Theme Study: The Nature of Reality

What is Reality???

The state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them

– Oxford English Dictionary

According to this definition reality is the state of things as they actually exist,  rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. So therefore we can clearly say unopposed that Father Christmas doesn’t exist and those presents under the tree are delivered by only who we imagine to be as a white-bearded man wearing a red coat that rides around the world on a flying sleigh. But however we would be opposed, by the many children across the globe who believe that this mystical character is not imaginary but thought of as real, even though he has never been seen. So how can it appear to them that this character is real?

Jostein Gaarder[1] explains this phenomenon of the experience and belief of a child quite well in another example. First of all Gaarder sets the scene, a family of  three eating breakfast, two parents and one 18 month old baby. The mother turns her back to the two to get something off the stove, then the father spontaneously starts to float over the kitchen table. The baby looks at his airborne father without any reaction, quietly watching the floating man whereas the mother turns round and drops whatever she was carrying in shock as she sees her floating husband. Gaarder resorts to the baby’s lack of experience in our world as the focal point of this example. The mother has grown so used to the nature of reality that she is scared and shocked of what has happened to her husband, due to the fact that he defied nature’s law of gravity. The baby however does not know this and gives off no expression.

Therefore the nature of reality ultimately is based on our experience and our beliefs, right?

This theme study explores four books and two movies that appear to be relative to the concept of the nature of our reality. Whether they do or don’t however is always your opinion as the concepts can become very sceptical as they do not have concrete evidence to support them and most likely never will, e.g. solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that our mind is the only thing that ever exists and that anything that is outside the mind may or may not exist due to the fact that all knowledge recorded by the senses considered unreliable. This concept is furthermore linked to Platonism and other ideological ideas of the sort.

In chronological order of explanation

Books
-Sophie’s World: by Jostein Gaarder
-The Grand Design: by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow
-Quantum Physics http://library.thinkquest.org/3487/qp.html
-His Dark Materials Trilogy:By Philip Pullman

Movies
-Inception: Movie
-The Matrix: Movie

The first book that I am going to talk about has the name of Sophie’s world and is written by Jostien Gaarder. The book is completely relative to my theme study as it condenses 3,000 years of western philosophy onto four hundred pages. Philosophy means the love and pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means, furthermore the goal of all philosophers is to unravel a bit about the nature of reality. This goal is also shared by scientists and that is why many philosophers are also scientists. A good thing to note is that before there was Newtonian physics and complex mathematical equations, philosophers were the only scientists and were studying the nature of reality but only with their minds.

The book itself has a dual story as two fifths of the book could be considered non-fiction as it explains the evolution of philosophical ideas from the pre-Socrates to Sartre. The remaining three fifths of the book is centred around the fictional story of a 15 year old girl with the name of Sophie Amusndsen who mysteriously starts to receive a constant supply of letters from an enigmatic philosopher called Albert Knox.
Albert primarily explains the significance and philosophy of the three great Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle who have been claimed to have provided the entire foundations to western thought. However the most relative to this theme study is Plato as he believed that everything in the material world is susceptible to the erosion of time and that everything in the natural world ‘flowed’. Furthermore meaning that everything in the natural world is in a constant state of change.
However Plato is most famous for his belief of eternal forms and ideas. This belief was told in the form of a story called the Myth of the Cave.
The story tells of some people living in an underground cave. They are sitting with their bodies bound in such a way that they can only look at the back of the cave. Behind them is a wall and behind the wall is Plato’s true world of ideas. However there are some human-like creatures that inhabit this true world, they are holding some figures above the wall. Due to the fact that there is a fire behind these figures a shadow is cast on the cave wall.  The  cave dwellers have been living bound in this way all their lives so they think these shadows are all there is in existence.

