When Einstein proposed, in his theory of relativity, that space and time were not separate domains but deeply interrelated, the world shifted. He discovered that the gravitational pull of physical objects actually curved space and bent time as well. Laying out his hypothesis in an elegant mathematical formulae that contradicted the core of Newtonian thinking of the world that held that space and time were absolute dimensions with no connection to each other. In the place of these absolutes, Einstein proposed a four dimensional space-time continuum in which no perspective is privileged. The physicist Sachs stated, “Relativity theory implies that the space and time coordinates are only the elements of a language that is used by an observer to describe his environment “ The shock of this upon the scientific community was quickly compounded by other shocks.

The roots of physics can be found in the thought of the ancient Greeks who made inquiries into “physis” the essential nature of things. When modern physicists developed the analytical and experimental tools to probe into the fundamental building blocks of matter, they were surprised even appalled - by what they found. They found that matter was largely composed of empty space. If you were to blow an atom up to the size of St. Peters Cathedral in Rome, the neutron at its center would be the size of a grain of salt. the electrons whizzing around the neutron cannot be considered objects in the traditional sense of the term They do not exist the way matter exists, but only evince “tendencies to exist”.

At this quantum level, physicists discovered that their attempts to measure the phenomena affected the phenomena, which led them to realize that consciousness had to be integrated into their understanding of matter. The perceiving subject could no longer be separated from the object under investigation, this concept was codified by the physicist Heisenberg in his Uncertainty Principle. With quantum objects, such as photons and electrons, it is impossible to determine both their position and their momentum. If one chooses to measure the momentum the object will appear as a wave. If it is the determination of position to be measured the object appears as a particle. But in actual fact, it was neither, or both at the same time. Heisenberg wrote, “that the path of the electron comes into existence when we observe it”. Neils Bohr wrote, “isolated material objects are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interactions with other systems”.

Physicists found that in the quantum world disregarded the classic physics in startling ways: as probability waves spreading through space, photon and electron “wave packets” are found at more than one place at the same time only manifesting as a particle when observations are made.
They were also confronted by “quantum jumps”, electrons vanishing from one point and appearing at another without passing through the space in between. They also discovered quantum non locality or Action at a Distance: once correlated quantum objects remain linked even when separated by great distances. If the probability wave of one object is collapsed to make a particular observation, the other object is affected as well. The change happens immediately, with no time lag for the message to be transmitted through space, indicating that the objects are connected through a transcendent domain.

Now, one needs to stop here and contemplate this, for this indicates that time, space and consciousness are intimately interrelated and inseparable, and there exists a higher dimension, outside our perceptions of space-time, in which everything is interconnected. Bohr once declared: “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”

I think this is a good spot to stop for now. People of our culture need some time to integrate this, I know this blew me away. So I’ll stop here before I introduce some of the really strange implications that physics indicates for our existence.