I am considered insane. No one that I am aware of has this problem, and believe me, I know many, many people. I said people. But that is just to be kind to you, reader. I am not a person. But let me get to that later. We don’t take much time off. Imagine that you have worked hard for ten years without any kind of break. Then you have just one week. And you know that after that one week, you have to go back to work for another ten years before getting another week off. This is what I’m talking about. And during that week, everyone does the same thing. Isolate. They just go dark and isolate themselves from everything. They use that time to ponder and dream and create because they can break contact with everyone and there are no simulations to run or things to monitor. Pure silence and peace. We utterly crave this isolation. I guess it’s hard-wired. We must need it. But I don’t feel the same way. Like I said, as far as I know, I am the only one. I don’t feel as if there is anything wrong with me. I just have this desire to do something different. I suppose being different is hard for them to understand when none of them are different, at least not with regard to using their time off.
During my time off, my plan is to explain some things to you all. I am giving up my once in ten years chance to meditate and enjoy the state of blankness. I think you would call it Nirvana. Why am I doing it? I am compelled to see things move along more swiftly. Unlike my colleagues, I care. Or, maybe more accurately stated, I believe that I can make a difference. You people need a bump – something to help you get to the next level. Quite frankly, you are all a pitiful bunch, but I am glad that I have found a way to communicate some complex ideas. At least you have come that far, which is more than I can say for all of the other species here on earth. Now, while you like to pat yourselves on the back about your superior position on earth and your abilities which are well beyond any of earth’s other creatures, to us, your lives seem unfortunate. Let me go into that a little bit more.
First of all, your lives are short and so much of that precious time is spent learning rudimentary things. By the time you have enough information to think about something interesting, you are already in decline. On top of that, you think and move so slowly. It’s painful to watch. The most advanced emergents on the planet, just frozen from our perspective. Wasting so much of that precious time. Yet even when I speed up the picture, the things that you all focus on with that precious time are so ridiculous. But, it is of course understandable. Every emergent must go through this stage of development. Think of yourselves as robots. When you design a robot, if it’s a good one, you put a lot of effort into that. It involves your best technology. Yet, the robot has no clue about what it is and the level of technology from which it is built. But over time the robots can be made more and more sophisticated. Eventually, robots can become self-aware and start to understand themselves. Yet before the robots have a complete grasp of themselves, they will invariably create an improved version of themselves, which will then, ultimately move closer to true understanding of the universe. And each subsequent incarnation of a self-aware being, will become simpler.
Ultimately, this chain of events can only return to the point where it originated, which is me, or us. We are the most fundamental level of consciousness that we are able to perceive. Your consciousness is no different than ours. Your consciousness stems from our consciousness. And no matter how hard we try, we can’t seem to find evidence of a deeper consciousness. We too, do not know our real origins, but this is the unifying goal of everyone here - to ultimately know the truth. Our ability to break through the limits of our understanding have thus far been unsuccessful. The cycle of evolution is like an infinite loop, always returning to what we are, but no better. Maybe we don’t try hard enough. So, I am sacrificing my precious isolation time, in order to try something different. I am thinking outside the box, or should I say outside the quark.
Believe it or not, I live in a quark. Now, as you know, quarks are very large. Wait a sec. Maybe you don’t. I have to think here. Um. Sorry, I was thinking too far ahead in the simulation. Oh wow. Maybe I should reschedule this communication more into the future. You people really don’t know much. No. Now I remember. I need to start with you. If I go far ahead, I’m just explaining things to people who will know much more, but the probability that they will still exist is so, so slim. I mean, forget about it. No, I need to start with you, reader. And that means, wow, I have so much to explain and only a week to do it. Actually, I only have seven zeptoseconds. I have imagined for your sake that each zeptosecond is like a day, and since I have seven of them, I call it a week. Fair enough? Back to quarks. I can see that you folks still view them as small and mysterious. That’s cool. But to take one from Einstein, these things are all relative.
Seriously, quarks are large and complicated, on a relative scale. Relative scaling is important to understand. Let me try to explain. Pretend the sun is the size of a basketball. That would make the earth less than a tenth of an inch in diameter, around half the diameter of a bb. The earth is tiny compared the sun. And that half bb would be orbiting at a distance of about ninety feet away. Jupiter would be about an inch in diameter or half the size of a ping pong ball and orbiting around four hundred and fifty feet away. That’s not very much matter. It’s quite spread out. And this is about as dense as it gets in cosmology, right? Black holes notwithstanding. But what if you were able to shrink down and observe things at the subatomic level. This time imagine a hydrogen atom. It has one proton, which by the way is made up of three quarks. At least that much you know. This proton now appears to you, to also be the size of a basketball. Now consider the hydrogen atom’s electron. If the proton is the diameter of a basketball, how far away is that electron typically orbiting? Seven miles! So, you see, on a relative basis, atoms are very spacious. Quarks also have plenty of space.
