God’s
deepest secret, like most truths, is utter simplicity. I could state it here in
a few words, but without traversing the logical terrain from where we dwell in
everyday awareness to arrive at this deepest secret, it would sound like a
meaningless tautology. But it is a profound secret, in effect, hidden in plain
sight.
There
appears to be a pattern of surprising phenomena, concealed behind the reality
we perceive: Only about four to five percent of reality is perceptible through
our physical senses, and the conscious mind is only about four to five percent
of the brain power locked up inside the average human skull. This is not an
accident; this pattern of hidden secrets is pervasive throughout the universe.
The Hubble space probe has revealed that only about 4.9% of the universe is
made of ordinary matter and energy, the nature of the rest, currently called ‘dark
matter’ and ‘dark energy’, is unknown to mainstream science. God’s deepest
secret is hidden because reality is quantum in nature, ostensibly made up of extremely
tiny distinctions of mass, energy and consciousness, perceived as separate, but
actually intimately connected when the other ninety-five percent is revealed. Because
reality is quantized, God’s deepest secret is going to be numerical in nature.
This is why mathematics is the language of science. And God’s deepest secret is
hidden in the three simplest concepts of number: whole number (integer), zero,
and infinity.
THE HIDDEN SECRETS OF THE QUANTUM WORLD
What are these secrets, and how and why
are they hidden? First of all, quanta are hidden from direct observation and
measurement because they are so very small. Everyone knows that elementary
particles are very, very, very small. It would take about one billion
(1,000,000,000) Hydrogen atoms laid side-by-side to reach across your little
fingernail, and the proton at the center of the Hydrogen atom is about one
one-thousandth of the size of the atom. And the electron is much smaller. But
all you really need to know is that they are almost unimaginably small. The purpose of this post is not to impress you
with how much I know, so I won’t be talking about all of the particles of the
so-called ‘particle zoo’. Most of them only exist for fractions of a nanosecond
as debris from reactions engineered in particle colliders, and are irrelevant
to this discussion.
There is another way that the secrets
of the quantum world are hidden. Unfortunately, it is by the unintentional use
of inappropriate mathematical tools. Mathematically logical procedures
effectively simplify and explain reality, but when misused, i.e. applied
inappropriately, they can confuse and conceal; and this is exactly what has
happened in quantum physics. Let me explain: ‘The’ calculus, as used today, was
devised by Leibniz and Newton more than 300 years ago, based on ideas developed
by Fermat and Descartes, and even earlier, by Archimedes. It depends on the
concepts of continuity and infinite divisibility, while quantum physics, the quantized
nature of reality, which was discovered by Max Planck more than 100 years ago,
reveals a world of discreteness and finite indivisibility. Application of
differential calculus to quantum phenomena has produced confusion, obsfucation and
even some of the so-called weirdness of quantum physics. Before we get into the
details of how we can remedy this inadvertent mathematical blunder, I want to
write a tribute to Max Planck, the father of quantum physics.
A TRIBUTE TO MAX PLANCK
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born in Kiel, Germany in 1858. As
a young student, he showed promise in music, and played the piano and organ extremely
well. But as he prepared for university an exceptional mathematics teacher
named Hermann Müller turned his interest toward science. In spite of a physics
professor who told him that physics was essentially a complete science, with
nothing left to be discovered, he decided to study the second law of
thermodynamics, specifically the dissipation of energy from hot materials by radiation.
In 1900 -1901, he developed the theory that energy flows, not in a continuous manner,
but in discrete packets that he called quanta.
This was a radical idea, but it fit the experimental evidence. His new theory
explained why the glow of a red hot iron fireplace poker goes from red to white
as more heat is added, without going through any of the other colors in between.
Planck had no desire to revolutionize physics, he just wanted to explain the phenomenon
he was studying. But this elegantly simple discovery started a revolution in
physics that would be carried forward by Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner
Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrӧdinger and change the science of physics forever.
Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919 for this discovery.
Planck, from
a Christian family, openly opposed the national socialist movement (Nazism) that
was under way at the time, and tried to intervene on behalf of Albert Einstein and
other Jewish scientists who were being publicly denounced by Adolf Hitler. He even
resigned his position as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft in 1937
in protest. His son, Erwin Planck was executed in 1945 for involvement in a
failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, and Planck’s home was destroyed by Allied
bombing during World War II. The war ended in August, 1945, and after the war, his
discovery was again recognized by the scientific community as ground-breaking. The
research center was renamed the Max Planck Institute, and he served as its
director. Max Carl Ernst Ludwig Planck was considered to be one of the most
important men of modern science when he died two years later in 1947.
My
favorite Planck quotes are:
“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the
most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as the result
of my research about atoms this much: there is no matter as such. All matter
originates and exists only by virtue of a force. We must assume behind this
force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the
matrix of all matter.”
“I regard Consciousness as fundamental. I regard
matter as derivative from Consciousness.”
“A new scientific truth
does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but
rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that
is familiar with it.”
ENERGY ONLY OCCURS IN EXACT FINITE QUANTA … SO WHAT?
Max Planck discovered that energy flow
only occurs in exact multiples of an extremely tiny unit of energy called a
quantum, and Einstein proved that energy and mass, the basic measures of
matter, are equivalent and can be converted from one to the other. The equation
E = mc2 expresses their equivalence when energy, mass, space, and
time are represented in consistent units of measurement. The simple fact that mass
and energy are two mathematically equivalent quantized forms of the same substance
of physical reality has revolutionized science and technology as nothing else in
the history of science on this planet. The multitude of electronic devices that
have so radically changed the world since 1935, were completely unimaginable
before this discovery. But the full implications of this discovery have not yet
been realized. When they are, the world will be changed more radically than it
has been during the past eighty years.
Stay tuned to learn more about the
implications of God’s deepest secret. Join me in the journey from ordinary
awareness to the deepest secret, the step-by-step infinite descent into the innermost
nature of reality, and from that point, to discover the infinite ascent from
the smallest unit of finite reality to the ultimate unity of Infinite Reality.
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