Chapter 1 - What Is Real?

Ted Driver Copyright 2002-2007

Chapter 1 - What Is Real? We are animals. Whether you believe in creationism or not (more on this later), it is undeniable that we are made of flesh and bone, just as so many other beings on Earth are. Whenever we look at the world around us, we sense things. We experience something. We take in meaning from the sensory clues we receive and our brains turns those sensory clues into an experience, comparing it to other experiences so we can classify the experience as new, old, different, overwhelming etc. Your brain is a filter through which all experiences are judged. By using these senses and filters, we determine what our environment is like. Once we make this determination, we assign it as real. What I mean by real is that it (whatever it is) exists in our daily lives, here on Earth or in space as tangible items. We can see, hear, touch smell or taste it. These words are real, I can see them. This brings up a dilemma -- is everything we know real? Are the ideas I'm expressing to you real? I know they are and you know they are, but we cannot assign them reality based upon our five senses. We simply know they are real. That being said, it is simple to see then that thoughts are real , as ideas are simply series of thoughts regarding a similar subject. So, objects are real things we can physically identify with our 5 senses. Thoughts are real – you understand what your reading. We know this to be true because they exist in our minds and we can express them so that they can be sensed by one of our 5 senses. Humans create buildings, art, scientific data, all from the thoughts we initially have. So, why does our current scientific community only focus on reality as defined by our 5 senses? The scientific process ignores the fact that ideas and thoughts are completely real to the person having them. I bring up this point here because in what I have to say throughout the rest of this book, I will be forced to discuss proof. Many scientists use proof alone as the deciding factor for determining whether or not a hypothesis is true. The scientific method demands that a hypothesis be tested and if the test results are negative, the hypothesis must be dropped. If the test results are positive, further tests must be performed to determine under what conditions the hypothesis is valid. What conditions and criteria are necessary for this hypothesis to be true? There is a saying attributed to Albert Einstein; "no experiment can prove me right, one experiment can prove me wrong." So, when I discuss proof later in the book, please be aware of the different types of proof. I am defining two types of objects within our reality here on earth, Type I and Type II. 1

Type I: tangible things, able to be sensed with one of our 5 senses. This is defined by judgment independent reality – an objective perspective. Type II: intangible, things that are known to exist but cannot be sensed with any of our 5 senses. These are defined by the fact that an individual knows that a type II thing exists but cannot prove it using the current scientific method. Dreams are an example of a Type II object. The type of proof our scientific community demands is objective proof, proof that we can sense with at least one of our 5 senses. This is proof of a type I object. With objective proof, we all agree that an object or property exists independent of judgment. The experimenter's meter may say that there is 1 volt in an electric circuit for example - there is little to dispute here. The fact that 1 volt exists in the circuit does not depend on your or my judgment: it is an independent fact. Proofs of Type I objects are the type the scientific community uses to establish experimental verification. There must be no judgment involved in an experimental result if it is to be considered valid. A proof of a type II object is a means of showing that a thought or idea exists, an intangible that everyone agrees exists but no one is able to sense. In our current scientific paradigm, we cannot prove the existence of any type II object. For example, we cannot prove that we dream, but everyone knows we do. We know truth, not only by reason, but also by heart -- Blaise Pascal How then is acceptance of a Type II object obtained? I will discuss this topic in depth soon. I'd like to explain now how the reality that you and I know, the Type I reality, is not as objective as it may seem. When Isaac Newton created the law of gravitation, he also created a new scientific paradigm. By showing that all material objects of the day followed the new law of gravitation, he was showing that these objects actually existed and moved without the notions of gods manipulating the universe. This meant that nature was separate from us and could be studied as such. Nature consisted of rocks, air, water; things that we could subject to experiment. The method Newton chose to study nature has lasted until this day. Every physicist is taught the scientific method during his or her education; we our taught to look at nature objectively and test it as such. That is until Albert Einstein came along. Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity, one of the most popular theories ever. His theory gave us the famous equation E = mc2 which says that energy equals mass time the velocity of light squared...basically everything that has mass is really just energy. This theory also showed that everything can be represented as a space-time event. This means that everything can be described by defining its position and the time at which you measured its position. There is a great deal of physics behind this and Einstein showed something completely counter-intuitive. He showed that, if the speed of light is constant,

