More Things In Heaven and Earth

Because of the nasty weather here in Virginia, I spent hours curled up in bed watching TV last night. That's unusual for me. Usually, I'm curled up with my laptop or with one of the several dozen books I'm reading at any given time. I call it multi-tasking but you can call it distractibility. You say tomato, I say whatever...

I got caught up watching a program on the Science channel because, if nothing else, I am a really big geek. I majored in Physics in college, until the math got too hard...then I switched to Art. Yes, really. Anyway, I was watching a show about gravity and the applicability of Einstein's theories regarding spacetime. Einstein died a frustrated man because he couldn't quite pull together his theories into something "unified" that explained the behavior of everything. When he applied his theories to large, celestial objects, his theories held up. But when taken to the subatomic level, they fell apart. What followed was a new way of looking at the universe called "Quantum Mechanics." Einstein reviled quantum theory; it was his biggest failure of imagination. What a shame, becuase if his mind had gone there, who knows what he might have imagined....

The theory of Special Relativity shows when you look at the way gravity behaves on a planetary level, you can explain many unusual phenomena in the universe; but there are still many things left to explain, for example why objects behave the way they do around a black hole. The equations that make up the Theories of Relativity can't quite explain what goes on regarding gravity and the black hole. Quantum physicists theorized about a particle called a "graviton" that makes up much of empty space, probably in another dimension that we cannot perceive. This is why people got so up in arms about the Large Hadron Collider when it started operations. Basically, the idea is that everytime you collide particles, you end up with detritus that can be measured; when looking for gravitons, though, we have no way of measuring them other than to see which portion of expected energy from the collision suddenly vanished. Where did it go? The theory is it escaped from our perception into another dimension. The collider theoretically creates subatomic "black holes" every time it smashes something so I think the public was alarmed that Europe would be sucked in, one bottle of wine at a time.

By the same token, on a quantum level we are affected by everything around us. Earth creates a disturbance in spacetime, sure, but so do we. Every movement we make creates an unseen ripple through spacetime. It doesn't just exist "out there." It's all around us. WE are part of all of it.
Our cells, our atoms, every smallest particle of us, affects and is affected by spacetime, by the movement of life around us, by the chemistry of feeling, thought, touch, sound, taste....and we are forever altered by these things, most often in ways we can't measure. Our particles collide with others, energy is expended, and some of it disappears - unmeasured - into a place we dare not go.

This is my long-winded way of wondering why it is so difficult for people to believe that there are things that lie outside our perception? We only have five senses, well six really, but for most of us our sixth sense lies fallow. Maybe it IS that sixth sense that we're meant to develop in order to perceive the unseen universe. Maybe we're going about this the wrong way, using only the limited senses we're accustomed to using to see things outside their range. Our senses developed over time through evolution to accommodate our biological needs; it's reasonable to think that we've evolved to a point (at least some of us) that we need to develop another sense in order to move to the next level. The universe is FULL of things beyond what we can grasp. We are very limited beings, throughout history making up stories, gods and goddesses about things we didn't understand or didn't have the tools to measure. I really think there is a portion of humanity that is poised to push evolution to the next level, that we are on the brink of something undiscovered and that there are many of us who can sense what others cannot. Things like "ghosts" and "gravitons" exist in some plane just out of our reach. Rather than make up silly stories about it, my most fervent wish is to be alive at a time when humanity transcends the limits we place on ourselves. I want to see the unseen.
I believe. I know it's out there...because I feel it in HERE.