100,000 times bigger

I've just spent part of my afternoon reading about quantum physics. 

That's right. Quantum physics. I learned the following things:

• An atom is 100,000 times larger than it's nucleus!
• The "uncertainty principle" means that the values of a pair of variables cannot BOTH be exactly known - knowing one means that you don't know the other.
• Light has the properties of both a wave and a particle.
• The matter we observe in our daily world is made up largely of "nothingness" at the quantum atomic level.
• The behaviour of a photon of light is totally random.
• The action of the universe is not on a "continuum" but in discrete particles/objects/events.
• Some scientists believe that a particle's position before it is observed is unknowable (famously Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) while others (including Albert Einstein) believed that the real world must have physical properties, whether or not one measures them, saying, in 1926, that he was convinced that God "doesn't throw dice."
• We can predict how a particle could be in one state or another but are unable to show how it might end up that way. This leads to the "many universes" theory where the two possibilities can occur simultaneously. That is, individually I can see only one universe and not the "other universe" that awaits if I were to choose another direction. Just because I don't choose it doesn't mean that it can't exist. And so on for every individual, all 8 billion, or so, of us!

I have pondered (my students might say something like: "I had a bit-ov-a think about") these things and have come to the conclusion that I have no conclusion. The world, the cosmos, the universe (s), are only knowable in the moment. Because in the next moment I will be in another moment which is in another universe that I have chosen - and different from the last

I ask myself, what 'reality' would I be experiencing right now as I write, had I chosen to get out of bed five minutes later this morning? I have no idea because I can't experience it. We don't think about what might be happening in the quantum world because our every-day concerns distract us (probably for the better) but we nevertheless exist in that state.

Sometimes I am awestruck by what we don't know about what we don't know.

So, there is no use worrying about our decisions. All we have to do is make the one that's in front of us because everything else is illusion anyway.

By the way, by "illusion" I don't mean something like a mirage, or a magic trick. I mean more like a belief that has no substance.

Anyway, I should probably get back to my crime novel. That's a story I can actually follow!