I spent the day having strange thoughts about the nature of the world. I'm the kind of person who thinks about unusual things a lot, a tendency that was amplified today by my recent lack of sleep and the fact that I'm reading Salman Rushdie's Grimus, which is excellent and also very trippy.
My thought goes like this: Matter is composed, as we know, of atoms, which are themselves composed of electrons and neutrons and protons, which are composed of quarks, which are themselves, I understand, three dimensional expressions of a twelve dimensional string of infinite length vibrating through the frequencies of the first four measures of Pachabel's Cannon over and over again. Let's stick to atoms for the purpose of this discussion, though. When two objects interact - imagine a ball bouncing off of a wall - what is really happening is that the atoms in the two objects are repelling each other. We think of the ball as "touching" the wall, but really the electron clouds around the atoms in the ball are repelling the electron clouds around the atoms in the wall. If you consider matters from this perspective, no "touching" actually takes place. The closer two objects get, the stronger the repulsion becomes, until it equals the strength of the force pressing the objects together.
In fact, since all interactions between matter are really interactions between these fields, I'm not sure it would be possible to talk about two pieces of matter "touching," and the idea that's really gotten me thinking is that there's also no obvious way to say where a particular piece of matter is. We think of the borders of things as being the spot where their matter stops and some other matter begins. But how do we define where an object's edges are? The edges should ideally be the edges of the electromagnetic fields that are responsible for all interactions between objects that we experience, but electromagnetic fields have an infinite range. They get weaker at an accelerating rate as they get further from their source, but they never actually go to zero.
So where are our edges? Where do you stop, and where does your neighbor begin? To a certain extent, it seems, everything in the universe is really overlapping, and not nearly as defined and distinct as we perceive it to be.
I'm really not sure that there's any value in these thoughts, but they've been occupying my mind in its spare moments over the last week, so I thought I'd share them with you all.
Friday, May 29, 2009
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I like the way you put this!
ReplyDeleteFound my way here looking for an interview with Rushdie in which he talks about Grimus (which he doesn't really do much of!) The whole bit about boundaries of self and other also interests me in Rushdie's novel and I think the difficulty in identifying that border is part of what Rushdie is getting at.
Interesting that he also uses a blend of Sufi mysticism and quantum physics to define that problem of borders. So I was interested in your thoughts and thought I'd share that the novel got me thinking along the same lines as well.
Michele, thank you so much for your comment. I'm still reading through the last third of Grimus - it's like eating a rich cake that you can neither eat more than a bit of each night nor stop eating until it's finished.
ReplyDeleteI think the question of borders between people is one of the most interesting. I've been contemplating it a lot lately, and it takes you through all kinds of conundrums about the nature of self and consciousness.