Fluctuality

Metaphysics is the study of philosophy from the point of view of an ethereal hippie.   Quantum physics is the study of minutiae from the point of view of a fanatical mathematician.               And yet, even they agree, you are codependent.                The reason is because in either field all of reality is made up of the same two components: the observer and the observed.   You can’t have one without the other. Without an observer, nothing can be perceived. Without something to do the perceiving, there is nothing to observe. Exhibit A: Cat being perceived versus a cat not being perceived. Now you might suggest that you don’t need to observe something to exist, “I think therefore I am, “ right?                But what would you think about if nothing had ever existed? How would you know you existed if there was nothing to perceive, nothi...

Welcome to social media, where you are Pygmalion, meticulously shaping and sculpting the perfect version of you. On a professional networking site like LinkedIn (where this was first published), this masterwork is called a CV and with the right effort, yours will be so incredible that others will surely fall in love.               And if they don't fall in love? Then clearly you must have done something wrong and you will muster the strength (with a little torturous feedback from friends) to continue your efforts at perfection, striving to find the ever elusive three-word description that perfectly sums up who you are as both a human being and an indispensable professional. If only you could figure out exactly what kind of ninja you are. No, that's cliche. How about wizard? Too Harry Potter. Swordsman? Samurai? Hobbit? What sort of mythical character best sums up the way you do spreadsheets? Sound familiar?   The truth is, you are a...

A very long time ago there was a sacred tree. This tree was called The Tree of Knowledge for it was beneath this tree that the great prophet was said to have meditated, finding within the ether the wisdom that would become the doctrines of spirituality and a oneness with nature itself.              This tree looked as ancient as the beginning of time. It had a massive trunk armored in twisting, gnarled bark. It had branches, thousands upon thousands of them, thick and muscular and seeming to reach out in every direction. Some curled upward as if holding up the sky. Others reached outward, defying gravity and extending far beyond what should have been supportable, their leaves always fluttering as if beckoning pilgrims to come hither. And come hither they did. For centuries, devotees endured impossibly harrowing journeys across treacherous plains and jagged mountains just to reach the roots of the tree. Roots that seemed an extension ...

This is your brain. It is an inanimate object.   This, however, is what your brain looks like when it is synapses are firing, communicating from neuron-to-neuron to create what we call consciousness: Without electrical interaction, the brain of a dead person is no different from a thinking, breathing, living person, so this is what the consciousness that is you, a thinking, breathing, living person looks like. This is the known universe. The known universe is everything. Only it isn’t. What we think of as the entire universe is actually less than 5% of everything. All those stars, all those galaxies, all those atoms, all those particles make up only 4.9% of what is really out there.             The rest of everything is dark matter (27%) and dark energy (68%). Dark matter consists of particles even smaller than subatomic particles. So small that they can actually pass through atoms. In fact, the...

If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? No.             In fact, technically even of someone is there it still doesn't make a sound. Sound, you see does not exist on its own. What does exist is motion, in the form of waves traveling through the air. Your eardrums, which are a thin membrane stretched like a the skin on a drum, are a biological device specifically calibrated to detect these motion waves, as long as they fall within a certain range. Your brain then takes the pattern of that wave the eardrum is now vibrating in and it translates it in a biofeedback loop with your conscious mind where you experience it as sound. Until those waves reached an ear conspiring with a brain to interpret that motion as sound, that tree made no noise at all.   Here is what that tree actually did. It converted the potential energy of it standing up into the kinetic energy of it falling down. The impact ...

Hold your hand up about 18 inches from your face. Poke the index finger of your other hand through the air right next to that hand. Pretty darn easy, right?  Now wave your hand back-and-forth as quickly as you can. Try poking your index finger through the same spot. Chances are your hand blocks you most of the time.             Now, imagine if your hand was vibrating back-and-forth like that all the time, only 100 times faster. Or 1,000 times faster. Or 1,000,000 times faster. You would never get your finger or anything else through that point where it was once so easy to poke it through. Essentially, the exact same amount of matter in your hand would now occupy a space about three times as large as it previously did. For all intents and purposes, you would have a gigantic hand. This is what the atoms that make up your body are already doing. Consider a gigantic atom. If you were to enlarge an atom to a siz...