Beautiful bit of science: everything is ultimately affected by everything else

Most of us, me certainly included, are big fans of oneness. Heck, I wrote a lengthy book called Return to the One that described the teachings of Plotinus, a 3rd century Greek mystic philosopher. And almost everyone prefers being united with who and what we love, rather than separated.

This is one reason I embrace most of the non-religious side of Buddhism. A central Buddhist tenet is emptiness. Which doesn’t mean nothingness. Almost the opposite, in fact. For Buddhist emptiness points to the lack of anything having inherent existence, standing alone, sufficient unto itself.

Here’s a couple of the posts I’ve written about emptiness:
Emptiness is ultimate reality: nothing, including us, has an intrinsic nature
Buddhist emptiness isn’t nothing, it is everything

Similarly, in part I’m attracted to science because it deals with the nature of the universe. Singular universe, as is uni. There’s speculation about a multiverse, but no evidence of this, so for now we’re stuck with our one and only universe.

Insofar as scientists can tell, a telling bolstered by observations of hugely distant stars billions of light years away, everything in our universe follows the same laws of nature. This includes matter and energy being governed by the laws of quantum physics, which say that quantum fields are present everywhere in the universe.

Everywhere. So a particle in a galaxy five billion light years away is just like a particle here on Earth. Even more astounding: that particle affects particles on our planet, because everything in the universe is ultimately affected by everything else.

Here’s an excerpt from physicist Jim Al-Khalili’s book, On Time: The Physics That Makes the Universe Tick. I’ve read a few chapters of the book and am enjoying it a lot. This is a quote from physicist Michael Berry’s book, A Passion for Science.

Suppose you’ve got lots of colliding particles. You can think of them as molecules of oxygen, let’s say, in a gas and they’re in a box. You believe that they obey Newtonian mechanics. They don’t quite, but let’s suppose they do. And you measure their initial position and velocity precisely. Of course, one couldn’t do that, but suppose one can. Then one could predict their motion for all time. But wait a moment.

You can only do that if the system is completely isolated and so you say, ‘Isolate it as best you can according to the laws of physics as you now know them.’ Well, there’s one force that you can’t screen out, and that’s gravity. So unless you know the position of every single external particle in the universe which would have a gravitational effect on your molecules, you couldn’t predict the motion.

So let’s estimate the uncertainty that arises from this source by considering the gravitational effect of an electron at the observable limit of the universe. You agree it’s not possible to think of a smaller perturbation than that.

A single electron. Just one. There it is at the observable limit of the universe, say ten thousand million light years away. It has its gravitational effect, but you don’t know where it is exactly, so that’s the uncertainty. Well, you ask, how many collisions will the little uncertainty that’s produced in a motion by that electron be amplified to the degree where you’ve lost all predictability, in the sense that you make an error in predicting the angle at which a particular molecule will emerge from a collision by say 90 degrees.

You could reasonably say you’ve lost predictability then. Well, the amazing thing is that the number of collisions is only about 50 or so, which is of course over in a tiny, tiny fraction of a microsecond.

Al-Khalili then describes what this means.

But, the point remains, nothing is ever truly isolated from its surroundings — everything is ultimately affected by everything else. This is even more important in the quantum world, as we will see.

You may well have figured this out by now, but the three reasons I have listed for why the future is unpredictable are in fact really one and the same. That Laplace’s demon must include itself in its computations is really just another way of saying that it cannot isolate itself from the rest of the universe, and needing to know the initial conditions to infinite accuracy is also because all systems are ultimately open to, and will therefore be affected by, their surroundings, however remote.

I can therefore distil all three reasons down to just one: We cannot predict the future because no system in the universe is truly isolated.

In other words, there is an inescapable oneness to the universe. Which means nothing is as it is because it is an isolated independent entity. It is as it is, just as we are as we are, because the entire universe has made it that way. Here’s a quotation from a writer on Buddhist emptiness that I quoted in this post.

Rather than seeing things as they are, we superimpose upon ourselves — and on things around us — a false existence, a self-existence or essential reality that actually does not exist at all. In the Buddhist philosophy explained here, the ultimate truth is the sheer absence, the lack, of any such essence.

This is emptiness (stong pa nyid, shunyata). While this may sound bleak, disappointing, or frightening, it is the very nature of reality. And it is reality — not fantasy — that is our final hope and our refuge. The path to freedom from needless misery, for ourselves and others, is through profound realization of this fundamental reality.

…The Tibetan and Sanskrit words that we translate as “emptiness” do, in fact, literally mean “emptiness.” They refer specifically to some sort of lack or absence in things. But it is not a lack of meaning or hope or existence.

It is the lack of the exaggerated and distorted kind of existence that we have projected onto things and onto ourselves. It is the absence of a false essential nature with which we have unconsciously invested everything. It can be quite frightening as we start to have doubts about this “heavy duty” kind of reality. We will feel that things cannot exist at all if they do not exist in the solid way we are accustomed to seeing them.