The Field – Stephen Davis
―Electrons are both waves and particles? One minute they act like a particle, and the next minute they act like a wave? At the time, no one could really believe any of this was actually true. Something must be wrong, they thought……...So the scientists modified the experiment to watch (with a measuring device) a single electron as it went through the double slits to see if it really acted like a wave instead of a particle.
However, the moment they observed the electron, an even stranger thing happened. They got a standard particle pattern on the screen that looked exactly as if they had fired BB‘s through the two slits. The simple act of watching the electron meant it went back to behaving like a particle instead of a wave, and therefore only went through one slit, not both, and formed a pattern like the BB‘s. So………the final conclusion is this: In its natural state, an electron is a wave rather than a particle, until it is observed. Then it becomes a particle with a fixed position in space and time!
The electron is very peculiar in the sense that when you‘re not looking, the electron can be here, can be there, or can be over there……...it can be all over this room, so to speak. But whenever we look – this is the strange thing about this electron – we always find them to be in one particular Geiger counter, although we have a room full of Geiger counters.
This is the fundamentally important stuff about the electrons. There is compelling evidence that the only time ‗Quanta‘ (1) ever manifest as particles is when we are looking at them. When an electron isn‘t being looked at, it is always a wave. So the term quantum mechanics and now more commonly
‗Quantum Physics,‘ (2) has to do with the study of electrons and their energy.
The word quantum is also synonymous with wave/particle (a term that is used to refer to something that possesses both particle and wave qualities).
Now this was truly radical………
An electron is a wave until it is observed, and then it becomes a particle!
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The ramifications are enormous. It means reality (the physical universe which we have always thought of to be solid and predictable) is not real, not solid and predictable at all, because the basic building blocks of that universe are not particles of matter, but waves of possibilities………waves of potential locations where an electron might appear as a particle when it is observed. But who is this observer? And how does an observer change the electron from a wave into a particle?
The first question is not easy to answer completely at the moment. The observer can be a human being looking at something; it can be a machine or a device set up to watch, record, or measure something; it can literally be anything that attempts to see something out there in the physical universe. But there is another level to the answer which needs more information before it can make sense; so we‘ll just have to wait.
Right now it‘s worth repeating the inescapable conclusions of the ‗Double Slit Experiment‘(3) : According to quantum physics, the atoms (nucleus and electrons) that makes up the physical universe we consider to be so solid and so real, only appears to be solid and real when they are being observed. When they are not being observed, they return to a wave state of infinite possible locations.
So now let‘s talk about how an observer changes an electron from a wave into a particle………wait a minute! No one really knows the answer to the question of how – or why – the observer changes an electron from a wave into a particle.
The experts can only speculate……...particles aren‘t really what they seem to be.
They‘re momentary manifestations, momentary poppings of this quantum wave function in which there is no particle – there‘s just this waviness which can spontaneously pop out as particles.
In other words, when electrons are viewed by an observer, these waves of possibilities pop and assume a specific location in space and time, which is what we see as reality. This is called collapsing the wave function. Collapsing the wave function can be very successfully explained and predicted mathematically, using complex quantum mathematics; but it‘s very hard to describe in simple English. Basically, it means an electron normally lives in a wave state (a wave function) that includes many possibilities of where it could end up as a particle; and when the electron is observed, those multiple wave states are collapsed to one state, the state of being a particle in a specific location.
Physicist ‗Nick Herbert‘ (4) says this sometimes causes him to imagine that, behind our back, the world (where we are not looking and cannot observe) is always a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup.
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But whenever we turn around and try to see the soup, our glance instantly freezes it and turns it back into reality. Herbert believes this makes us all a little like Midas, the legendary king who never knew the feel of silk or the caress of a human hand because everything he touched turned to gold.
Likewise humans can never experience the true texture of quantum reality because everything we touch turns to matter.
So where are these electrons living as waves of possibilities when no one is observing them and collapsing their wave function into a particle? The answer to that question has gone through a lot of revision over the years, and has been called a lot of things as the research has progressed, including:
The „Planck scale‟ (by the physicist ‗Max Planck‘)(5)
The „implicate order‟ (by the physicist ‗David Bohm‘) (6)
The „vacuum state‟
The „quantum wave function‟
The „zero point field‟
The „superstring field‟
The „M field‟
The „unified field‟
Today it is mainly just called ‗The Field.‘ In her book, ‗The Field,‘ Lynn McTaggert defines it simply as ‗A Field of All Possibility.‘ (7)
‗Everything you can think of, and everything you can‘t think of, and everything no one can think of already exists in this ‗Field‘ as ‗Waves of Possibilities.‘ ‗Dr.
