When I used to study physics, I learned about a breathtakingly awesome new way to look at things. It was developed by a bunch of physics geeks who were studying the movement of particles in very dense particle environments. Which sounds strange in and of itself until you realize that normal matter is largely empty space. The distance between atoms and molecules that make up your arm, your cell phone, the chair you’re sitting in now as you read this is mostly space. Even the eyes you are using and the brain that is processing these letters into words into sentences into ideas, is mostly made up of space.
But in the realm of solid state physics, matter starts to behave a little differently. Because the atoms are packed in so tightly, there is a lot less space. And when scientists try to describe the matter, using the language of physics and mathematics, it gets incredibly complicated, incredibly quickly.
Add on top of that subatomic particles have characteristics that are completely out of the ordinary experience of what you see everyday. Size, shape, color, density taste, and all other descriptions we use to describe what we can see don’t apply on the sub atomic level. So they need to come with descriptive names like spin, charge, charm, strangeness and other goofy names, not goofy because the scientists are goofy, but because the nature of matter itself is goofy. And when you think about it, the only reason things we can see seem normal, is because we are so used to seeing them all the time.
Of course everything behaves just like it is supposed to, according to the laws of physics, but that which we are not familiar with seems strange and magical.
So these scientists are trying to study this system of particles, all packed closely together. When they try to describe the movement of one particle, they have to take into account all of it’s neighbors. And of course for each neighbor, you need to take into account all of its neighbors. You can see how this can fry the world’s fastest computer in a jiffy.
Until one scientist had a fantastic idea (which is what scientists do.) He suggested that instead of looking at each particle, with all of its strange qualities, and use that to describe the system, he had a better solution. Why not look at the holes instead? Why not assume that instead of a kajillion particles bouncing around off each other, why not just look at the movements of the few thousand holes that are in there? And assume the holes have zero mass, zero spin, zero charge and zero whatever other characteristics that are used to label the particles.
What? His fellow scientists asked him. Are you crazy? Study the movement of holes? But holes don’t move! Holes are only there because of the other particles!
Try it, he persisted. So they tried it. And it worked. Beautifully. By describing the holes, which made the math incredibly more simple, they were able to describe the particle system to a T.
Think about that for a minute. Let it sink in. These guys, these highly trained physicists, decided to describe something in terms of something that they knew wasn’t true, and yet it still worked to describe the system so they could predict how it would behave under various situations.
What they did was create a new model of what they were looking at. A model is something that you come up with when you aren’t sure of the rules. You can use different models, and see what works best.
People do this every day. In fact developing models is so ingrained in our neurology, that we do it all the time and don’t even know it. In the movie “The Jerk” with Steve Martin, there was a scene where some crazy sniper had decided to kill somebody at random. Of course, he chose The Jerk. When he missed, and starting hitting a stack of oil cans, The Jerk looked at the situation and decided “He hates these cans!” While that was pretty funny, and obviously wrong, it illustrates what happens. Something happens that we don’t understand, so we immediately make up a reason to explain what is happening around us.
Normally what people do is see something, and then quickly and automatically come up with a model to explain how what they are seeing fits into their already pretty well defined version of reality. Unfortunately, a lot of times the model is not created to come up with a beneficial way of looking at the world, or even an accurate way of looking at the world, but to protect our ego and our feelings.
And we almost never stop, take a step back, and see if our model is really accurate or supportive of how we would like to experience life. Many people can see the same thing, and come up with vastly different meanings for what they see and experience.
Think of what the physicists did in the experiment above. They purposely created a model to make life easier. They purposely created a model that made it easier to understand what is going on. It didn’t matter to them at all that the model was obviously not correct according to reality. All they cared about was how their model was able to help them get what they wanted out of the experience they were looking at.
Of course we don’t live in a physics laboratory. The life that we experience on a daily basis is a million times more complicated that a test tube filled with particles. But if you can just take a step back, from time to time, and see if you can come up with different explanations for things you think are set in stone, you’ll be amazed at how incredibly more rich and abundant your reality becomes.
Because I find the concept of models and trying on different models so fascinating, I’ll be posting several more articles on different specific models for the nature of the universe and life in general. So when you read them, you’ll at least have a couple different ideas as starting points to choose from when you decide to create your reality the way you like it.
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