|
The other side of the coin is that waves, light waves for example, in which colors are described by wavelengths of oscillations, behave like particles. This is the way that quantum physics started. Max Planck, just over 100 years ago, showed that he could solve some of the fundamental problems in physics by assuming that light waves were not just smooth oscillating waves as Faraday, Maxwell, and others had thought, but came in lumps of energy which he called quanta. The word "quanta" comes from "counting."
Small particles in nature are not little solid bodies or corpuscles with rigid edges, the way Newton, Boyle, and Locke thought in the seventeenth century. They are more like clouds of tendencies or propensities. The shape of these clouds is worked out very accurately in quantum mechanics (this shape is what the wave function describes), but they do not just stay dispersed like clouds, because they still somehow maintain a unity. So we need a systematic account of how these spread-out clouds or fields can yet act only in a single unified way to give one outcome. This selection problem is the measurement problem that quantum physics has tried to solve over the years: to understand how things that are spread out, and behave like waves while they are spread out, can then act only in a single manner with a single response.
The combination of these two problems in quantum physics is called the problem of wave-particle duality. The task that quantum physicists now have is to try to understand the connection between those two features of quantum physics. I am not going to explain much more about the physics details, but will return to some of these things in a general way below. We need to ask what is really going on in nature: what is quantum physics telling us?
Forming Connections with Swedenborg
The way I want to try to answer this question is by using some ideas of
Swedenborg. This is not the way I normally introduce quantum physics,
but I am relying on the fact that you may well have some of these ideas
already. My basic goal is to draw some correspondences between spirituality
and quantum physics: not identity, but correspondences. Thus, those
of you who know Swedenborg can use these correspondences to understand
quantum physics, and those who know quantum physics can see the
reverse connections as well.
|
