The Land Of Particles

Since the earliest days of our existence we have aimed to understand and tame the laws of nature. The birth of science was driven (in the early days) as a struggle — a desire by man to understand the environment that he lives in (and as a byproduct) to tame it and take control of it, to harness it and use it to gain power over others and ultimately over death. Escape from death is the driving force that led to the defining of our “universe” or more so our very definitions and elocutions of “what is” and later on the slightly more interesting form of “why”.

You see, science has evolved to worship the particle.

Those fundamental building blocks, which, when paired with the laws of physics, describe the nature of all that can be. But why this worship? Because with these laws we can answer many questions, many useful questions — when will a bridge break, where will a ball land, why will a ship sink.

But perhaps the particle is only a means to an end. Perhaps there are building blocks much more interesting to us — us conscious beings than the particle. Perhaps we are viewing the universe in reverse.

To make this distinction more tangible. Consider the following scenarios:

Consider a ball bouncing against the ground. We can look at the ball and decompose it into many little parts — particles. We can build rules to say how particles interact and bond and come together according many diverse formulae that each function at a different granularity of scale. At the tiniest granularity, we can describe how little itty-bitty pieces of matter interact and bond and resonate at various frequencies to form the rubber like surface of the ball. Through various processes these pieces have been arranged in a lattice and within them lie other particles which unlike the outer particles bounce back and forth much more frequently to form the pressurized air within the ball. All these little particles exist in a very large space of many other particles (the universe), within which by many eons of a nearly infinite number of coin flips at this particular moment this particular subset of particles came together to form a ball and as it so happens this ball was thrown from a distance of a certain amount by some other, even more, complex set of particles henceforth referred to as a human being. With these laws, these formulae, we may compute the trajectory of one group of particles with respect to another group of particles and see how they move back and forth in various metrics and dimensions.

But I digress. Perhaps the particles are not so important. Perhaps we should instead look at the concept of the ball itself. Perhaps it exists outside of the world of particles. Certainly a ball may be expressed in many forms — often times not as spherical lattice of complex carbon molecules “rubber”. One time it may show up on a piece of paper within the drawing of a child, or as a sequence of bits stored within the storage unit of a computer — the byproduct of complex sensors that take light reflected from the surface of the ball and capture it. The particles are only a sort of storage unit for the grand total concept of a ball, a mechanism — much like a piece of paper, or computer memory or a stick paired with a large flat region of sand. As it so happens the “ultimate” storage unit for the ball is the land of particles.

Maybe it is the case that in fact the most important thing of all is the concept — not it’s particular expression, not its storage medium. But why and how? Why is the ball important? The ball is important only in so far as it is useful for a conscience being or measuring device, in fact I would say that perhaps these are the only things within “the true universe” that are useful. When I say “the true universe” I do not mean the universe of particles, but rather something more mysterious and perhaps more useful and interesting to study.

When we look at the true universe we no longer care about the how an object exists but rather the effect of its existence upon how other beings perceive the universe itself. The ball gives us information. When we touch it, it feels soft but compressible. When we throw it we learn that it bounces. When we look at it we see that it is blue and casts a spherical shadow.

The particles forming the ball, paired with our eyes is a measurement device for a set of rules about the concept of the ball. But so too is the animators flipbook or the digital video taken with a cameraphone.

Matter is nothing more than a way of storing information, or perhaps the ultimate way of storing information. A ball is information describing a ball … but this ball may be stored in many other ways — in our minds, or as an image.

So the question is what is it that the particles are storing? We are humans — the re-organizers of particles into forms that are similar. We reproduce ourselves into further little baby humans, we reproduce patterns of non-entropic particles and this my friends is the key.

Entropy is perhaps an overly simplistic notion, let us instead look at “reproducibility” … i.e a process which further produces itself.

The universe is nothing more than small subsets of particles in certain forms that reproduce themselves and the only “information” that truly matters is “information” that effects the process of reproduction and re-creation. So the concept of a “ball” is only useful in so far as how it affects the reproduction and recreation of certain pre-existing patterns in the cosmos.

So information about the ball may be created and it may be communicated and we would like to look at is how and where information is being communicated