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suddenly everything, every space-time event became relative. Relative to what? If you, standing on the moon and your friend, flying by the Earth headed for Mars both track the time it takes for some event to occur, you will both arrive at different answers. Because you are measuring in your reference frame and you friend is measuring in his reference frame, you will get different answers. Because of relativity, the distance you measure does not just depend on the three-dimensional coordinates. It also depends on the time of the measurement in your reference frame. The elapsed time of an event that you measure is no longer just dependant on your stopwatch, but on the location from which you are timing as well. This is the nature of space-time events, relativity has married space and time into one inseparable couple; they no longer stand on their own. This concept has brought many old ideas into a new light. For example, it has been thought for many hundreds of years, perhaps many thousands, that all events are objective, all things happen in a defined matter that everyone can agree on. When the ball falls off of the table, we can calculate when it will hit the floor and agree on the answer. This is how physics and other sciences have been taught for at least three hundred years. There is really no reason to expect otherwise...is there? Put yourself in the shoes of a scientist in the early 1700's. There was no electricity, only mechanistic objects to study. A credible scientist of the time would never conceive of an idea that didn't represent what was known to happen in experiments. There was no scientific reason to do so. In the experiments of the day, all outcomes were explainable by simple theories; theories that worked on an objective basis. Everything had its place, for every cause there was an effect. This reminds me of an old Japanese monster movie. The ground controllers had just lost contact with their spacecraft speeding through space. The conclusion they came to was that "giant space monsters" had attacked their ship; there was nothing they could do. It would have been just as ridiculous for a scientist of the time to assert that the falling ball’s position and the time the ball took to hit the floor were relative for different observers. Everything is relative, according to Einstein, so nothing is truly absolute. One person looks at an event, another looks at the same event, and both will disagree on what happened (especially the faster they are moving with respect to each other). This means that we, as individuals, cannot agree on an event's or object's exact nature, only on ways to categorize or bound the object and its properties. Your reality and my reality are different, based upon our individual observations. Each of these realities is unique, a separate reality for each observer. This leads to our first rule:

First Rule: Nothing is Absolute So far we have examined reality from the point of view of relativity only. We know that reality is not absolute because two observers will not agree on the time or position of an event. However, there is another realm of physics that has even more unnerving consequences. Quantum Mechanics, born at the turn of the last century, was developed to explain experimental deviations. Quantum mechanics was used to clear up some

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aberrant experimental results of the time and led to exceedingly precise theories of the nature of matter at the atomic and nuclear levels. Never before had scientists been able to learn about and measure so accurately the atomic structure of atoms, the theory was a revolution of understanding. The theory was also the beginning of what is arguably the biggest philosophical debate in history. In the 18th century, Sir Isaac Newton, the father of classical physics, made an intellectual leap and suggested that light was composed of tiny particles. This was an acceptable theory for the time, since Newton thought of all objects as particles that were governed by the three laws he devised. Why should light be an exception? Unfortunately, at the time, there was no way to determine if he was correct, he simply stated the hypothesis and left it at that. Over the next one hundred years though, experiments were done that showed light to be wavelike in nature. Experimental evidence confirming the wave characteristics of light were found with experiments in diffraction and interference. With this experimental evidence at hand, the brilliant physicist James Clerk Maxwell fully explained through detailed calculations that light was a wave of electromagnetic energy. Maxwell’s equations, probably the most famous equations in physics after Einstein’s E=mc2, are listed here:

E is the electric field, and B is the magnetic field – both intricately linked to one another in these equations. These equations are called wave equations because they can be manipulated mathematically to be the same form as equations physicist’s use to describe wave phenomenon. Light was a wave, this was certain. Through theory and experiment this hypothesis had been shown true over and over. There is always calm before the storm however, and it was getting cloudy. As every physicist of the 19th century knew, waves traveled through a medium. Sound waves traveled through the medium of air, ocean waves traveled through the medium of water...so what medium did light travel through? Physicists conjectured that there must be a traversable medium in space that light from stars traveled through -- they dubbed this medium the ether. The physicists Michelson and Morley performed very precise experiments to determine the speed of light through this hypothesized ether. The hypothesis was that if there was an ether, everything including the Earth must also travel through the ether. The relative speed of light traveling through the ether in the direction of the Earth's motion around the Sun should be different that the speed in the direction opposite to that of the Earth's motion. Michelson and Morley set up a very accurate experiment to determine the difference in these two speeds. There results showed that there was no detectable difference between the speed of light from any direction. The speed of light, often denoted by the letter c and equal to 299,792,458 4

