Friends: This is not a part of the essay. Feel free to comment. Mutual honesty is the most important aspect of any relationship.


I have two theories about reality. Actually, only one of them is a theory and the other is just an observation that seems reasonable but never fails to astound me. Somewhere below I’ll have a sentence about how the two are connected. That sentence will be pretty standard.
First the theory: I believe that near the beginning of the universe, things just worked. No laws of star formation, no sub-cellular structures or protons or hydrogen bonds; all processes occurred without internal mechanisms, since no one was looking and it wasn’t necessary to have rules. But when consciousness appeared and asked “How?”, the universe had to think fast. Reality instantly was forced to make up logical mechanisms and to make it appear that they had been working the same way since time began. It was awfully clever with life. Ion gradients, repair enzymes, chaperonins; to come up with all that on the fly and have it actually fit together was quite a feat. But when observers started to get more curious, the universe ran out of ideas and decided to simply make rules even if they didn’t make sense, and then finally to created a barrier that would preclude any further question-asking. That’s why we have things like quarks, gluons, parity violations, and other enigmatic phenomenon that make sense at some level but which we can’t really explain. And the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the ultimate in knowledge limitation, is just reality’s way of throwing up its hands and saying “Enough! Stop asking!” The truth is that there is no “Theory of Everything” because if we dig far enough, things will just be “working” like they did when no one was around to care.
But in the macroscopic world of cells, people, and planets, the initial rules the universe created hold true, and dictate every aspect of our daily lives, which brings me to my observation, which I refer to as “The Infinitude of Reality”.
Basically the Infinitude refers to the fact that as closely as you look at a thing or a situation, you are in almost no way limited in the amount of detail or complexity you can find. But since we are usually only interested in some small subset of that detail, we often forget that rest even exists. When I’m walking to my favorite coffee shop, I pass by a telephone pole that’s crawling with bacteria, some of which are probably trying to metabolize nicotine blown in their direction last week. That same pole was maybe made by some guy in Wisconsin, who normally works as a painter but needed an extra job to help pay for a new horse barn, in which he would not keep horses but llamas. All of those details are just as real as those subjects I normally think about, and it simultaneously amazes and frustrates me that there’s a practically unlimited set of things about which I’ll never know. This also comes into play in the science of small things, since researchers have to imagine what influences are important on very tiny scales, most of which would seem absurdly inconsequential to the common observer.

Photo Credits:
Biggest cop-out of all time: http://www.pbs.org/hollywoodpresents/copenhagen/story/heisenberg.html
J-Lo vs. the Universe: http://washington.pacificnorthwestmovies.com/Enough/
Tina: http://www.raynox.co.jp/comparison/digital/comp_fps602.htm
Double True: http://www.e-shirt.com/MyShop.asp?CatProduct=16