“Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water; then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if then you took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.”
Erwin Schrödinger, quoting an example used by Lord Kelvin, to demonstrate how small atoms are (that is: how many of them there are in everything, like glasses of water).
As he notes, however, it’s not so much that atoms are small as it is that we are large, very large. Schrödinger begins What Is Life?, which was sent to me by my dad, by pondering the relative size of organic life to its atomic constituents. Why are cells, organisms, humans so much larger than atoms and atomic events? Why are all fundamental physical processes so far beneath our sensory perception?
The question is not facile, although the immediate instinct is to say, as we do when we don’t understand something, “Because it is!” But Schrödinger arrives at an arresting conclusion: life is vastly larger in scale because at the atomic scale, individual atomic events are not reliably predictable. Due to the bizarre and irregular nature of individual molecular and atomic events, few repeatable phenomena are available for systems to organize their processes with; that is to say, you cannot build reliable, repeatable processes from atoms or molecules because they are too random. Life must use aggregates of millions of atoms or molecules.
In aggregates, atoms behave with statistical regularity despite individual irregularity. Schrödinger illustrates this with examples like diffusion and Brownian motion; in both cases, individual atoms behave with total and unpredictable irregularity, but in massive groups they behave with complete predictability. Just as one could not build a skyscraper on unpredictably shifting earth, so organic life must rely on the aggregation of atoms and molecules for the processes it uses to function (like diffusion, for example). Hence our sense organs all being far too massive to perceive all the fundamental phenomena of the universe’s compositional elements.
Abusing this remarkable observation, I thought it a nicely poetic metaphor for an epistemological phenomenon that has long irked me: the manner in which the more closely examined something is, the more fleeting its precise details are; there is a Heisenberg-like quality to reality, and I remember when as a child I was attempting to learn about JFK’s assassination how baffled I was that so many thousands of investigators, historians, academics, and law-enforcement personnel, working for decades, could not arrive at an indisputable conclusion. As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen that this is true of virtually every event, even those recorded on video or photographic media and witnessed by millions.
While this has nothing whatever to do with Schrödinger and Heisenberg, it struck me then that reality resists knowing: the more closely you examine it, the more space in between facts you see, the more chaotic the motion you seek to arrest, the more diffuse the facts you want to connect. Crystalline structures of conclusive meaning merely mask enormous spaces in their own lattices, spaces where the random trails of the unpredictable remain visible.
(Note: I’m not even discussing the inescapable fact that at the quantum level, and thus probably beyond it, mere observation demonstrably affects reality in ways that are scarcely believable).
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