Let’s stop kidding ourselves. Reality’s a massive information network with a gazillion switches packing it into some thing. Something changing.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
By David Stone
The facts are in.
No matter what we believe, over the last 120 years, we learned that time is a personalized conception. And space is also a convenient creation, and everything in the universe rests on a supercharged bed of possibility. We ignore the truth, maybe, because it’s too weird, completely out of range.
Who’s in charge here? And how do we drive this thing?
Blame Einstein for exposing the massive information network
It’s Albert’s fault.
Initially, anyway.
Without his genius, we might’ve missed it, carrying on just fine, comforted by our illusions, maybe for centuries, even forever.
Einstein proved that time is relative, that is, different for everyone, a useful invention helping us build sequential stories not all wadded up in one extremely congested place. The resulting reality is itself a fiction, but at least we get to share it.
But it wasn’t all his doing.
Before Einstein’s mind-bending equations proved that time and its life partner, space, are personally sculpted by us, Max Planck set the table, demonstrating that the world we see, touch and feel relies on a foundation of quirky fundamental particles he called quanta.
Not as well-known today as other quantum pioneers, probably because he stayed in Germany under Nazi rule while his Jewish colleagues fled West, Planck won the Nobel Prize in 1918, before the allies gummed up European politics, setting the stage for Hitler and, less significantly, Planck’s diminution.
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Einstein got more ink, but Planck’s idea opened doors to the mystifying world of quantum theory, the science of tiny particles, some so small they pass through the earth by the billions every day without changing course.
Reality’s a massive information network, you see, and all of those tiny somethings are quivering bubbles of data.
To be frank, countless tests of quantum theory confirm that virtually everything we thought was true at the turn of the Twentieth Century was false.
Apparently true, that is, and only at a superficial level.
And we got over it.
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