meters per second, was the same in either direction. What then of this ether? Where was it? Thus began the decline of the comfortable world of classical physics where everything was explained by the theories of the day. There was and is no ether through which light propagates, light propagates without aid of any medium. A German physicist named Max Planck was also performing experiments on the wave nature of light around the turn of the 20th century. The wave equations of Maxwell were used to describe light in many different situations. In fact, one of the key reasons the theory was so successful is that the speed of light can be determined from the wave equations alone, without any measurements! This theoretical value agrees quite well with the speed determined by Michelson and Morley’s experiment. Planck was having trouble though. The experiments he was performing were on blackbodies; perfect absorbers and radiators of light. Planck was very troubled by the fact that the wave equations did not explain the experimental results he was getting. Finally he tried explaining his results by assuming that light was made of discrete bundles of energy - Newton's original idea - and an idea that Einstein later generalized and for which he received the Nobel Prize. When Planck applied the theory of energy quantization (these packets of energy were to be called photons) to his experiments, his results were proven. A new theory had been developed that explained this odd newly discovered behavior of light. Wave equations were developed to explain the diffraction and interference effects of light. These same equations could not explain the blackbody results obtained by Planck though. These effects had to be explained by particle theories of light, and even worse, other experiments, like the photoelectric effect that Einstein worked on was also only explainable by the particle theory of light. How could light be both a particle and a wave? Yet another physicist, Young, decided to find out. He developed an experiment that would show once and for all whether light was made of particles or waves. This experiment would show the effects of light traveling through two tiny parallel slits displaying a diffraction and interference pattern on a screen behind the slits.

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When a light source was shined through one slit only, a predictable diffraction pattern was seen. When both slits were opened, an interference pattern developed that was still explainable through the wave theory of light. So, if light was photons then, we should be able to reduce the intensity of the light and send single photons to the photographic screen behind the slits. This will remove the wave characteristics and show a simple random picture of photons hitting the screen. When this experiment was performed a startling thing happened. The photons slowly made an impression on the screen and slowly built up a wave-like picture of the interference pattern previously only seen by waves. Young then tried to determine how many photons were passing through each slit. He set up a photomultiplier -- a device for counting photons -- on one of the slits and repeated the experiment. To his surprise, the diffraction pattern of the uncounted slit appeared only, no interference even though both slits were open! Evidently the act of counting the photons from a slit interferes with the wavelike interference phenomenon. Actively observing the system disturbs the system in a fundamental way. We are a part of the experiment. See a detailed explanation of this experiment here: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment) This experiment and others like it meant that a new theory of physics was required. New theories were needed to explain the strange wave-particle duality being seen. Young's famous double slit experiment sat very uneasily with "classical" physicists, as they came to be called. The classical physicists believed that everything was explainable by the current laws of physics, those of Newton for mechanics, Boltzman for thermodynamics and Maxwell for electricity and magnetism to name a few of the more well known scientists. Einstein was a classical physicist until the day he died...never believing that these new theories were completely correct. The new theory came fast and eventually became very successful. In fact, the theory of Quantum Mechanics is more precise that any other theory of physics. Quantum 6

Mechanics explains how photons and waves interact and can predict the outcome of experiments, within certain criteria. What this theory states, is that nothing is certain (have we heard this before?) only probabilities of events occurring can be predicted. Where the photon will strike the screen for example, can only be calculated as a probability from the wave equation of Maxwell. We cannot know exactly where the photon will land on the screen. In fact, the theory of QM shows that there are only specific probabilities that any event will occur. Nothing is guaranteed to occur (despite the old adage of death and taxes, these are not guaranteed to occur either.) Every event has an associated probability with it. This is the point Einstein had a problem with, where he made his famous statement -- "God does not play dice with the Universe." The classical physicists, as you can probably guess, had a great deal of trouble with this new theory, "experiments cannot have subjective results...the world is objective!" they cried. But it isn't. God does play dice with the universe and Einstein was wrong. This new theory of Quantum Mechanics was a blessing and a curse. It provided answers that many sought, answers to all of the nagging questions left in the open in physics. Yet, it provided the answers in an unexpected way. The world was now a new plaything, a place where events weren't objective realities that we could observe, but rather events that we determined would happen. It was almost like reality was unfolding in accordance with the magic eight ball - will the proton decay into a neutron? Signs point to no. Quantum Mechanics is like an eccentric old teacher -- she has the answers you need, but sometimes she smells a little and mumbles things that you can't quite hear, and you really dislike going to her with questions. What do you do with a theory that matches reality exquisitely, but provides unexpected answers as well? For the open-minded physicists, you get used to the smell and start asking questions.

Second Rule: Nothing is Guaranteed We have seen that relativity holds up a yardstick to the universe and it changes its readings depending on where you are standing. We have seen that QM allows us to predict probabilities of events happening, but that no event is guaranteed to happen. We have eliminated the objectivity of the world in two separate and distinct ways. What we see depends on where we are and what we want to see, nothing else. The world is a subjective place, with each individual creating and interpreting his own reality, based on his own point of view and thought processes. Because the probabilities of many events are so large, we can agree on just about everything around us, but not all. There is light peeking in from around the edges of the box -- the world is not so tightly contained after all.

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