I’m going to share with you one of the most fascinating things I came across whilst diving into knowledge on electrodynamics. It’s Thomas Young’s ‘Double Slit Experiment,’ whereby, in trying to decifer if light & matter, and their interactional movement, was truly made of waves or particles; scientists inversely discovered that observation (consciousness) not only disturbs the measurement of reality, but indirectly influences it. To gain true perspective, it’s important to know a little background. The truism is that it’s quantum all the way down; pretty well everything in nature is either atoms or light (unless you consider dark matter & dark energy).
The Ancient Greeks were known for their philosophical definitions of reality. This is exemplified in their works of art, not least of which, their mastering of sculptures that were grounded in estoric geometrical understandings of the human body. The idea of atoms goes all the way back to the Ancient Greek philosophers who envisaged that we were made up of individual pieces of uncuttable matter (atomos) and that these atoms would just be smaller versions of ourselves. But quantum theory turned that view on its head. As we explore the world of the very small, such as photons of light, electrons and our modern understanding of atoms, we discover that they behave like nothing we can directly experience with our senses.
The double slit experiment sparked an exciting time in scientific theology because what it showcased was that quantum particles could get into superposed states (until observed/measured), that is, to have simultaneous probabilities of being in a range of states, rather than having an actual unique state. This bore new enthusiasm for mathematical metrics such as probability and complex numbers (square roots etc) as scientists fought to define quantum behavior. This is where Einstein came to the fore using Plancks useful cheat theory to describe reality and the photoelectric effect (producing electricity from sunlight), and with that, had set the foundation for the whole of quantum physics with his special relativity theory – much of which he spent his life challenging thereafter.
