August 6, 1945, saw the development of the atom bomb. My 5th grade science class now seems so long ago, but I remember the day I learned how water boils. It was tough for me visualizing atoms and molecules, let alone that they could move around like that. You can imagine my amazement later in life when they told me all of life’s building blocks were constructed of neutrons, protons, and electrons. They obviously forgot morons.
1966 was a volatile year but it also provided rich mental protein for creative people. Feeling inspired to write a moving anthem about a guy picking up vibrations from a girl, Brian Wilson (of Beach Boys fame) produced a classic hit record entitled “Good Vibrations.” Allegedly, he based the lyrics on the burgeoning psychedelic music and Flower Power movements popular at the time. But I suspect, perhaps unknowingly, he tapped into something more fundamental: the sublime spirit of Nature itself.
Those early concepts of different mixes of electrons dutifully orbiting a nucleus were awe-inspiring. Scientists have long understood that heat travels through vibrations. Molecules vibrate faster and faster as they heat up, and their vibrations cause other molecules around them to vibrate as well, warming them too. For decades this was the only known way heat could be transferred in organic molecules. E=MC^2 explained the energy released in an atomic bomb but didn’t explain how to build one. The knowledge that built the bomb unlocked many other secrets of the universe—and almost wiped the Japanese race from the face of the earth. The game was theoretical physics, and the name was Albert Einstein. We’re still pushing the envelope of science.
Turns out, understanding gravity was key. The theory of general relativity was taken to explain how very large objects (suns, galaxies, etc.) work. It teaches that gravity is the bending of space and time, and that most events are ultimately determined by external causes. But it doesn’t adequately explain the workings of very small objects which seem to involve chance variation. So, entering stage left, was a new field of science known as quantum mechanics which addresses the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles. Problem is, general relativity and quantum mechanics explain their respective parts well, but we still need a theory of quantum gravity, which unifies both of them, in order to explain situations where gravitational and quantum effects are equally important.
String theory has emerged as the most promising and consistent framework we have to shed light on the quantum nature of gravity. The idea behind string theory is simple, says Sera Cremonini of Lehigh University: “Look deep inside any particle and you’ll see this tiny vibrating string. This is the fundamental unity we’ve been searching for, the fundamental entity that makes up everything.” For something so elemental, just know that strings are one-dimension objects, possessing length but not width. Moreover, scientists have not yet developed tools that can produce or observe strings. That’s right, we’re talking here about ghosts—welcome to the quantum world! Despite the fact that mathematics has opened up worlds we can’t see with our own eyes, this new knowledge has had profound effects in science and technology. Quantum mechanics led to the development of things like lasers, light-emitting diodes, transistors, medical imaging, electron microscopes, quantum computers, quantum networks, and a host of other modern devices.
Even so, what I see in my reality appears solid; it’s not vibrating. Clearly, there’s more than one reality! To help grasp this, I think about what it would be like to be a spider, rather than a human. A spider’s world looks normal to it but would be totally weird for humans. At the spider level nature looks different. Vegetation, sunlight, weather—existence itself would be different. Taking it down several more notches, imagine life at the particle level. Totally foreign, surreal maybe. All those little bits spinning and zipping around, affecting each other in special ways so as to distinguish, say, a chair from a rock or a fence post—or a galaxy for that matter.
This gets even wilder when quantum mechanics completely moves the goal posts. For example, there’s this very nonsensical effect known as quantum entanglement which implies each small particle in nature has a perfectly coordinated counterpart (sometimes extremely far apart—like light years) which reacts in exact replication as its complement in any situation. . .with no apparent connection between the two. A photon moves on earth in a certain location at a certain time with a certain momentum, and somewhere else in the universe, its colleague does the same! The implication is that what we see with our eyes is not real! In other words, quantum entanglement violates Einstein’s concept of space. This property of particles has not been proven beyond all dispute but has been shown to exist in experiments so tightly controlled as to leave almost no chance to not be true. Crazy, right? The laws that govern the light from a firefly in my backyard also govern the light emitted from an exploding star one billion light years away. Place changes nothing. Nor does time. Doesn’t this astonish you?
For me, this is truly mind-blowing. It makes me question my senses. How, exactly, do I interpret nature through my senses?
Sight. Take, for example, light. As far back as 1847, Faraday proposed that light was a high-frequency electromagnetic vibration. Visible light is indeed a portion in the spectrum of electromagnetic waves that are visible to the human eye. It’s really a vibratory motion, which is transmitted in the form of waves through space. It can be of different colors, which depends on the wavelength of the radiation causing it. When electrons move from a high state to lower state (imagine wood burning), they emit electromagnetic vibrations, known as photons.
Hearing. Sound also is actually an oscillation of parts in a medium that has had its equilibrium disturbed. When someone hits a drum, how hard the drum is hit determines how many electrons snap to a lower state and this changes the sound. Different sounds can be created by changing the shape of the air vibration. To understand sound as vibrations, all you need is a teenager to cruise by with his bass turned up to a ridiculous level.
Smell. Vibrations are suspected to be the source of smell too. Researchers noticed that molecules with different shapes could smell similar while other molecules with nearly the same shape smell very different. They noticed that with the vibrations of these molecules, a kind of “chord” seemed to play a role, that when molecules of different shapes have similar vibrational “signatures,” they often smell similar, and when molecules of similar shapes but different vibratory “signatures” are detected, they smell very different from each other. This idea was originally considered outlandish, but physicists agree the mechanism works in theory.
Taste. Also not fully understood, recent scientific experiments suggest that taste is a function of vibrations too. In particular, 16 volunteers tasted salty, sweet, sour, or bitter solutions while EEG recordings were taken from electrodes in their scalps. Results showed that different frequency vibrations correlated with different taste identities. An activity level of 1-4 Hz was the point at which a distinct electrophysiological signature caused taste processing in the human brain.
Touch. We already know when we feel heat that we’re processing vibrating molecules, but there’s more. Different regions of our body have different types of touch receptors. In the fingertip alone, there are four different ways of sensing touch, two of which respond to slow or fast vibrations. New research shows that humans distinguish the difference between fine textures (like silk or satin) through vibrations picked up by these receptors and relayed to the brain.
I find these concepts cataclysmic! The beauty of Nature is even greater than what I experience with my senses. When I go walking in the woods, what I see, feel, smell, taste and hear are really just vibrations. The difference between a stream and a tree is nothing more than points on a spectrum of vibrations. When I look at you, all I see are vibrations. Your organism is a miracle of harmony. All those things functioning together. And we are sensitive to only a small band of vibrations, so we’re missing an enormous range outside that band. Think of the implications: alternate universes, other dimensions—infinite possibilities. Life is pattern; it’s a dance of energy. Everything is rhythm; everything vibrates. And we mesh with all these things. We interconnect. If these vibrations were to stop, time-space would cease to exist. So, almost sixty years ago maybe the Beach Boys were on to something. The hippies were right: it’s all about vibrations, man. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, man.
By Larry Gfeller