Ten Things About Reality That Will Blow Your Mind

I’m really surprised at the low level of impact that various astounding scientific discoveries make in our everyday sense of ourselves and the world around us. For example, the past century has seen a series of breathtaking, startling and rigorously proven breakthroughs in our understanding of reality that have radically altered our view of what the universe is and how it works. But unfortunately by “our” I mean a very tiny handful of particle physicists plus a smallish coterie of amateurs who read avidly on the topic. The nature of reality appears to have been deemed too esoteric and counter-intuitive for dissemination to the general public, and you will learn precious little about it in our schools, in the media or anywhere else for that matter.

It’s an understandable predicament – this stuff is genuinely difficult and mostly counter-intuitive – but nevertheless unfortunate. And so, to signpost some of the high-level general implications of these discoveries for myself and to share them with my friends I’m posting 10 discoveries that we have made over the past century that radically alter our understanding of what reality is and how it works. Buckle your seatbelts! The universe is a far stranger and more awe-inspiring place than we originally imagined.

1. Possibility is a real thing, not just a human concept.

Quantum mechanics has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that possibility is a physical force every bit as concrete and real as gravity or electro-magnetism. And it flows across the universe in waves, as if it were a liquid. Every constituent component of our universe travels along in “probability waves” that contain every possible location and path that they might possibly have taken, and they collapse into actual things with definite locations and trajectories only when they bump up against one another. Until then there is a very real sense in which they are riding a wave that simultaneously places them at every possible location where they could be, and those possible locations can also bump up against one another and create interference patterns that we can observe in labs.

2. Our one-way, linear experience of time is an illusion.

To the best of our current understanding, it appears that time is not linear and there is no “arrow of time” that we flow across, all reasonable appearances to the contrary. Objects (including ourselves) move through time, but all directions of time are equal, just as they are for space.

Our illusory experience of time’s flow is due to two things (1) the law of entropy, which shows that highly ordered things invariably break down into a rest state of disorder, and (2) the original state of our universe, which was extremely, extremely ordered and is constantly breaking down into further disorder, because it was so ordered at its inception. This is the only linear aspect of our universe across time, and it provides a physical constraint that prevents conscious beings from mapping memories of the future, in addition to the past. Therefore whatever moment you happen to be in appears to “flow” in an orderly fashion from past to present because our memories go only one way and many kinds of things (like the breaking of an egg) can’t be undone in this universe.

In a universe that was less orderly in its beginning, by the way, consciousness probably would not even be possible because in a rest state of high disorder it is phenomenally rare that order ever increases.

It's important to note that, while this is the leading theory at the moment, it has not been absolutely proven as of yet, and it's still possible that something else may be at work in our one-way perception of time. There’s still a lot for us to learn and its pretty certain that more revelations are (were?) in store for us in the “future”.

3. The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.

Believe it or not this has been experimentally verified and is now beyond doubt. Time slows proportionately depending on how fast you are moving through space. Because we can only move relatively slowly through space, these effects are never apparent to us. But if you could get in some sort of magical space ship that went almost as fast as the speed of light you would be able to travel through time much more rapidly than those on Earth and arrive back millions of years in the future in a matter of days.

4. When you jump out of an airplane, you are not falling toward the Earth; the Earth is falling on you.

Objects made of matter, whether humans or planets or subatomic particles, warp the fabric of space-time and cause grooves to form in it across which other, smaller objects will now travel. It’s as if a fat person made an ass-print in the comfy chair of our universe. This is called gravity. The pressure that we feel for virtually all of our lives (except when we’re jumping out of airplanes) is a combination of (1) our body’s natural rest state moving at a steady velocity down the warp in the fabric of space created by the massive object that we live on, and (b) that same massive object obstructing our body’s ability to continue in that rest state. Therefore when you jump out of an airplane (not counting the impact of the wind) you are not really moving relative to other objects around you; rather, they are moving toward you. And the Earth is flying at you like the ultimate Mack Truck.

5. Particles can communicate and align themselves with one another instantly across space, even if they’re on opposite ends of the universe.

