THE LIBRARY
There are three other doors in the back of the movie theater I haven’t mentioned. One has a sign saying, “Men’s Room;” another says “Ladies Room;” and above the third door is a sign saying, “Library,” and that door is never closed.
In between groups, or as I began to realize the particular group I belonged to at the time wasn’t going to produce what they were offering and my membership was coming to an end, I would go into this Library and read, looking for new inspiration and hope. I’ve mentioned in passing some of the titles and authors I spent time with, and I had the chance to study many of the texts written by the founders and leaders of various groups, saving me the trouble of actually joining that group in order to discover its inconsistencies and contradictions.
Most of the books in the Library aren’t worth mentioning, at least in this discussion. But there is some very important information I discovered while reading you should know about, if you don’t already – information absolutely critical to anyone wishing to change their reality.
So I’m going to make a big jump right now from philosophy and religion to science, from metaphors and analogies to cold, hard scientific experiments. The subject is quantum physics and what has become known (and widely misunderstood) as the “Holographic Universe” – monumental discoveries made in the last few decades which literally change everything we have believed about our physical universe.
Don’t worry. I’m not going to get scientifically technical or say something any Human Adult couldn’t understand. But if you are still not satisfied with any of the groups you’ve joined – if you’re looking around trying to find out why none of the groups have produced anything close to what you want to experience and what you think is possible to experience – then you should spend the next few chapters in the Library with me; and bring your computer.
I want to say at the outset I am not an expert in quantum physics, so I have invited the real experts – Ph.D.’s in physics, professors of quantum physics at major universities worldwide, authors of many books – to speak to you directly by using a lot of their written quotes and video interviews. Basically, I want to assure you that what you will be reading will not be my opinions, but those of the people who really know what they’re talking about.
I’ve included a number of links to videos to watch, and I strongly suggest you visit those links and watch those videos as you read.
Okay. Here we go…
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We’ve known for a long time – at least, I was taught in school more than fifty years ago – the physical world around us is not as “solid” as it looks and feels. In fact, the universe is made up of mostly empty space.
This becomes very clear when we take a ride on a rocket into outer space and see so much “nothing” between a few particles of matter called stars and galaxies. As the technology has improved and we have gone deeper and deeper into “inner space” as well, we find the same thing in the atomic and sub-atomic worlds – mostly “nothing.”
The very best and most fun way to experience this for yourself is to watch a nine-minute video called Powers of Ten, from the office of Charles and Ray Eames, which they produced for IBM in 1977. You can watch it here.
There have been other videos made along the same lines: Cosmic Voyage (1996, produced for IMAX and narrated by Morgan Freeman), and Cosmic Zoom (1968, produced by the National Film Board of Canada.)
The most important thing to see in these videos is that “outer space” and “inner space” look very much alike; there’s hardly anything there except empty space.
For example, if you took the nucleus of a hydrogen atom and blew it up to the size of a basketball, the electron that defines the outermost “edge” of that atom would be twenty miles away from the nucleus. And in between? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Just empty space.
“Within all the atoms and molecules – all the space within them – the particles take up an insignificant amount of the volume of an atom.”1
“In fact, the universe is mostly empty.”2
So… the first thing we have to understand is that matter is not “solid,” even though it looks and feels that way to us.
“Matter is not what we have long thought it to be.”3
Matter is, in fact, full of empty space.
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The Powers of Ten video ends at the limit of our understanding at that time (1977), looking at a single proton in the nucleus of a carbon atom.
But as the technology improved over the years, and scientists were able to dive deeper and deeper into “inner space,” they discovered the very small particles they found did not behave as they were supposed to, at least not according to all the laws of physics we had believed for the last hundreds of years.
The most famous experiment that caused a real commotion is called the Double Slit. It was actually first done with light in 1801 by an English scientist, Thomas Young. Young demonstrated that light was not actually a particle, as had been believed forever, but acted like a wave instead.
Then in 1961, this same experiment was performed with electrons rather than light4, and finally in 1974 with just one electron at a time5. Since then it has been repeated and refined and repeated again, over and over, with the same result every time.
In September 2002, this Double Slit experiment was voted “the most beautiful experiment”6 by readers of Physics World, and noted quantum physicist Richard Feynman has said “all of quantum mechanics can be gleaned from carefully thinking through the implications of this single experiment.”7
That’s how important this experiment is, and how much it has changed everyone’s thinking of how the world works.
So let’s take a look at how this experiment is done and why its results are so startling….