Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Strings and Things

What is it that you suppose you and I and everyone else is made of, physically? I mean, at the ultimate level, beneath the cells and DNA and molecules and atoms, beneath the subatomic particles and quarks and even subquarks? What is it that sustains the energy which presents itself as the particles which manifest as us? What it is which underlies even the sub-subquarks.... would it surprise you if I told you that our most compelling mathematical models now suggest that the thing which underlies all matter and energy appears to be.... nothing? But indeed that's what String Theory suggests, that the subtlest underlying force is Planck-length strings, not of matter, not of energy, but of empty space itself, twisted up and vibrating (btw, the Planck length is the shortest distance across which physical reactions may be conceived to occur).... those strings of nothingness are unfathomably countless, there would be hundreds of billions of them in the tiniest living cell. Now it follows that if these strings are twisted and vibrating, something's got to be keeping them coiled and humming, some pure and unbound force must be sustaining them, and that, I believe, is where God is, that force, that twist, that vibration, IS "God"....

And what does that mean for us? Well every part of us and our world and our minds and thoughts, every arc of electricity, every gleam of a photon, every moment of gravity and magnetism and the nuclear forces -- all of these things are at bottom made of these strings; and so we are all part of God (and, as Duke University physicist Robert G. Brown has proposed with his Pandeist Theorem, everything is indeed necessarily part of God if God may properly be described as omniscient)....

Now, here's something else really interesting about the strings envisioned by the mathematical models of String Theory. Every single one of their uncountable multitude is perpetually in contact with and affecting every single other one!! Which means that we, being made of these strings, have a connection with everything else in our Universe which is bigger than what we can even imagine. And it is this connection which may logically be supposed to provide for all our experiences, physical and metaphysical -- so, the exciting thing to consider is that we are all part of our Creator, and whether or not it may be that our Creator "enjoys" this relationship, can there be any closer relationship between man and our Creator then to be made of the substance of our Creator?