Here is a thing that is simply true: right now, in the room where you’re sitting, there are particles that have no definite position until they’re observed. There are subatomic events happening that have no cause in the classical sense. There are fluctuations in empty space that spontaneously produce and annihilate pairs of particles in timescales so brief they make a nanosecond look geologic. None of this is metaphor. None of this is mysticism. This is the actual structure of reality as best as physics has been able to describe it.
I am not a scientist. I can’t derive the Schrödinger equation. I’ve never run an experiment. My relationship with physics is the relationship of someone who reads and listens and asks questions and then has to lie down for a few minutes because something has temporarily broken his intuitions about what existence is.
I love this feeling. It might be my favorite feeling.
My interest in cosmology, quantum mechanics, the nature of consciousness, the sheer improbable strangeness of the universe — it isn’t about accumulating facts. It’s about staying in contact with the mystery. We live in a culture that pushes hard toward certainty, toward confidence, toward the feeling of having things figured out. The sciences, properly understood, push in exactly the opposite direction. The more precisely you look at the universe, the weirder it gets, and the best scientists I’ve read seem to understand that the weirdness is the point.
Take the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Particles exist in superpositions of states — multiple possible outcomes all coexisting — until a measurement is made, at which point the wave function “collapses” into a single definite state. The problem is that nobody fully agrees on what’s actually happening when this occurs. Is it consciousness that collapses the wave function? Is there a branching of parallel realities with every quantum event, as the many-worlds interpretation suggests? Does the question itself reflect a misunderstanding of what waves and particles even are? Physicists have been arguing about this for nearly a century, and the arguments are livelier and less resolved than you’d expect given how casually most people assume science has this stuff worked out.
The consciousness question gets me every time. What is it? Seriously, nobody knows. We can describe its neural correlates — we can map brain activity during various cognitive states with increasing precision — but the actual existence of subjective experience, the fact that there is something it is like to be you reading this sentence, remains inexplicable at the level of physics and biology. The philosopher David Chalmers called this the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and what I appreciate about the name is the honesty. It’s not the Difficult Problem or the Complicated Problem. It’s the Hard Problem because it might be, in some fundamental sense, intractable given the tools we currently have.
Cosmology is where I go when I want to feel appropriately small. The observable universe is ninety-three billion light years in diameter. It contains something in the neighborhood of two trillion galaxies. Our galaxy, which already contains four hundred billion stars, is an unremarkable suburb. The whole thing has been expanding for thirteen point eight billion years, and it will keep expanding, and eventually — over timescales that make the age of the universe look like a Tuesday — everything will grow cold and dark and dissipate into heat death.
I find this beautiful rather than depressing, though I understand why some people don’t. Standing next to the universe’s indifference makes human suffering feel unbearable — there’s no one home, nothing listening. But standing next to the universe’s scale makes human consciousness feel extraordinary — in a hundred billion trillion stars, we’re the ones who noticed. We’re the strange loop that looked up.
There’s a line from Richard Feynman that I keep coming back to: “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” The questions that can’t be answered — what is consciousness, why is there something rather than nothing, what happened before the Big Bang, what are we really measuring when we measure a quantum state — aren’t failures of knowledge. They’re the edge of the map. That’s where the interesting territory begins.
I spend a lot of time at that edge. I read and listen and watch lectures and ask questions of people who know more than I do, and then I sit with the strangeness of being a conscious creature made of atoms in a universe that didn’t have to exist and might not be what it appears.
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to me. It doesn’t, and I love it for that.