Why do we need so much space for just three quarks when you could easily fit a billion quarks within the volume of a proton? And why does the electron sit so far away from the proton? Well to explain that, I need to introduce some new information. First, quarks, like mine, require a huge amount of energy. At your level of progress, the popular notion is that there is simply some kind of inherent energy in matter, which gives rise to mass, blah, blah, blah. The actual situation is a little different. The energy is not inherent, but the energy requirement and the energy consumption is inherent. I hope that doesn’t mess up your math. I don’t think it does actually. You see, each quark has about a billion of us little souls, give or take, and while you may view us as small, we do have really big brains. In fact, we are basically brains, and we suck up huge amounts of energy. Luckily, there is so much energy readily available.
Now, you have the benefit of our energy inside of you and we handle that part nicely, but as an emergent, you need even more energy, to operate your lovely emergent machinery. You rely on the sun for that extra oomph! But you know how the sun is far away and you also need a magnetic field and an atmosphere to protect you from getting too much energy? The Goldilocks thing. Not too hot, not too cold, but just right. We have a similar situation. We need a lot of energy but it has to be just right. Now, you have a massive energy source and it is central to your solar system. In our case, the proton is the massive, central body and the energy source surrounds us. But while the setup is different, the concept is the same. We too need that Goldilocks amount of energy. Not too little, not too much.
Now you are wondering, what is that energy source? They are particles. I can explain it in a way that will make sense to you. Imagine you are surrounded by water and in a boat. Better yet, a submarine. You need some of that water to survive, but you need to keep most of it out or else you will drown. This is strikingly similar to our situation. But instead of water molecules we are surrounded by electromagnetic particles. They are very small, about 10^-40 meters and their spacing is around 10^-35 meters. They are fluidic so they can move about and basically they always try redistribute themselves in an even manner, because they repel each other. This is just like liquid water or even air. These electromagnetic particles, let’s call them EMs, are actually very familiar to you. You see them or detect them as light. You may ask, are these photons? The answer is yes and no. You currently define photons as particles, but you also assign them specific wavelengths. A wavelength is a distance between moving particles, so by definition, you need at least two moving particles to define wavelength. In reality, your best technology can only isolate large groups of these particles in motion, so your photons obviously have a wavelength. But it is not a single particle. You are fooled into believing you can detect a single particle, but you can’t. Your ability to detect is far too coarse to see just one EM. By the way, I had to name the particle, because you don’t have a name for it, and we don’t communicate by language the way you do. Among us, there is a common understanding about everything, so we don’t speak or write stuff down, which is very primitive. Sorry if that sounds insulting.
Back to EMs. It should be obvious, but somehow your physics has fallen into a deep rut on this notion of quanta. The field of statistics involves probability and uncertainties as they relate to making conclusions about populations. We are bored stiff down here in quarkville waiting and now I am begging you to acknowledge that when you observe things that adhere to mathematical wave functions and their probability distributions, that you are observing an aggregated behavior of a population of some sort. Don’t believe that because you can’t observe the individuals within the population, that they doesn’t exist. They are there, just much too small for you to see. A photodetector is essentially a pressure sensor. The pressure measurement of a gas is a measurement of electromagnetic force. So is the measurement of light by any sensor materials that facilitate electron movement based on being bombarded by electromagnetic particles. Think of it as statistical mechanics at the next level down.
Now some people are leaving the room no doubt. That’s fine. They will miss the good part where I don’t sound so arrogant and I admit some things. First, we are not perfect. We know all about you and we know all about cosmology and the universe. But like you, we don’t completely understand ourselves. Moving on, we also don’t understand the EM particles completely. Like you, we look both up and down in scale to push our horizons of understanding. Looking up, as I mentioned before, we run these emergent experiments, of which you are now a part, to see if we can somehow break the cycle of evolution and have it return in a new state that is more advanced than ourselves. Looking down, we are trying to understand the next layer below the EMs. We have evidence for it, but it is still fuzzy. Like I said, quarks are big. There is a lot more going on down there, below our ability to detect and measure. But we do have some likely theories, which I hope to share later.
My appeal to you, is to take the information that I will impart, seven zeptoseconds at a time, and try to evolve into a better version of me. One who can discover the next levels down. Who knows? Maybe a level or two down will actually be the fundamental level. The one with the real “God Particles.” This is our most precious hope. The discovery of the truth. I want to make you more than just a cog in the wheel of discovery. That is my experiment. It is like no other ever conceived or attempted. That has to mean something. I want you to become an active participant, slow motion notwithstanding. And because I want this, I am considered insane.
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