Quantum Reality: All Verb and No Subject

Recently, I was reminded of the fact that the material world, consisting of the supposedly solid objects that we see and touch, is to a large extent an illusion.  It resulted from re-reading a couple of books, especially In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat by John Gribben.  The topic was quantum physics, which tells us that commonsense principles regarding reality break down at the level of the atom and beyond.

         
Let’s start with the atom, a building block of all material things.  To show just how small it is, Gribbin tells us that if someone were to attempt to count all the atoms in a spoonful of sugar at the rate of one per second, and if he/she were to start when the universe began and continue until now, he/she would count only one millionth of the total.  And yet in spite of its inconceivable smallness, the atom consists overwhelmingly of empty space. 

We all know from science class that an atom is made up of a nucleus and one or more electrons.  But, contrary to those textbook illustrations showing electrons in snug orbits around a rather large nucleus, the radius of an atom is about one hundred thousand times larger than that of its nucleus and the volume is a thousand million times larger.  To give us an idea of the relatively vast emptiness of this almost infinitesimal entity, Gribbin tells us to “…imagine a pinhead, perhaps a millimeter across, at the center of St. Paul’s cathedral, surrounded by a cloud of microscopic dust motes far out in the dome of the cathedral, say 100 meters away.  The pinhead represents the atomic nucleus; the dust motes are its retinue of electrons.  That is how much empty space there is in an atom—and all of the seemingly solid objects in the material world are made of these empty spaces, held together by electric charges.”

Even that shocking fact does not completely encompass the lack of solidity of our supposedly material world.  According to quantum physics, the smallest components of the atom are quarks, which constitute the nucleus, and electrons.  They are too tiny for us to see, even with the most powerful microscopes.  Physicists identify them indirectly, on the basis of readings that they obtain with scientific instruments—if such-and-such happens when we do such-and-such, then a quark or an electron must be involved. 

They say that quarks and electrons are a type of matter because they have mass.  Even books like Gribben’s, targeted at the general public, do not bother to define mass, but, according to my dictionary, it is measured by physicists in terms of inertia.  Inertia in turn is defined as the ratio of force to the acceleration produced by that force.

         
So, at the most basic level we know that something has mass only in terms of force and acceleration.  Notice that this refers only to indirect measurements on the instruments of quantum physicists.  But surely, you might say, something real and solid is implied in that definition, something that has inertia and resists or responds to an outside force. 

Einstein’s  special theory of relativity gives us reason to question even that commonsense proposition, because it says that mass is equivalent to energy and vice versa: E=mc².  Thus, according to quantum physics and relativity theory, everything consists of energy (the left side of Einstein’s equation) and (on the right side) resistance to energy, which is how mass is defined in quantum physics.  Everything at this level is known only in terms of actions and reactions.  Of course, our experience in the everyday world tells us that every action has at its source an agent, a thing that causes it.  And the subject-verb structure of our language demands that we nominalize events at the sub-atomic level in terms of the quarks and electrons that we infer to exist.

But the rules that we apply at our super-atomic level break down in the quantum world, and the words that we use to portray events there are only crude metaphors.  We try to describe quarks and electrons in terms of “particles,” or “waves,” or “strings,” but they are not any of those things in the sense that we know them in our everyday lives.  In reference to the popularly accepted representation of the atom, Gribbens says, “It isn’t just that Bohr’s atom with its electron ‘orbits’ is a false picture, all pictures are false and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms.”

When we look beyond our terrestrial experience, to the cosmic level of relativity and to the sub-atomic level of quantum physics, the distinction between matter and energy takes on the aspect of an interpretive artifact instead of a universal truth.  There appears to be no basis for thinking that, if we could somehow become small enough to do so, we could see or touch a quark or electron.  We only know them as events rather than as objects which produce those events.  It seems possible that our universe is at the most basic level all action and no actor, all verb and no subject. 

In that case, reality would not really be physical in the sense that we think we know it, nor would it be spiritual in the ordinary sense of that word.  Our best attempt to describe this universe consisting of “empty spaces, held together by electric charges” would be in terms of “energy,” another crude nominalization based on the narrow range of human experience.  Such an understanding would be a reminder of the limitations of our knowledge and an invitation to maintain open minds in regard to all things cosmic, sub-atomic, and terrestrial.