Menu
The new understanding of the reality of the world.
Neculai C. Tutos, Ph.D.
“The world and life are one.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century.
The new science of the world's reality redefined our position in the universe and triggered unprecedented progress in everything critical to humanity, to life. The four images on the right side of this text name four of the extraordinary benefits people worldwide will enjoy. It is, to a large extent, already happening. Most of this exceptional progress occurred during the last fifty years.
Table of Contents
At it deepest level, the world is a set of quantum fields of energy.
For more than 300 years, classical physics assumed that the universe, including life, is a material world governed by the universal laws of motion and chemistry. The new physics, quantum mechanics, proved that at its deepest level, the world is a set of quantum fields of energy that makes all the stars of the universe and all the sub-atomic structures. Energy, information, and mathematical laws make the whole world, including life. Matter does not exist; what we perceive as matter is a manifestation of energy. Electromagnetism creates the strength and solidity of what we perceive as matter. In reality, what we perceive as a compact object is over 99% space among its sub-atomic structure.
A tiny number that refused to be zero opened the door to the quantum reality of the world.
h = 6.62606957×10^−34 = 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000662606957
Max Planck, a German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate, discovered this constant of the universe, now named the Planck constant, at the very beginning of the twentieth century, in November 1901.
10^-34 means ten at the power of -34.
A few years later, in 1905, Albert Einstein, one of the greatest physicists in history, indicated that light is quantum in nature. More than a century of discoveries in quantum mechanics enabled the development of computing, digital-age communication, and new materials.
Quantum mechanics explains how the universe was created about 13.8 billion years ago and the universe’s evolution during the first seconds of the universe’s life.
Discoveries in quantum mechanics motivated research in biology at its molecular level; this resulted in the discovery of the DNA structure in the 1950s. Erwin Schrodinger, an Austrian physicist, and Nobel Prize laureate, is credited for being the one that motivated the research that ended in the discovery of the DNA structure.
The human mind could reach far back in time, very high up to the stars located at billion light years distance, and very deep down to the level of quarks, electrons, and photons. The human capability to discover the universe’s unbreakable mathematical constitution made possible the new understanding of the world’s reality.
It all started at the very beginning of the twentieth century when Max Planck, a German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate, opened the door to a shockingly different world reality. This discovery motivated more than a century of extraordinary discoveries that revolutionized the understanding of the universe and life. For the first time in history, these discoveries redefined our position in the universe and proved that life is not an accidental happening. Many highly respected scientists concluded that the universe was fine-tuned for life and that the creation of the massive stars was the way to make life possible.
1905 and 1916: Albert Einstein, one of the most outstanding scientists in history, redefined the concepts of space, time, and gravity.
1925 – 1927: Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, and Paul Dirac discovered the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. All three of them are Nobel Prize laureates.
The mid-1970s: The development of the Standard Model of particle physics, our best understanding of the quantum reality of the world.
2012: Experimental detection of the Higgs particle that explains the mass of the sub-atomic particles. This sub-atomic particle was mathematically predicted in 1964 by Peter Higgs (born May 29, 1929), a British theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize laureate.
1927-1964: The scientists finally accepted the Big Bang theory to explain the universe’s creation about 13.8 billion years ago.
1931: Kurt Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems are among the most important results in modern logic and have profound implications for various issues. They concern the limits of provability in formal axiomatic theories.
The 1950s: the discovery of the DNA structure.
1990-2003: Human genome project that makes the human genetic code known.
“Without a doubt, this is humankind’s most important, wondrous map ever produced. Today, we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.” President Bill Clinton, on June 26, 2000, announced the first results of the Human Genome Project. Participants included Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
2016: experimental detection of the gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916.
The missing piece: Gravity is the only fundamental force of the universe that remained unexplained by the quantum mechanics theory.
Is the universe aware about our existance?
“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.” Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos (p. 85), Oxford University Press.
For more than 300 years of scientific materialism domination, the world, including life, was considered a material construction, a gigantic machine governed by the laws of universal motion and chemistry. Scientific materialism is now proven wrong; everything happening in the universe, including life, is governed by mathematical laws. The same laws governed the creation of life, the creation of about 10 million living species.
“The Laws of the world, as we know them at present, seem to have been finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.” Stephen Hawking (1942–2018), English theoretical physicist and cosmologist.
Accepting that mathematical laws govern everything in the universe implies the acceptance that somehow the universe is aware of the existence of life. Mathematical laws of the universe governed the creation of stars that did make life possible. Stars are the way to create the chemical elements vital for life; we are made from star stuff.
Where are the laws of the universe located? Plato (429?–347 B.C.), one of the greatest philosophers in history, assumed that mathematical concepts have an independent reality outside the reality of the physical objects. Several great mathematicians later reinforced this position; the list includes Kurt Gödel, the greatest logician after Aristotle, and Roger Penrose, a British mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate in physics.
“The sense of the world must lie outside the world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”.
“We are no longer satisfied with insight into particles, or fields of force, or geometry, or even space and time. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.” John Wheeler, American physicist (1911–2008)
“One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.” Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894), German physicist
“The Laws of the world, as we know them at present, seem to have been finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.” Stephen Hawking was a great English theoretical physicist and cosmologist.