However one of the cave dwellers escapes his bonds and climbs the wall to find out that what he has seen is only a shadow from a figurine. He then walks out of the cave and sees the true world of ideas where there are true animals, true plants and what seems to be like true humans.
In his newly found freedom he decides to free the other cave dwellers. He tries to convince them that the shadows are not real but only dark reflections of the real image however they do not believe him. Undeterred by their initial lack of faith he still insists on trying to convince them however they just point towards the wall and say this is all there is. They finally kill him due to the fact that they thought he was crazy.

‘Plato’s point was that the relationship between the darkness of the cave and the world beyond corresponds to the relationship between the forms of the natural world and the world of ideas.’

-Sophie’s world

This model of a dual reality however was disproved by Darwin due to the fact that animals and plants have been evolving over a long period of time so there is no such thing as a true form. This was also something that Aristotle disagreed with as we only call a horse for example, a horse due to it’s characteristics that it has. It is therefore merely a complex idea that formulates in our minds that we call horse.
This is relative to the nature of reality as Plato saw the world as a mathematician, there is the unreliable knowledge that eternally changes such as that of the course of a river flowing and true knowledge such as the fact that one plus three equals four. The fact that 1+3=4 is eternal and will never change is Plato’s idea of true knowledge and then the question arises that according to the nature of reality are only ideas and concepts immutable? e.g. The idea that Cairo was the Capital of Egypt in the year 2013 is immutable because it is true and always will be true.

However there is something that nearly all philosophers agree with and that is the innate power of reason as reason is what separates us from animals and what drives us forward as a species. Reason gives us the power to work things out logically. However we are the only species on this earth that is given this power, so it appears to us that there must be a reason to as of why we are different.
In Sophie’s world there is a chapter about St. Thomas Aquinas (28 January 1225 – 7 March 1274) and how he tried to explain why we are given reason in religious terms. His philosophy states that there are two ways that God reveals himself to humanity. One way is through theology of faith, as written in the bible. The other way is through natural theology such as reason. The theology of faith relies on the belief of the existence of God as what happens in the bible defies our reasoning with miracles but sends the message that God is omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent.
The natural theology of faith is supported by the fact that reason guides us to God as it is via reason that we know that it is wrong to kill. It is also said in the bible that it is wrong to kill. So ultimately Aquinas uses reason as a cornerstone of his philosophy to give the connection from man to God as God gave us reason to for us to have an affinity with morality and his own teachings.
Whether God exists however is still a mystery. The existence of God is crucial to the nature of reality because theoretically the belief of God causes the concept of fate to arise because of the fact that God is omniscient, he knows past future and present. The existence of God creates the idea that everything is predestined and that we do not have control over our own lives. People do not like the idea of fate as it gives the impression that we are not free to make our own choices. Arguing over the concept of fate has been disputed over millennia but one thing is for sure, as long as God is around so will the idea of fate.

There are many more notes of philosophers inside the book Sophie’s world however if I was to note all of them and their philosophy I would have an essay over 10,000 words long. This is why I am going to introduce the second book that I have read for the theme study. This book is “The Grand Design” by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow.

– The Grand Design

Stephen hawking currently holds the position of chairman of mathematics, a position that Issac Newton also held, inside Cambridge university. What he talks about inside his book are some of the discoveries in physics of the past century, that have consequently lead to new theories of the composition of our reality, therefore rendering completely relevant to this theme study.

The first theory that I am going to talk about is Quantum theory or as known to some as Quantum Mechanics – QM for short. Quantum Mechanics is the understanding of the physics behind the movement of matter and energy at the atomic/ subatomic scale. The way that this differs from our usual physics (classical physics) is that there are phenomenon such as dual natures of movement such as the dual nature of light. As you may have heard of before light moves as particles and as waves. Quantum theory describes this phenomenon in mathematical language and that is furthermore translated into a model that we can visualize.

Another article that I have read for my theme study links to this theory especially, it’s at http://library.thinkquest.org/3487/qp.html and gives a vary of examples in attempt to give a student at least the faintest idea of QM. This article explains the basics in 5 clear points.

