Quantum beer

The concept of quantum foam has bubbled up in scientific circles for over half a century, ever since physicist John Wheeler figured that quantum mechanics, at the really really small scale, would yield a Universe where nothing was ever static, and instead bits of matter (or, at least, the fundamental particles constructing them) popped in and out of existence all the time. And this foamy sort of science has long inspired all sorts of ideas as to what sorts of things might arise in a Universe so made.

But the thing which seems to be overlooked in this examination is the question of what all that foam is topping off. Now there are many kinds of foam out there in the world -- foam from shampoo, the foam in foam rubber, sea foam, and what used to be called shaving foam (but for some inexplicable reason is now more popularly called shaving cream). But come now, everybody knows the best, most satisfying kind of foam there is, is the foam that rises atop a perfectly poured down the side at an angle glass of beer. The kind of foam which tickles your nose as you drink that first draught, the kind of foam which is crisp and sweet and slow to settle.

Beer is one of man's first inventions. The ancient Egyptian pyramid-builders were paid in beer. Beer is liquid gold, and liquid bread (and bread baked with beer has a most wondrous foaminess to it, too). Beer even figures into physics -- physicist Donald A. Glaser, for his Nobel Prize-winning invention of the bubble chamber, used beer to fill early proptotypes of the chamber (though he denied that beer inspired the invention).

An old quote floating about which has been attributed to Werner Heisenberg (apparently wrongfully), tells us that "The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you." Now this has been interpreted to mean a lot of things ranging from "the more fully understood our Universe is, the more intricately designed it appears" to "you start seeing fantastic things once you get drunk enough." But if the glass is of the quantum beer from which the quantum foam fizzes forth, then surely it must mean, once you get down to the bottom of things, you find that there's something beneath the bottom, and that it's that we're all connected, all manifestations arising from a single oneness. Perhaps even like the oneness described in the evolutionary theological theory of Pandeism (pantheistic Deism). And an amber-hued, rich, tasty, all-loving oneness, at that!!

Quantum beer probably looks something like this....