Unreal

How real is our everyday life? Most people probably have some experience with artificial colors or flavors in food or maybe even hair coloring or colored contact lenses. There are also reports of fake news that didn’t happen and so-called “deep fake” images that look like actual – but nonexistent – photos. Recent advances in generative AI tend to accelerate such fake media trends. But living with what is not real is nothing new.

Various objects we see around us, look solid and act solid, so to us they are solid. However, scientists tell us that matter is really mostly empty space. We owe this discovery to a team led by Ernest Rutherford, and their new model of the atom with a very small positively-charged nucleus surrounded by a cloud of swirling negatively-charged electrons.[1] How can this “empty” space inside atoms look solid? Light is electromagnetic, and electrons are electrically charged, so they could potentially interact. How light particles (photons) interact with electrons in an atom depends on the type of atom or really the available energy states of the atom.[2] If it works out that the photon has the right energy to help an electron move to a state of higher energy, then the photon can be absorbed. Under the right conditions, the energy can be given up again immediately as “reflected” light, as if the light did not change at all, except for its direction. In some cases, there is no match between the photon energy and the available electron energy states, and the electron passes through the material seemingly unchanged. What about molecules? Electrons are shared between atoms in a molecule, and again there’s the question of whether there is a good energy match between the photons and the available energy states of the electrons.

How can that empty space in atoms and molecules also act like it’s solid? If you’ve ever played with magnets, you probably experienced magnets pushing each other apart, even when there was nothing but air in between. That’s another example of the electromagnetic force. The magnetic poles pushing each other apart were either both north poles or both south poles. Similarly, electrons are all negatively charged and repel each other because they have the same charge (as opposed to negative and positive). This is what makes it hard to push atoms together. Granted, molecules keep their atoms together (but not too close) by sharing electrons. In that case, presumably when one atom temporarily hogs a missing electron, it has a relative negative charge, and an atom that is temporarily loaning an electron has a relative positive charge. So the relatively negative and relatively positive atoms attract each other.

Not only is matter not what we think, but people are not quite how we think they are either. The human brain is very complex, which makes each person’s knowledge and behavior very complex. So in simple terms, it’s hard to know and understand everything there is to know about a given person (even oneself). On a more theoretical level, the brain is a chaotic collection of natural processes. Slight changes in conditions, such as the effects of the sudden appearance of a buzzing mosquito, can lead to outcomes that are very different from what the person would otherwise experience. Maybe the person becomes defensive because the hypothetical mosquito reminds them of being picked on while camping at a place that had mosquitoes. Our now-defensive person might make different choices, each with their own consequences. This chaos helps make it impossible to model the person’s behavior with complete accuracy, besides the fact that not all relevant information about the person is readily available anyhow. While we can make generalizations and guesses, we can’t predict what a person will think, say, or do in a given situation with absolutely accuracy. Instead we use what relatively vague information we have about them. Effectively, the person we think they are – if taken as a total description of the person – does not really exist as such.

Turns out, the stars we see at night are not quite how we see them either. The nearest star outside the Solar System is about 4.25 light years away.[3] That means the star is far enough away, that light from it takes 4.25 years to reach us. As a result, we can only see the nearest star as it was 4.25 years earlier. All the other stars are even further away, and the light from them is accordingly older. Yes, we are essentially looking at the past. How many of those visible stars no longer exist? Fortunately, it is suggested that most stars we can see at night probably still exist.[4]

To sum it up, we see solid things that aren’t there, live in the past with the night sky, and talk to simple people who don’t really exist. Those actions sound like symptoms of mental illness. In this case, we can blame it on the universe, which might lead us to say we live in a “crazy” universe. What would really be crazy is if we stopped learning about the universe. Admittedly, it has its issues, but – like people – the universe is worth knowing.

References

[1] https://www.ans.org/news/article-724/lord-rutherford-and-the-atomic-pudding/

[2] https://science.howstuffworks.com/question404.htm

[2] https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/nearest_star_info.html

[3] https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/are-many-visible-stars-dead