My Beliefs – Quantum Physics – weird and wonderful.

My Beliefs – Quantum Physics – weird and wonderful.

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My Beliefs – Quantum Physics

We stand on solid ground.

That’s not true.

In effect we are standing on a force-field that our force-field, our the force-field of our solid body, cannot penetrate. There is relatively more ‘space’ between atoms that there is between the stars. If it wasn’t for the force-fields holding things in place the atoms would simply slide past each other without a single one touching.

That’s weird. You think of solid things hitting something solid but there is no solid thing to hit.

But that is as nothing to the world of Quantum Physics.

This is a world where nothing makes sense. Things can be in two places at once. This is a world explained by mathematical theories. It is the world of energy, atoms, subatomic particles and atomic forces. It does not behave like the universe we inhabit.

I believe the universe we live in is an illusion.

I believe we only see it partially.

I believe we are living in a sandwich of ‘reality’. The macrocosm, full of quasars, black holes and dark matter, full of galaxies, neutron stars and astronomical size, is a universe of incomprehension of Newtonian Physics, Einstein’s magic and String Theory. The microcosm with its neutrinos, Higgs-bosun, quarks and particles that go back in time, is another world that you couldn’t make up.

I believe the reality we live, suspended between the two, is much more peculiar than even we can imagine. We don’t know half of it.

I don’t understand it but I am fascinated by it.

I believe the human mind is amazing. We have invented maths and we have invented tools that enable us to learn and understand to levels that are stupendous.

We stand on the backs of giants.

Our knowledge and understanding expand beyond all comprehension. No living person can embrace it all.

I believe our understanding of Quantum Physics makes the religious fundamentalists, like ISIS, look like primitive savages. They would have us chuck aside all of our knowledge for the sake of a medieval book of dubious ramblings.

The next time I hear someone tell me that evolution is not true I will think on the minds that worked out the mysteries of the microcosm and macrocosm and feel sorry for them.

I know we are far from understanding it. But we do know that the earth is billions of years old and that the ark was never a reality. The whole world did not flood. The flood that is taking place is the massive inundation of knowledge and understanding.

My beliefs – The creation of life.

My beliefs – The creation of life.

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The creation of life

Isn’t that amazing?

We seem to be on a planet with a vast array of other living animals and plants. Of course – I could be dreaming it!

Over billions of years organic molecules accumulated in the seas and joined together. The building blocks of protein, ribonucleic acid, carbohydrates and lipids bonded together and the first organism came into being.

From that first simple organism, through a series of evolutionary steps, all life evolved.

As a biologist I can appreciate the chemistry involved and the way these steps might have occurred. I can see why people find it incredible to understand. It is remarkable, stupendous and amazingly unlikely.

Yet it happened. Somehow it happened.

Given billions of years and the infinity of space I believe anything that is possible to happen will happen.

Yet the creation of life is stupendous.

Given more stars and planets than we can conceive it seems likely that it will have happened elsewhere too. If there are enough monkeys with enough keyboards sooner or later they will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But that does not make it any the less wonderful.

The cop out is once again to put in a deity and put the mystery one step removed. Presumably the deity is alive? So life started somewhere before?

Life is awesome. It’s complexity is majestic.

I do believe that it happened spontaneously through natural laws. The human body is too badly thought through to have been designed (unless we have a deity who is inept or has a warped sense of humour). Why have one opening to the lungs? A neck that breaks? A excretory system and egestory system that opens into the genitals?

No – I believe animals, with all their design faults, are the functional result of evolution and not some cosmic designer.

But that doesn’t stop me from shaking my head at the wonder of it, the sheer improbability and the stupendous results of all this teeming life.

I believe we, as conscious, sentient and supposedly intelligent, animals, have a duty to nurture it.