
with no signal involved
. Wolfgang Pauli identified this truly surreal property of subatomic particles in 1925 with his exclusion principle. Pairs of quantum particles, it was discovered, demonstrate an awareness of what the other is doing
after they've been separated
. Without any kind of signal.

The universe in its smallness presents us with a reality we simply don't have any frame of reference for:

A single electron can do forty-seven thousand laps around a four-mile tunnel—in one second.

Protons live ten thousand billion billion billion years, while muons generally live about two microseconds—and then they're gone.

If you're sitting in a chair that spins and I turn you around, I have to turn you 360 degrees to get you facing the same direction again. Electrons have been discovered that don't return to the front after being spun 360 degrees once; for that to happen you have to spin them
twice.

Imagine playing tennis and discovering that sometimes you were able to hit the ball with your racquet, and other times the ball went
through
your racquet as if there were no webbing. You would immediately assume that there was some reason for this unexpected behavior of the ball and the racquet, and so you would work to figure out why this was happening. You'd take into account speed and force and the characteristics of the various materials: plastic and rubber and metal. All under the assumption that there was an explanation for the ball's action. You'd apply basic laws of physics and motion, and you'd think about similar circumstances involving similar speeds and sizes and shapes.

You'd be doing what scientists have been doing for a long time: operating under the assumption that the universe functions according to particular laws of motion
that can be known
.

But in the subatomic world,

things come and go,

disappear and appear,

spin and leap and communicate and demonstrate awareness of each other,

all without appearing to pay any attention to how the world is supposed to work.

Niels Bohr said that anyone who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what was being said.

It's important to pause here and make it clear that quantum theory is responsible for everything from X-rays and MRI machines and superconducting magnets, to lasers and fiber optics and the transistors that are the backbone of electronics, to computers. It's staggering just how many features of the modern world as we know it come from the contributions of quantum theory. The Nobel Laureate physicist Leon Lederman and the theoretical physicist Christopher hill of Fermilab believe that quantum theory is arguably the most successful theory in the history of science.

 

Which is all rather interesting, of course, but I'm assuming by now that you have a question, something along the lines of

What does any of this have to do with what we talk about when we talk about God?

Excellent question.

Three responses, then,

beginning with

energy,

and then moving to

involvement,

and then a bit about

surprise.

Energy,

involvement,

surprise.

Let's begin with your chair, because odds are that you're sitting in a chair while you read or listen to this book. It's probably made of metal or wood, foam, cloth, maybe leather. A few nuts and bolts, a screw or two, some paint, perhaps some nylon or plastic as well. If we were to take that wood or steel or cloth and put it under a high-powered microscope, we would see the basic elements and molecules and compounds that comprise those materials. And if we kept going, farther and farther into those basic materials, we would eventually be at the subatomic level, where we'd discover that the chair, like everything else in the universe, is made of atoms.

And atoms,

it turns out,

are 99.9 percent empty space.

If all of the empty space was taken out of all of the atoms in the universe, the universe would fit
in a sugar cube.

An atom, in the end, is a thing. But a thing that is made up mostly of empty space, which is commonly believed to
not
be a thing. So what exactly are you sitting on?

A chair—a tangible, material, physical object—is made up of particles in motion, bouncing off each other, crashing into each other, coming in and out of existence billions of times in billionths of a second, existing in ghost states and then choosing particular paths for no particular, predictable reason.

Your chair appears to be solid,

but that solidity is a bit of an illusion.

It has weight and mass and shape and texture, and if you don't see it in the dark and stub your toe on it, that chair will cause your toe great pain, and yet your chair is ultimately

a relationship of energy—

atoms bonded to each other in a particular way that allows you to sit on that chair and be supported. Things like chairs and tables and parking lots and planets may
appear
to be solid, but they are at their core endless frenetic movements of energy.

I talk about all of this red shifting and dark matter and uncertainty and particle movement because most of us were taught in science class that ours is a hard, stable, tangible world that we can study and analyze because it's there, right in front of us, and we can prove it in a lab.

Which is true.

But often another perspective came along as well, the one that declared that there is a
clear distinction between the material world and the immaterial world, between the physical world and the spiritual world.

What we're learning from science, however, is that that distinction isn't so clear after all.

In other words, the line between

matter

and

spirit

may not be a line at all.

In an article about physicists searching for the Higgs Boson, Jeffrey Kluger writes in
TIME
magazine that they're “grappling with something bigger than mere physics, something that defies the mathematical and brushes up—at least fleetingly—against the spiritual.”