Sublime

Nobel laureate Phil Anderson once captured the core idea underlying the answers to these questions with the phrase more is different: “The whole becomes not only more than but very different from the sum of its parts.”

No part knew the whole, the whole did not know all the parts, and none had any need to.

A basic notion for a dialogue would be for people to sit in a circle. Such a geometric arrangement doesn’t favor anybody; it allows for direct communication. In principle, the dialogue should work without any leader and without any agenda.

The universe is a banyan, its roots above and branches below.

A more exotic variant of what is essentially the same idea is the following. ‘A tangible photon is real; a shadow photon is merely a way in which the real photon could possibly have behaved, but did not. Thus quantum theory is about the interaction of the real with the possible.’

And as stated by another early 20th century quantum physicist, Sir James Jeans: “Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter…we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.”

The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. It exists only through its interactions. Quantum theory is the theory of how things influence each other. And this is the best description of nature that we have.54