Welcome to the first episode of "The Concept of God", if you haven't read the introduction yet, I really suggest you to read it first, since it gives a good insight about what I am gonna discuss in this series. Link below :
Okay, so I assume you have read the introduction, but for safety measures, I give some disclaimers : Do not take this writing as an academic source or my take to oppose and offend a certain religion group. This text is purely a philosophical view of a modern concept of a higher power, enjoy as it was a science fiction.
The Concept of God : Introduction
Okay, so I assume you have read the introduction, but for safety measures, I give some disclaimers : Do not take this writing as an academic source or my take to oppose and offend a certain religion group. This text is purely a philosophical view of a modern concept of a higher power, enjoy as it was a science fiction.
A Higher Entity Who Defies Quantum Physics
Defying Quantum Physics, is the key-phrase that you have to remember throughout this episode. During the development of humanity, we always eager to know more and more about our surrounding; knowledge is the key to become more powerful, "to be closer to be a God", as some people say. According to this definition, a higher power is something that knows everything, therefore It could rule and make everything possible.
How close are we? Quite close, but still far away. How is this possible? I quote a theological point of view about knowledge, "the ultimate knowledge is incomprehensible for humanity, since only a higher power could understand everything." So how could we explain this? Let me introduce you to a simple concept of infinity. Maybe you have learned that if you write 0.99999...... without ending, it would be equal to 1. The more 9s you write, the closer you are to 1, but it would never reach 1 if you stop writing it. If you are on a straight line running towards infinity, you are always closer to your start point than to the end point.
This concept is quite bizarre and still a hot discussing topics among pure mathematicians. So how could we connect this concept of infinity to a higher power? I say it once more : according to theological point of view, God is infinity. There is no way we could reach that point, we could only develop ourselves as much that we are always closer to the beginning of humanity than to the ultimate power.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle
Now we have discussed the definition of classical God that we are going to use in this episode. What does it have to do with Quantum Physics? First of all, what is Quantum Physics? Let me tell you this way. Before the mighty Sir Isaac Newton, we could say physics is just a pure philosophical view of the universe, but he introduced the mathematics formalism into it. He laid the groundwork for other upcoming physicist until now, and for this reason we could say that he 'discovered' physics as we know today.
He is biggest known for his three laws of mechanics, and I'm going to explain it shortly and easily, especially for you, who never took a physics class or it's already a long time since then. The most important concept of these laws is the conservation of momentum. What is momentum? Imagine you are standing still and a friend throws a ball towards you, then you have to catch it. If the friend throws 2 balls, the second one is faster, which one is harder to catch? Of course the second one, and it will hurt more. Now the friend throws you again 2 balls, this time with the same speed, but the second one is heavier than the first one. Same question : which one? Of course the second one. Weight and speed of the balls (in physics we say them as mass and velocity, but for this explanation there is no need to clear the difference), are the keys to momentum. Mathematically, momentum is the product of the mass and the velocity of an object. Momentum tells us how hard is it to stop moving object. This might be a bit different than the textbook definition, but it will help you easier to understand this concept.
Now I have said before about the conservation of momentum. This explains, in a closed system, when you have no power to effect the result of an event, the total momentum every single thing inside the system is conserved. What is this useful for? Have you ever played billiard?
The conservation of momentum rules billiard. (okay there is definitely friction, but as any physicist would say : we ignore them). If we know the speed and the mass of every single ball before the collision, we could know the speed and the mass of each ball after the collision, since the total of the momentum is always conserved. Now imagine if you have three balls, four, one million? The same rules applies. Theoretically, if we have the technology to measure the speed and the mass every particle in the universe, we know what will happen next.
If we know the present, we will also know the past and the future.
Let that sink in.
How Close are We?
So, how far has our technology developed, so we could know everything in the universe? That is the most popular question since Newton's discovery, until the discovery of Quantum Physics. This changes everything.
In early 1800s, most academics said that we are almost at the pinnacle of understanding the universe. Physics will stop its development, it's just a matter of time until we have the technology. Then comes Quantum Physics. It revolutionise physics so much that even some academics say this must be wrong. Everything we knew before was just the 'simplified' version of the real one.
There are some important concepts in Quantum Physics (and I will just write it as 'QM', as it stands for Quantum Mechanics; they are the same thing). Nevertheless, today I want to focus on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Heisenberg is a german physicist, and one of the most modern physicist among Max Planck, Einstein, and Schrödinger. In short way, the principle said that it is impossible to know the position and the momentum of a particle simultaneously. If you could measure the position with a really high accuracy, you have to sacrifice the accuracy of the measurement of the momentum, and vice versa. This is not because our technological limit; nature forbids us to do so. It seems that nature wants to hide something from us; it doesn't want us to know everything.
This is Where God could Play a Role
This is where my concept comes to play. If Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is indeed true (at time I wrote this, 19.03.2020, it still holds), the ultimate knowledge of humanity is indeed forbidden. There is no way for us to know everything; we could always develop our technology so much, but once we reached that limit, there is no going further. If this is the case, then there must be a higher entity who could defy this rule, something that created this rule for us, to limit us from know everything. It knows what every single particle in the universe is doing in the past, right now, and in the future.
However, is this a good or bad thing for us?
Let's imagine that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is wrong. Such limit does not exist. There will be a time that we have developed our ability to measure what the universe is doing. Therefore, we also know our future, and this is the concept that a lot of people are against with. If indeed we know what the future is, then there is no more point of humanity. We will have reached the peak of our evolution; it is the end; we were indeed god.
Of course there are still a lot of researches to the "theory of everything", for example superstring theory, which is the hottest topic among theoretical physicist right now. It is hoped that this could explain these kinds of limit better; to understand ourselves and the universe better. Maybe I will discuss about where God could come to play according to this theory, and this one is more abstract, since we need more dimensions.
The mystery of the universe pushes us to learn, to evolve, to be a more advanced society than before. The reason why we have to continue to sustain humanity is not because we are the mightiest; it is because there are a lot of things that we have to know better. We evolve not because of our intelligence, but because of our foolishness and our motivation to be less foolish than before. It doesn't matter if we are going to reach the finish line; what matters is we have left our start line further.
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