“Quantum physics makes me so happy. It’s like looking at the universe naked,” says Sheldon on the The Big Bang Theory. It’s a great quote from a funny show, although I have absolutely no comprehension of why my wife says I sometimes remind her of Sheldon. I do not own a single one of his T-shirts. (In technical terms, the subsets of our T-shirts do not intersect.)
But Sheldon has it right. In quantum physics you get beneath and beyond normal concepts of matter, space, and time.
Quantum physics is fantastic evidence of the existence of God. However, when I talk to people about it their eyes glaze over and they start looking away. One thing seems clear, I’m not good at explaining the connection.
The trouble is the subject is incomprehensible. It makes no sense. It is contrary to our reality. I doubt if any person in the world “understands” Quantum physics. Yet it is true.
Quantum physics is the study of reality at the smallest levels, the atomic level and below. It is a fantastically successful. I’ve been told that the theoretical predictions have been proven accurate to 13 decimal places, or one part in ten trillion. The mathematical tools needed to do those calculations are perhaps the most complex tools in all of physics.
Please don’t sweat it if you don’t “understand” Quantum physics. No one does. Sure, physicists can make predictions and calculations, and apply the theory to give us some of the most amazing technology of our modern age. But as for making sense, no, it doesn’t.
It’s the wonder of Quantum physics that is amazing. In the wonder we find God.
You may have heard about a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. It is beyond weird. Scientists take two particles and “entangle” them, make them exactly alike in subatomic ways. Then they take the particles and separate them, miles apart. When one particle is changed the other is affected, and it happens instantaneously, faster than light can travel between the particles. As far as scientists have been able to measure, there is absolutely no delay.
This means particles are connected outside of space of time. Let me repeat that, because it is beyond weird. Particles are connected outside of space and time. How can that be? Well, that’s the wonder of quantum physics. Nobody knows how or why it happens. It just does.
This proven fact, and it has been verified tens of thousands of times, is shocking. It violates our understanding of reality. We are beings stuck in the fishbowl of space and time. We cannot get out; we cannot see out; we have no clue what may be outside space and time. Yet there is something beyond space and time. Space and time are not all there is. Something greater, something more wonderful, is out there.
In this wonder we find God. God is outside space and time. God created space and time, and he dwells outside it.
I think this shocking fact, that there is a reality beyond space and time, has not sunk into our collective consciousness. We think space and time are all there is. But they’re not.
At a dinner years ago at the Harvard faculty club, I asked a prominent Harvard physics professor to explain quantum entanglement. His answer was that we don’t fully understand time. I suppose that’s right, but that really is no answer. He, and we, haven’t a clue.
The scientific facts are undeniable. There is a reality beyond space and time. God is out there, or you might say in there, in your heart. You just have to seek him.
God bless,
Doug Ell