Frayn, Michael, a British philosopher, and playwriter, figured a great way to question our position in the universe.
“What is the universe, after all? Vastly big in its totality – and vastly small in its details. What makes it big, what makes it small? You and I do, by standing where we stand, by being 1.80 meters tall, by living for three score years and ten. We have some notion of how vastly bigger it is than ourselves, how vastly smaller, only because we’ve laid our meter-rule against it. Only because we’ve put our stopwatches on it. It’s big, it’s small, it’s so many billion light years across and so many years old because you and I and some of our friends say it is. If we weren’t here in the audience, comparing and measuring, gasping and applauding, the whole show would have gone for nothing. The universe would not be several billion light years across, or four centimeters, or any other distance. It would not be odd or awe-inspiring – or even banal. It would have no characteristics at all. And if it had no characteristics then in what sense would it be anything? In what sense would it exist? The lifespan of the omega meson would not be 10 –22 seconds or twelve centuries, or any other length of time. Here would not be here. Now would not be now. And if here is not here, nor now now, there is not there, nor then then. There would be no is, no was, no will be. If no is, no was, no will be, then no passage of time. So we are perhaps not after all such nobodies. We are not for nothing. The middle of things is not an entirely inappropriate place for us to be.” Michael Frayn, “The Human Touch.”
Life is an infinite numaber of now-moments, an infinite number of opportunities to be a fine human being.
Every now-moment in our life is between our past full of memories, regrets, and lessons learned, and the future of our hopes, dreams, and promises.
The now-moment is the only actual time in our life. What is a now moment? One year, one day, one hour, or one second? It has to be less than one second; each one-tenth of the second becomes past long before the end of a second. Many say that a now-moment is a zero time duration, implying that the present time is zero time.
Albert Einstein was very much troubled by the "now" concept. Long before him, St. Augustine concluded that time is an illusion when it is now a way to define the present time. St. Augustine (354-430) is one of the Latin Fathers of the Church and perhaps the most significant Christian thinker after St. Paul.
Nothing is scientifically known about the nature of time, and much less is known about the flow of time. The observation of changes creates the illusion of time. With no changes is no time.
An optimistic assumption is that a now-moment is more than zero, possibly the shortest time duration of any mining in physics, the Plank time. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology gives the value of the Planck time as 5.391247 × 10^-44 seconds. The number of Plank time units in a single second is number 5, followed by 44 zeroes, an enormous number. Practically, every day, every hour, our life is an infinite number of now-moments. Practically, every day of our life is an endless number of now-moments.
Can anything happen during a Planck time unit? Yes, a lot can happen; from 10^-36 to 10^32 of the first second, the inflationary Epoch. During this incredibly short time interval, the universe expanded to become 10^27 times larger; this is an expansion from almost zero size to around ten centimeters. This increase may seem like a minor expansion when in reality is of a gigantic magnitude.
- Let us assume that an investment of one dollar doubles every billionth of a second 90 times. In a lot less than a second, the one-dollar investment turns into 1,237,940,039,285,380,274,899,124,224 dollars!
- Imagine a tiny grain of sand that grows to the size of the Milky Way galaxy in a trillionth of a second. It can be done by doubling a grain of sand 90 times.
Having no way to tell the duration of each now-moment in our life, the intelligent way to deal with it, is to live well every now-moment in our life.
“What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know. I can state with confidence, however, that this much I do know: if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; if there was nothing existed, there would be no future time; and if nothing existed, there would be no present time. Now, what about those two times, past and future: in what sense do they have real being if the past no longer exists and the future does not exist yet? As for the present time, if that were always present and never slipped away into the past, it would not be time at all; it would be eternity. If, therefore, the present’s only claim to be called “time” it is that it is slipping away into the past, how can we assert that this thing is when its only title to being is that it will soon cease to be? In other words, we cannot really say that time exists, except because it tends to non-being. …………… I said just now that we measure periods of time as they pass, so as to declare this interval twice as long as that, or equal to that, and report anything else about segments of time that our measurements have revealed. It follows, then, that we measure those intervals of time as they are passing by, as I remarked, and if anyone asks me, “How do you know that?” I must be allowed to reply, “I know because we do, in fact, measure them; but what does not exist we cannot measure, and past and future do not exist.” But how can we measure present time when it has no extension? We can only hope to measure is as it passes by because once it has passed by, there will be no measuring; it will not exist to be measured.”
Saint Augustine, “The Confessions,” text segments form page 232 to 238, New City Press pocket-size edition, August 2012.
Readers may consider reading this great book by Saint Augustine about the year 400.
What is making us human.
The language, the understanding of I, I-plural, and the distinction between right and wrong make us human. Work in progress.
Reality is not given to us
Soon.
The unbreakable mathematical constitution of the world
Soon
Math laws that proved to be smarter than the scientists that discovered them
Soon
The good and the bad of the digitization
Soon
The ABC of democracy, law, and order
Soon
The constitution of liberty.
Soon