Science, faith

How could it be that the exquisite and indescribable experience of consciousness, of thought and emotion, of the overpowering sense of an “I,” is simply the result of so many electrical and chemical flows between neurons, which are themselves nothing but atoms and molecules?

At the Planck scale, space is grainy. Space simply does not exist within a Planck cell. What we experience as space is the correlation between different corners of these cells. Planck cells would be the atoms of space. Rather than atoms as the smallest unit of matter existing in space, we are now talking about the smallest units of space itself.

99.9999999999999 percent of the volume of an atom is empty space, except for the haze of nearly weightless electrons. Since we and everything else are made of atoms, we are mostly empty space. That vast emptiness is perhaps the most unsettling consequence of dividing the indivisible.

If a wheelbarrow began to float, a scientist would look for magnetic levitators or, if necessary, assign the phenomenon to some new kind of force—a natural and lawful force, not a supernatural force.

The sensation of smooth time and space that we experience in our large world of houses and trees results only from averaging out this extreme lumpiness and chaos at the Planck length, in the same way that the graininess of a beach disappears when looked at from a thousand feet up.

The myriad stars in the sky, once thought to be the final resting place of dead pharaohs, once thought to be the embodiment of constancy and immortality and other dispositions of the Absolutes, will eventually be cold floating embers in space.

The idea of a lawful universe is itself an Absolute.

why should I insist on meaning? Fish and squirrels get by quite well without it.

With fundamental elements, we can conceive of the world as being constructed, whether the Constructor be an active God or the more passive Laws of Nature. A constructed world implies order and design. And the faint suggestion of an intelligence behind that order.