We are comfortable within our reality - it's the one we perceive through our five senses, the reality that's at our scale. We're familiar with it, intuitively we get it. From the smallest thing our eyes can see on the tabletop, right out to hills on the far horizon. At our human scale, our basic, high-school grasp of classical physics works just fine:
"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction." "Any object, totally or partially immersed in a fluid, is held up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced." "Momentum equals mass times velocity." And so on. This we can get our heads around; we understand it perfectly.
The chair on which I sit is solid. If it weren't, I'd fall right through it. I perceive my body and the chair to be solid; I can climb onto the chair and jump off - and then gravity brings me down to the kitchen floor at the rate of 9.8 metres per second squared. Gravity is a powerful force!
But let's get atomic. And then subatomic.
Our bodies are made out of around 7 x 1028 atoms, 99% of which are hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. Each of them are very nearly empty. Let's take a hydrogen atom. Constituting around 9.5% of our mass, hydrogen atoms make up 63% of all the atoms within the body. Let's zoom right in on just one of those hydrogen atoms. One that's chemically bonded to another hydrogen atom and one oxygen atom, forming a molecule of water, which makes up 70% of our mass.
Our lowly hydrogen atom is over 13.7 billion years old, having been formed, along with every other hydrogen atom in the universe, a mere 380,000 years after the Big Bang - so it's three times as old as the Earth.
Yet there's still has a lot of life left in it; particle physicists have calculated that it will decay in 9 x 1019 years' time. Yes, ninety billion billion years, so the 13.7 billion years is not even infancy. A good innings. And for the tiniest fraction of that time, it will have been a part of you.
Our hydrogen atom is 2.5 x 10-24 meters across. A thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a millimetre.* Now, imagine blowing that up to the size of a cathedral dome. In its centre at this scale, we'll see a pea-sized nucleus consisting of a single neutron, made up of two 'up' quarks and one 'down' quark. The neutron is surrounded by a single electron the size of a grain of salt, whizzing around that neutron, somewhere within the radius of that dome. This electron is travelling at 2,200 kilometres per second, around 150th of the speed of light. Where is it? It is but a cloud of probabilities. And that electron has been in motion around that neutron ever since it was formed, less than 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Other than the pea and the grain of salt, the structure is empty.
And now back to our everyday reality. We consider that we are solid. We have mass. I have mass. My kitchen floor, my chair, have mass, and they are solid. And that mass of mine ensures that when I jump off my kitchen chair, I will be attracted by my kitchen floor, towards which I will inexorably fall. Because gravity is a powerful force!
Well - it's nowhere near as powerful as the force that holds the quarks together within the neutron, which despite all of that subatomic emptiness maintains you as a solid object. Comparatively, gravity is extremely weak. It's six thousand trillion trillion trillion (6 x 1039) times weaker than the strong nuclear interaction within the neutron.
We cannot easily get our heads around the inner workings of the atom - the stuff of which all things are made.
So how then can we get our heads around the existence and nature of God?
[* To put the atomic scale into another perspective, let us consider the Planck Length, the shortest distance that can possibly exist, namely 1.616 x 10-35 meters. Ten billion times smaller than the diameter of a hydrogen atom.]
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2 comments:
You say "The reason that I have been in recent years fascinated by physics and cosmology boils down to my quest for a better understanding of God"
Would a better understand of God lead to a better understating of physics and cosmology?
Are they commutative?
Do the laws of physics lead us to the laws of biology?
If not,then can non-commutative nature of the universe be a proof of a God?
Marek
@ Marek,
Proof of a God I don't seek, intuitively I feel that there is some form of Cosmic purpose; rather I seek to get closer to an understanding and definition of that purpose and unity.
Having a better understanding of God would indeed - and this is only my intuition - lead to tying up many loose ends in science, especially at the interface between physics and biology, where I feel that consciousness holds the answer...
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