John Hagelin‘ (8) explains………
‗Progress in our understanding of the universe through physics over the past quarter century has been exploring deeper levels of natural law, from the macroscopic to the microscopic, from the molecular to the atomic to the nuclear to the sub-nuclear levels of nature‘s functioning……...and what we‘ve discovered at the core basis of the universe, the foundation of the universe, is a single universal field of intelligence……… so all the forces of nature and all the so-called particles‘ of nature……… are now understood to be……… just different ripples on a single ocean of existence……...It‘s called the unified field, or superstring field, at the basis of everything – mind and matter………
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That field is a non-material field. Planets, trees, people, animals, are all just waves of vibration of this underlying unified superstring field……… It‘s the fountainhead of all the laws of nature; all the fundamental forces, all the fundamental particles, all the laws governing life at every level of the universe have their unified source in the unified field……… it is pure abstract potential, which rises in waves of vibration to give rise to the particles, to the people, to everything we see in the vast universe……… this isn‘t the world of electrons; it‘s the world of potential electrons……… and that‘s what we‘re made of.‘
…and ‗Dr. Fred Alan Wolf‘ (9) puts it this way………
‗Physicists give this a name; they call it a quantum wave function, because it seems wavy. However, this wave function isn‘t just a wave of matter, like an ocean wave or a sound wave, or any kind of wave of matter. It‘s a wave of possibility; it‘s a kind of thought wave. And because it is a wave of thought, or possibility, or not-matter, it‘s invisible to us. But we can‘t explain what we do see as matter………unless we picture that these matter particles somehow come out from or emerge from these thought-wave patterns.‘
The problem is no one can prove that ‗The Field‘ exists. You can‘t see it; you can‘t photograph it; you can‘t measure it; you can‘t hold it in your hand. But when quantum physicists assume ‗The Field‘ is there, they can make incredibly accurate mathematical predictions about the physical universe and how it behaves, which they can‘t do without taking ‗The Field‘ into account. As Fred Alan Wolf said, ‗We can‘t explain what we do see as matter………unless we picture that these matter particles somehow come out from or emerge from these thought-wave patterns.‘
Think of it as electricity. You can‘t see electricity itself; you can only see what electricity produces. One American comedian joked that he wouldn‘t pay his electricity bill until the company showed him the electricity he was paying for.
But we can see the light electricity makes, and the power, and the other effects we count on every day and now take so much for granted; and when we see those effects, we know electricity must exist.
The same thing is true for ‗The Field.‘ Even though we can‘t prove it exists scientifically, nothing makes sense without it in light of the results of the most recent experiments. Another example might help make this clearer……...If you were an Amazonian tribe living in the Amazon rain forest with no contact with the outside world, and someone brought you a radio; you might wonder how it works when you hear music coming out of the box. You might even take it apart, looking for an orchestra of very little people inside playing the music you hear.
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But after a while, you‘d realise the only way to explain the music is to assume there are invisible radio waves in the air, and this box simply captures those waves and translates them into sound – even though you couldn‘t prove it.
We have finally reached the point of human understanding (now supported by scientific evidence) that there are waves all around us. But this time they‘re not radio waves, they‘re not ocean waves; they‘re waves of ‗The Field,‘ they‘re waves of potentiality; and when they are observed, they turn into the physical universe we see!
I‘ll talk a lot more about this concept in later chapters. For now it is enough to know ‗The Field‘ must exist, it is outside of space and time, and it includes an infinite number of possibilities, but only in wave form. This ‗Field‘ does not contain particles; it is not matter; it is not part of the physical universe. Instead it is what the entire universe is made from – from these waves of possibilities.
But how did this ‗Field‘ come into existence? Who made it? Where did it come from? Currently, science has no answers to these questions. They only know
‗The Field‘ must exist.
So I will not speculate about how ‗The Field‘ was created, or who might have created it, or how it already contains all possibilities, because………well, simply because there is absolutely no way a human adult can understand or have a direct experience of anything that happens on the other side of ‗The Field.‘ This will also become clearer in later chapters.‖
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My Impression On Above Chapter: „No Matter‟
For more than two thousand years, it was believed that atoms were the ultimate ingredients of matter. They were pictured as tiny particles, indivisible and solid.
But modern physics shows that nothing could be further from the truth.
Early in the twentieth century, physicists realised that atoms are composed of even smaller ‗Subatomic Particles.‘(10) An atom may be small, a mere billionth of a centimetre across, but these subatomic particles are a hundred-thousand times smaller still. Imagine the nucleus of an atom magnified to the size of a tennis ball. The electrons would be spinning around it in orbits several kilometres across, making the atom itself the size of Sydney or Melbourne. As the early twentieth-century British physicist ‗Sir Arthur Eddington‘ (11) put it,
―matter is mostly ghostly empty space, 99.9999999999999% empty space to be a little more exact.
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If you could take away the empty space then all the subatomic particles in all the six billion people on planet earth would pack into a volume only a little larger than a grain of rice‖ (about this size:
)
With the advent of quantum theory, it was found that electrons, protons, neutrons, and the other subatomic particles were themselves far from solid and far from even being particles. On closer examination they appear to be just waves of energy, with no exact location in space just a probability of being around at certain point in space and time. Solid matter had, literally, disappeared into empty space.
Why then does the world seem so solid? Why doesn't the 99.99999...% empty space of my hand simply pass through straight through the 99.99999...% empty space of the table it is resting upon? The answer has to do with the forces that bind the atoms together.
When my hand meets the table, the ‗Force Fields‘ (12) in the atoms of my hand come up against the equally strong fields in the atoms of the table. The mutual repulsion of these billions of tiny, but immensely strong, force fields prevents my hand penetrating the table, giving rise to the appearance of solidness. But however real it may seem - this solidness is only how things appear to us; it is not a fundamental part of matter.
FOOTNOTES
1.
Wikipedia – Quanta;
2.
Wikipedia – Quantum Physics;
3.
Wikipedia – Double Slit Experiment;
4.
Wikipedia – Nick Herbert;
5.
Wikipedia – Max Planck;
6.
Wikipedia – David Bohm;
7.
Wikipedia – A Field of All Possibility;
8.
Wikipedia – Dr. John Hagelin;
9.
Wikipedia – Dr. Fred Alan Wolf;
10.
Wikipedia – Subatomic Particles;
11.
Wikipedia – Sir Arthur Eddington; and
12.
Wikipedia – Force Fields
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