There are ways in which matter’s constituent particles are not constrained by space at all, and can communicate with one another instantaneously from one end of the universe to the other. We know this largely because Einstein hated quantum physics and was constantly trying to come up with ways to debunk it. Unfortunately, every time he did he only prove it further, and proved how strange it is. His most ingenious method was to show that quantum mechanics predicted that if you emit two particles that are linked from a quantum mechanical perspective and allow them to fly off to opposite ends of the universe, then alter one of them in some manner, quantum math predicts that the other will be instantaneously altered as well. Sure enough, a decade or so later it was proven that this actually works. So if for example you split a photon into two and shoot them off in opposite directions, it has been proven that one immediately knows if the other has been bumped up against or not and changes itself accordingly, faster than the speed of light and instantaneously across space. This shows that there are mysterious links between some particles/waves that transcend space entirely.

6. It is possible under certain special circumstances to go back in time and change the past.

This one could also be titled “the universe is fucking with us”. But it only works for subatomic particles. The experiment goes like this: if you “tag” a particle (alter its spin) so that it is potentially possible that someone could distinguish it from another particle later, that particle’s probability wave collapses and it becomes an actual particle with a definite location and trajectory in space. If you later “untag” them so that they could never be distinguished from one another at some indefinite time in the future, it becomes a probability wave again. One the face of it, this appears to tell us that the particle goes back in time and now follows all possible routes through space where it once only traveled a single path.

This would even work if you “tagged” it in the Andromeda galaxy and then “untagged” it three million years later in our galaxy, which means that the past has been irrevocably altered and the particle, which previously only went through space via one definite path, has now gone back and traveled all of its possible paths as a probability wave. By untagging the particle we have altered 3 million years of history.

It also means that the particle/probability wave is on some level “aware” that it would be possible to measure and distinguish it at some point in the future, and alters its behavior accordingly. Terrifying, creepy and all-around awesome.

7. The universe was created out of nothing by a rare but occasionally occurring statistical blip in the void.

This does not of course rule out divine intervention, but the laws of physics as we know them today show that a universe such as ours will invariably emerge out of nothingness every so often as an extremely rare statistical anomaly. Blip!

It is probably a bit premature for me to post this one because it hasn't been proven per se -- but it's incredibly cool and looking more likely. The growing consensus around it stems from quantum math predictions surrounding the constant creation in our universe of "virtual particles" out of the void all across space that every so rarely turn into real particles, and an extension of this quantum behavior to reality before the creation of our universe.

8. The Big Bang was not a “bang”.

If you assumed it was a bang you would think that Planet Earth was Ground Zero, because everything is rushing away from us in opposite directions at speeds directly proportional to their distance from us. But the so-called Big Bang wasn’t a bang at all, and everything is actually rushing away from everything else at the same proportional speeds. The Big Bang and the ensuing expansion of the universe is more a stretching of space, like Silly Putty pulled further and further, and all matter in the universe gets stretched outward along with it.

In addition, it looks like our visual image of the universe starting in a single point and expanding outward also goes out the window. It looks more and more like the universe was infinitely large at its inception, even as it continually stretches and expands.

9. We already know how to teleport things.

And we’ve done it in labs. Unfortunately those “things” are sub-atomic particles like photons and electrons. But we’ve done it! Using the trans-spatial bizarreness mentioned in #5 we’ve managed to associate two particles with one another, send them off in opposite directions and then transport/transpose one particle onto the location of the other particle, destroying the other particle in the process.

Now the bad news. There is no way in hell we’ll be able to teleport human beings any time soon, and probably ever. For one thing, the teleportation requires this particle association (called quantum “entanglement”) for every particle being teleported. How do you do that for every particle in a human body? Then you have to have all of the constituent mirror matter at the location where you’re teleporting them. Then you have to have a computer so vast that it could capture all of the insane complexity of all of the particles jostling around in a human body in such a way that it can deterministically place them all back in the right order at the new location. The computer capacity required for that is truly inconceivable. Plus quantum weirdness may come into play; while the particles in your body are constantly jostling up against one another and their possibility waves have therefore collapsed, they might create a factor of uncertainty. In conclusion: forget about it. Not gonna happen.

10. Math is a motherfucker

Physicists have gotten so far in understanding how the universe works, despite how counter-intuitive so much of it is, by following the math wherever it leads. Whenever someone (such as Einstein) points out an apparent logical flaw in the math of quantum mechanics, for example, the math always turns out to be experimentally correct.

Which raises the question, why does math work? Nobody’s figured that one out yet. For now it operates infallibly and without explanation, as if the ineffable language of God.

ps. Because it is still very much undecided and up in the air I am not including any of the conclusions of M-Theory, because it hasn’t yet been proven or fully worked out. But suffice it to say that many more jaw-dropping surprises about the nature of reality are on their way. It’s worth tuning in to them from time to time!