Einstein Knew Our Perception Distorts Reality and Vice Versa.
"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility."
We use storylines to describe particles since that is how we perceive reality. You need a past position, present position, and future position to understand space, time, and motion. Each concept is essential to the other's definition. Einstein's physics is perfect for measuring how we perceive the universe, but it is not the actual state of the universe.
For example, the following is a Statement from CERN on the nature of the Higgs field and the Higgs boson. The description is from a storyline perspective:
"...when the universe was born, it was filled with the Higgs field in an unstable – but symmetrical – state. A fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the field found a stable configuration, but one that breaks the initial symmetry."
CERN's statement implies past, present, and future (a storyline) is the nature of reality, but it is how we perceive reality, not its actual state. The next level of explanation should focus on the limits of our perception. For example:
"Looking at the building blocks of reality reveals the Higgs boson particle likely exists at the extreme elementary end of our perception. We can't directly see or measure the particle, but we can measure it by looking for the next level of order that it supports (the results of its decay). All the particles are still there, supporting each other in an infinite state that combines past, present, and future. Sadly, our perception limits our view of this perfect state, but we can use our imaginations to construct a model of pure existence based on our findings."
This takes into account many things we know about particle physics, the nature of reality, and our own perception. Describing things from a storyline perspective implies motion is real. But according to Einstein, "People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Time, in other words, is an illusion. If time and space (distance) are illusions, then so is motion since none of them can be defined without a past, present, or future position. That's where our grasp on reality is challenged, and a new explanation is warranted.
Call it like it is. Reality is a complete picture or a sum of all things. Past, present, and future exist together all at once (there is evidence of this), but our perception is limited, so we cannot experience it all at once. Imagine all realities (past, present, future) overlapping across infinite dimensions, a limitless and complete structure of pure reality (a perfect nexus), and we exist inside of it. In this state, the universe doesn't have a beginning or end. Does that mean the Big Bang didn't happen? Not at all. If the Big Bang was real, it would be part of a storyline, a snapshot of a point that exists inside the infinite picture. The rest of reality still exists around it. We perceive one storyline at a time despite the infinite storylines around us, and reality appears to be moving when it is not.
Nothing is moving, not even our bodies. I know you want to reject that statement immediately. It just seems wrong, and that's because we're not capable of perceiving the infinite nature of reality around us. We would have to be gods to comprehend that much reality. Instead, we experience a tiny piece of reality one snapshot at a time by changing our focus. How we perceive reality is comparable to stop-motion animation. The faster you experience the different pictures (particle arrangements), the faster and smoother they appear to be moving, but they are not moving. Our perception is jumping, or blinking, to the next position in the limited storyline. Whatever our consciousness is (a spark of life?), it's stuck inside our brains and reading our storyline, provoking every sensation that comes with it. The sum of all realities surrounds us, but we only see our path. Our bodies are part of the picture, and our brains function like an antenna or a conduit of atomic energy with its own energy field, attuned to perceiving a certain reality (perhaps a probability amplitude similar to Feynman's Path Integral).
Physics declared the infinite nature of reality with the law of conservation of mass. "In physics and chemistry, the law of conservation of mass states that for any system closed to all transfers of matter and energy, the mass of the system must remain constant over time, as the system's mass cannot change, so the quantity can neither be added nor be removed." Thus the universe cannot be created or destroyed. That means it's perfect. It lacks nothing. When something is in a perfect and completed state, it is infinite and doesn't move. Just like a finished painting, reality is a completed picture, a masterpiece of all things, and it doesn't move.
The double slit experiment demonstrates the infinite nature of atoms, their duality, and our limited perception. This is how it works:
"Physicists fire particles at a barrier with two slits in it and observe where the particles land on a wall behind the barrier. If particles were bullets, they’d form a cluster behind each slit. Instead, particles land along the back wall in repeating stripes. The experiment suggests that what moves through the slits is actually a wave representing the particle’s possible locations. The two emerging wavefronts interfere with each other, producing a series of peaks where the particle might end up being detected. The interference pattern is a supremely strange result because it implies that both of the particle’s possible paths through the barrier have a physical reality. The path integral assumes this is how particles behave even when there are no barriers or slits around."
Meaning the particles are infinitely arranged everywhere around us whether we perceive them or not. Particles are holding together infinite realities just out of our perception. More evidence that we perceive one storyline at a time is demonstrated by the Observation Effect in Quantum Mechanics.
"REHOVOT, Israel, February 26, 1998--One of the most bizarre premises of quantum theory, which has long fascinated philosophers and physicists alike, states that by the very act of watching, the observer changes reality... When behaving as waves, particles can simultaneously pass through several openings in a barrier and then meet again at the other side of the barrier. This 'meeting' is known as interference. Strange as it may sound, interference can only occur when no one is watching. Once an observer begins to watch the particles going through the openings, the picture changes dramatically: if a particle can be seen going through one opening, then it's clear it didn't go through another. In other words, when under observation, electrons are being 'forced' to behave like particles and not like waves. Thus the mere act of observation affects the experimental findings."
For me, this demonstrates that our consciousness is affecting reality by focusing on one storyline despite the infinite storylines around us. The particles really are in infinite places all at once (past, present, and future), and they're maintaining the perfect framework of reality whether we see it or not.
Our field of perception can't interpret areas of higher order that appear in our storylines, so high-gravity objects appear to bend light. The high gravity is resisting and distorting our perception, not the light itself. It's similar to the lens effect. The light is obscured by the denser matter of the glass it is passing through. This is another way to look at the effect of time dilation. Areas of higher order (higher gravity) create resistance and slow down our consciousness's ability to perceive it. In some cases, we can't perceive it at all. If matter accelerated to light speed (took on higher order and gravity) or beyond, it would vanish since we could no longer perceive it. Take black holes for instance. Within the event horizon is the Schwarzschild Radius (the area where something would have to "travel" faster than the speed of light to escape the super gravity of the singularity). Nothing is detectable by our perception in that area because it is beyond our brain's ability to interpret it. That's why light appears to curve around the event horizon. Our perception is actually being distorted by the super gravity, causing a lens effect. If we had a pair of special glasses that allowed us to stop the lens effect, and we looked at the black hole, it would look like normal space, but the super order of the singularity would still be there, just out of our perception. "Scientists can't directly observe black holes with telescopes that detect x-rays, light, or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. We can, however, infer the presence of black holes and study them by detecting their effect on other matter nearby."
I see the connection between quantum physics and general relativity through the limitations of our perception and how order leads to more order in an infinite universe. Thus understanding the limits of our perception is critical, and Einstein helped us do that. Consciousness is a finite thing that is interacting with an infinite reality. The orderly levels of atomic structure appear to be moving because we perceive reality in a storyline instead of all at once. Elementary order supports complex order in a perfect structure, and the areas of higher order literally warp and vanish from our perception. This makes me ask: Why does our perception fail when faced with the extreme order of a black hole? Why does higher order (gravity) distort our perception? Why do we only see a certain amplitude of reality? My answer, our consciousness behaves like a particle and follows a path of least resistance, and that path is our storyline. Areas of higher order help keep us in our swim lane of reality. If we could perceive higher order, then we would have no boundaries, and we would lose our grip on reality. What happens to water without a canal or channel to follow? It scatters across the ground and evaporates, becoming something else. Without boundaries, the water disappears. Human consciousness would suffer the same fate without limitations. Resistance makes reality possible at all levels.
If you're curious about a new perspective on how our consciousness interacts with reality, check out my New Theory of Consciousness.