As a retired person I have taken full advantage of the opportunity to read at leisure. I am fascinated by one subject—quantum theory. It’s far too late for me to even attempt to learn the math necessary for a true understanding of this field—no pun intended (please see below if this makes no sense). I read the books that are written for the lay public by world class physicists (Brian Greene and Sean Carroll come to mind) and am drawn into this illogical and counter-intuitive subject. Actually even the physicists that devote their professional life to the study of what constitutes the insides of atoms and other similarly tiny—nano scale—structures and how they behave confess that, while they can do the math, their findings make no sense to us in the real world.
The quantum world and the macro world, the one we live in, have different properties and structures and seem to be controlled by different laws. I have come to understand that the continuing challenge is to find a unifying theory to connect behaviors and these “laws” of the two realms. One attempt at this reconciliation is what is called string theory. This concept visualizes the ultimate, smallest component of matter to be vibrating strings that live in a multi-dimensional universe. My head hurts!
It turns out that at the subatomic level there may only be electromagnetic fields that “collapse” into matter when detected; by what and who does the detecting is unclear. Boggles the mind; as Einstein said it’s spooky stuff. After all this a paraphrase from Gertrude Stein may be appropriate: when it comes to matter, there may be no there there.
