Posted on 09/18/2021 9:44:43 AM PDT by LibWhacker
I have a science background which includes some physics, yet consider things like this behavior of light to be miracles.
Here’s another way of thinking of light that to me makes it even less intuitive:
One particle (photon) can go through two slits at the same time. (That is how one photon (particle) can interfere with itself in order to make a diffraction pattern on the back wall in the classic experiment.
And light was the very first thing we know of that God created. “Let there be light.” Light is a thing that has dual characteristics that seem impossible to exist together. When light is really examined it is not intuitive, we have to resort to deep math and lots of verbage to try to describe it.
So that dual aspect of light helps when people ask (and these tend to be smart people who are bothered the most by this) “If God knows everything, including the future, how am I not a pre-programmed robot who should not be held responsible for what I do, since I must be already destined to do whatever I do?”
(In other words, they are claiming to apparently NOT have free will in a world where God is in control.)
I tell them about light, the first thing made, that has both particle and wave characteristics, two things that do not seem to be able to coexist.
The world and life is like that, like light: God knows all, and yet we DO have free will, that particle can also go through two slits at the same time.
God even refers to himself as light.
I am not claiming it is a pefect analogy.
However light certainly seems to be another way that God reveals his nature in nature.
These things in this universe made by God are true miracles.
As far as small things, that is also relative; to the naked eye, a human cell would be infinitesimally small (invisible), and on average an adult has 300 trillion of those. Bit hard but not impossible to wrap one’s mind around going smaller, to subatomic particles.
One of the things I learned from the David Butler series is that the majority — like 99% — of the mass of ordinary matter is not due to matter, it's due to the energy contained in the forces that hold the quarks together inside protons and neutrons, and the forces that hold the protons together within atomic nuclei. Quarks are held in proximity by the strong nuclear force, which is indeed very strong.
In the Butler lecture series, he said that to separate quarks from one another would require a force of 22 tons, not tons per square inch, but tons per quark.
If you could somehow exert this much force on them in such a way as to separate them, the energy you used to move them apart would be converted into matter, into a string of new quarks that would bridge the gap of separation between the two original quarks.
Isn't that strange and fascinating?
Yes, and the idea that they happened somehow randomly is more difficult to believe than it is to simply believe in God.
The law of causality still applies. The nature of the system as a whole causes the effect,
Materialism vs Made by God may seem to be the only possible alternatives, but there are others....
Sometimes when you ask the wrong questions you get the wrong answers....
Imho the concept of the fractal (hologram) is the key....
Nowhere is it written that talking apes are entitled to learn all the secrets of the universe....
Indeed
I don't think it's a matter of entitlement.
We know much more about the secrets of the universe today than we did 100 years ago, or even 10 years ago. That didn't happen because we are entitled to the knowledge, it's because of curiosity on the part of people intelligent enough to find the answers.
Quantum theory and God
Not as much as it may seem. Surveys show that physicists are less materialist in their personal philosophy than social scientists. Strictly speaking, materialism in modern science is a simplifying assumption, not a tenet of science. After all, as physicists nowadays mostly recognize, their view of reality is best described as panpsychism, not materialism.
Why is it so counter intuitive? Anyone who understands the implications of Heaviside’s work knows that there is nothing ‘quantum’ mysterious going on here. Electric and magnetic fields feed each other energy. The fields and the photons are different things. Read Dr. Hanz Schantz’ book on ultrawideband antennas; it’s really more a primer in electromagnetics. Also, he has a paper on the topic that is probably already out. I got to see a preview presentation.
So that little bit of energy-mass is what has the spin! That's amazing to contemplate. Thanks for that insight. I'm afraid I glossed over it at first.
I listened to one video where the narrator said that the concept of quantum spin is the key to the nature of reality itself.
As an undergraduate in physics, my inability to grasp it, and the inability of my professors to explain it, is one of the things that drove me out of physics and into engineering.
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