1. Energy is not continuous, but comes in small but discrete units. 
   
2. The elementary particles behave both like particles and like waves. 
   
3. The movement of these particles is inherently random. 
   
4. It is physically impossible to know both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time. The more precisely one is known, the less precise the measurement of the other is.
   
5. The atomic world is nothing like the world we live in.

Both of the texts introduce QM with the double slit experiment. This experiment involves 2 walls a light source and a detector. The first wall has a single slit the second wall has 2 slits and after the second wall there is a detector. If we did this experiment with footballs, the footballs presuming that the shot passes through the slits can only land in two points as the velocity of the football doesn’t change become disturbed. Now do this now with an electron; electrons are small negatively charged “particles” that orbit the nucleus of an atom. On an atomic scale the electrons pass through the first slit and also pass through the second slit however they do not land in two different places but many – see below.

The diagram unlike my explanation shows the particles travelling in waves yet how can electrons be both particles and waves????!!! This dual nature is the immense difference between classical physics and QM as describing the nature of a particle depends on the context of the experiment. However now that we know that particles can be waves another phenomenon appears that no-one has been able to explain with proper evidence. When you lower the frequency of electrons to say one electron, presuming it goes through the slit, it appears to have hit the detector at two points. This occurrence is strange as it seems as if the electron passes through both slits which is impossible right? At the moment it seems as if the electron has split into 2 however scientists prefer to look into this phenomenon in the light that the electron actually takes every possible path through the double slit instead of splitting into 2. Yet there is more to this story, sometimes the electron does not even hit the detector, once it passes through the second wall, so we ask where has the electron gone. It’s as if the electron has teleported through the detector and kept on going. At the moment when scientists are studying QM there is the certain aspect that makes scientists believe that anything can happen. Particles choosing every path, teleporting and turning into waves.

This experiment was the gateway onto the physics we have today as it introduced theories such as the mulitverse, string theory and super symmetry.  These are explained more deeply inside the Grand design however I am going to give a short summary of some of them.

The multiverse is a theory that our universe is only one of many almost identical universes. This theory seems fairly sci-fi however differs from parallel universes as there can be no interaction between the different universes. The way it came about is through the double slit experiment and QM. The fact that a subatomic particle can take every route possible gave the idea of calculating the probability for the path of the particle and assigning it to a  universe where only that path has taken place however this produces an infinite amount of possible of universes, hence the new word created to describe this theory is multiverse. Multi means many and verse could be said as a piece of text in a song. So ultimately meaning many songs, whereas universe means one song.  An example used to describe is the famous story of Schroedinger’s cat. “Imagine a box in which there is a radioactive source, a Geiger counter (or anything that records the presence of radioactive particles), a bottle of cyanide, and a cat. The detector is turned on for just long enough that there is a fifty-fifty chance that the radioactive material will decay. If the material does decay, the Geiger counter detects the particle and crushes the bottle of cyanide, killing the cat. If the material does not decay, the cat lives. To us outside the box, the time of detection is when the box is open.” – http://library.thinkquest.org/3487/qp.html#

So therefore at this moment in time the cat is considered both alive and dead. However if this were a multiverse there would be one universe where the cat lives and another where it dies as there is a 50-50% chance that the cat is either alive or dead.

String theory or M-theory is the thought that at the Planck length, 1.61619926 × 10^-35 metres (a very small number) particles, quarks, photons cease to exist and at this length all there is, are strings. Strings are one dimensional structures that can oscillate in different ways to form matter that we see today. These strings are the building blocks for everything and are merely forms of vibrations and the vibrations are what differentiate them from each other. The way that this is linked to quantum theory is that, if it were possible to observe a string with , basically the most intense microscope that could ever be made, we could theoretically look at the building blocks of our universe and furthermore learn science from the bottom upwards instead of from the top down. Whether that will ever be possible is debatable but if it were possible scientists believe that it could lead to the possible knowledge of everything in the field of science.