Something Is Missing - Science (No. 3 in Series)

This is the third in a blog series that will help you discover your spirituality and experience more love and happiness in life. Previous blogs are available via the index to the right.

In the last blog I started to put forward some answers to the question "Who am I". In this blog I look at what science can tell us about what we call reality, and is has some surprises up its sleeves!

Science

I would imagine that you don’t spend much time questioning the reality of the world around you. Objects look and feel as if they are solid and exist separately from each other. You believe you are a separate person on a planet that has billions of other individuals living on it. But if you were to ask a scientist about this experience of reality they would tell you that it’s not as straight forward as it seems. Here is what they might say.

 If your eyes were able to see very small things then you would see the molecules and atoms that make up the cells of your body. If you magnified things even more you would see each atom with a number of electrons surrounding a central nucleus, which in itself is also made up of even smaller particles. The electrons would be orbiting at a huge distance out from the nucleus compared to its size. In other words most of the atom is space. Given that you are made up of atoms, this means that a vast proportion of you (and everything else in the Universe) is not solid, it is space. What gives you the sense of solidity is the forces that exist between the atoms.

These scientific discoveries completely changed our notion of reality, but even this atomic view of matter was challenged at the beginning of the nineteenth century by a number of brilliant scientists. They showed that the fundamental particles that make up atoms are not solid and can also exist as vibrational waves. With his famous equation E=MC squared, Albert Einstein showed that every piece of matter in the Universe is made up of nothing else but energy. He also showed that when we move fast, time slows down and the length of an object shrinks when looked at by somebody who is standing still. All this has been proved many times by experiment and Einstein’s corrections are applied everyday to the GPS system that orbits the earth, to make sure your satellite navigation remains accurate.

Building on Einstein’s work, other physicists started to build a new theory of matter called quantum mechanics and things became less and less intuitive. Long gone were the days of classical physics were you apply a force to an object and calculate how fast it would move or which direction it would go in. In the world of very small things everything comes down to chance. Particles can change into waves and back again and it is not possible to pin down exactly where they are and what they are doing at any particular moment. Instead the physicists had to work with probability theory to create equations that could predict the behaviour of matter statistically.

Despite the challenges of defining something that is so ephemeral, quantum mechanics has been very successful in showing how very small things manifest and behave. At first many of the implications of the new theory seemed very weird indeed, and many physicists challenged them because it was so hard to make intuitive sense of them. Nevertheless most predictions have now been confirmed by experiment. The most telling of these is that at the quantum scale of matter nothing exists in isolation. Everything in the Universe is connected to everything else. This also means that changes in one atom are felt at some level in all other atoms in the Universe. This is an astonishing scientific discovery, but as we have already seen, this is something that we already know unconsciously.

For thousands of years sages, theologians and mystics have been telling us that we are all connected in one grand state of universal oneness, and now we find that science is pointing us towards exactly the same conclusion. Of course this is not a coincidence. Deep within us is the knowledge of our natural state of being. Despite the illusion of being ‘separate entities’, we never forget that we are connected. We know intuitively that the bonds of love are always present and are incredibly important to us. The trouble is that we don’t always recognise or remember this about ourselves or the people around us. So why should this be? To answer this we must start looking into the nature of consciousness, which is the subject of the next blog.

I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them. Previous blogs in the series can be read via the list on the right.