Everything is constructed of atoms.

If you looked at the composition of an atom up close, you would see a tiny vortex containing quarks and photons. If you zoom in closer still, you would see a physical void. The reality is that the atom has no structure. Every physical thing around us is actually constructed without anything physical. Atoms are made out of invisible energy rather than tangible matter. In actual fact, the internal structure of an atom is more like a thought. A thought that can be expanded and contracted, depending on the observer. We are held together by an ether that is totally subjective.

This is the territory of Quantum mechanics, the science of the very small. It is something that is extremely bizarre as it puts into question almost everything that we commonly think. As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr once said: “If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”

When you are looking at an atomic particle, it exists in one particular place. If you look away, it ceases be really be there, unless you look again. This is called “Quantum Superposition” – the name for something that can be in one or more places simultaneously. This puts into question every thing and relies purely on the expansion of our thought rather than the expansion of what we see.

When we look at anything, we are fixing a position of it due to our tendency to want to see something in a place. Ultimately we are choosing to see what we see.

Every second, our brains are deciding that the things around us are there at that time. Considering the evidence today, I would propose that instead of thinking of things as “things” we should think of things as multiple possibilities.

Quantum mechanics has confused many scientists. After all, the discovery that our physical material reality isn’t really physical at all, can be a bit tricky to digest. Unfortunately for devotees of Newtonian physics, the consideration of a material universe has been somewhat outclassed by the discovery that matter is nothing but an illusion. Everything in the universe is made out of energy. Nothing is materially real.

It should come as no surprise that the study of Quantum mechanics has been increasingly popular, partly triggered by Einstein’s paper on relativity, although if you look into the Vedic Sanskrit texts dating back 5000 years, you would see that these discoveries had already happened. In reality, our modern fascination with our combined invisible energy, our unity, was known in the East a very long time ago. However we tend to base discovery and invention on what we commonly understand, individually and collectively. Hardcore scientists have seldom respected the more spiritual thinkers of days gone by.

In the same way as we hail modern scientific understanding as new, we award innovators who create on top of a base line that has been imagined to be real. The people we study at school are announced to be inventors or geniuses, despite invention being purely contextual. Genius is merely relative and uniqueness is dependant upon what we already know.

Throughout history we can observe that every generation has considered itself to have the ultimate knowledge, just as we do today.

Up until 1917 the atom was considered to be the smallest and most fundamental particle that existed. Then Ernest Rutherford came along and experimented with a nuclear reaction and the proton was discovered. As ever, this was considered the ultimate element until 1964 when physicists proposed Quarks, an elementary building block.

Common thought had been expanded. The old finite thinking was upgraded to the new. As it happens, the “top quark” was the most recent to be discovered (there are 5 others currently), in 1995. Most online sources will refer to this as the “last” one – perpetuating the myth that we now have ultimate knowledge.

The expansion of thought is not exclusive to atoms however. For example, between the 4th and 15th Century BC, one of the primary arguments was whether the world was flat. Despite Aristotle accepting the spherical nature of the Earth in 330BC, 1162 years later, Columbus found it really hard to get support for his explorations due to the Catholic church maintaining their view of a flat Earth.

Moving from geographical exploration to commercial business, many companies show traits of the same lack of thought expansion. There is major focus on outsmarting competitors by hiding advantageous information, assuming that the competition has the same level of expanded thought.

This would seem to be a fundamentally unrealistic assumption. Thought is not based on static evidence, it is based on our interpretation of information. The assumption that others may have the same thinking is to say that others have interpreted the exact same range of information in exactly the same way. It is as realistic to say that what we have observed is actually there, when in fact we know that when we look away, it is not.

When seeking competitive advantage, in science, cartography or business, the most robust methodology would surely be through the expansion of thought; rather than the pursuance of what we believe to be innovative based on common understanding. We need to prioritise the observation of the unobserved.

In every area we are just beginning to understand what is around us and we have the opportunity to expand our thinking and further our journeys if we choose to do so.
—

Jonathan MacDonald
11.59pm 31st December 2014

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