Relax, nothing is real (according to science)
Nobel Prize-winning discovery may cause existential crisis
Hello friends, new and old! Thank you for joining me on this totally bonkers ride called “Science once again proves everything we always knew to be true.”
So let’s get the party started, shall we?!
Last year, I volunteered to lead a small (unpaid) design project. The project dragged on for many reasons. Then, my colleague told me she was frustrated with my lack of chutzpah on said project.
In response, I explained I’d been busy. But I wanted to say that I didn’t put my life force into the project because it honestly didn’t matter.
Turns out there is scientific, Nobel Prize-winning evidence to back this up. I will get to that in a minute.
Call it a trauma response, or hyperawareness of my mortality due to health struggles, or growing up with ghosts on an empty Alaskan beach, or living in Latin America, or cavorting in the performing and literary arts, or having been married to a Venezuelan Witch—
I drift in and out of the seeable world. My rooms are crowded with dead flowers. There are ten dead cats under my couch. (Psyche! just checking to see if you’re paying attention.)
During COVID, I doubted whether anything was real at all. Staring at my phone, I grappled for answers and control but got cataracts and depression. What was real was the fear I felt after reading the news, the dissociation that ensued.
Then, science proved that the universe is not locally real.
What in the Charles Darwin does that mean?!
Disclaimer: 60% of my students claimed to experience an existential crisis when I told them.
Prepare to need a nap.
In 2022, the Nobel Peace Prize for Physics went to three scientists who proved that the universe is not locally real.
Let me explain what they mean with these taquitos I’m about to eat for lunch.
The box indicates my taquitos will be stuffed with beef. But since I haven’t tasted them, they could be filled with pork. Until I find out for sure, my taquitos will be filled with beef, pork, and possibly more, like liverwurst.
This proves Schrödinger’s cat theory that if you place a cat and something that could kill it (like a radioactive atom) in a box and seal it, you will not know if it is dead or alive until you open the box. So, until the box is opened, the cat is both “dead and alive.”
“Until a system’s properties are measured, they can encompass myriad values,” writes Zeeya Merali in Scientific American.
Meaning, nothing is fixed until it is observed.
Meaning:
Matter doesn’t matter.
The material is immaterial.
None of this is real.
Kinda takes the edge off, no?
Annoyingly, this doesn’t explain whether or not the object can change after observation. But I’m guessing it’s in flux whenever not observed (or felt, smelled, heard, tasted, you get the point). Therefore, the moon doesn’t exist unless you see it — or unless you’re watching the tide, as one does in Juneau, Alaska, a.k.a. Lingít Aani, “Land of Tides.”
In case you’re wondering, my taquitos turned out to be full of beans, and now I want my money back.
The second really exciting or depressing part of this discovery, depending on how you look at it:
Quantum entanglement is real. In layman’s terms, that means something can instantaneously affect something related to it from far away.
Scientists considered if perhaps this was due to “hidden variables, factors that [exist] in some imperceptible level of reality, under the subatomic realm,” wrote Daniel Garisto for Scientific American.
Imperceptible. Subatomic. Hidden. Woooooooo!
I wonder if this is how my grandmother, in hospice, can cry out for my father in her sleep, and thousands of miles away, my father awakes to the sound of her voice.
Why I dream about a dead friend, and then the next day, Facebook tells me it would have been his birthday.
Why, when I ask a yes/no question in my dream, I awake to my daughter beside me whispering “yes” in her sleep, as if to answer my question.
This may explain paranormal activity and this true ghost story I published last Halloween.
Indigenous cultures have known about quantum entanglement forever; they just had different words for it.
If matter doesn’t matter, what does?
All of my students in my Spanish class have an A+ because they do everything I ask of them.
How? Energy.
When my all-boy group was being rude to each other, I explained how their barbs made me feel like I was going into battle.
“If I’m feeling that way, then you are, too,” I said. “And if you’re feeling unsafe, what can’t you do?”
“Learn,” they replied.
Observe energy shift. I watched their shoulders drop. Little smiles emerged. Soon, they were all writing down directions in Spanish on how to get from Jardines de Montfort to Mestalla Stadium in Valencia, Spain.
People think that teaching is about imparting knowledge, but really, it’s about spirit. Vital energy. Life force. Qi.
This is not some woo thing. This is observable. Documentable. Quantifiable. Even chiropractors are using energy in their treatments.
Anglo culture loves things it can see, quantify, measure, prove, and reproduce. Look at our culture’s emphasis on data, how teachers are evaluated, students are assessed, and human bodies are diagnosed.
In academia, more words and syllables translate to sounding smarter. You can hold the Bible in your hands. It’s heavy, tangible. SO MANY PAGES.
Since our culture demands evidence, here are concrete examples of how centering energy manifests in education and justice:
Indigenous-led Women’s Revolutionary Law is working in Chiapas. In a country with 111,896 disappearances, there hasn’t been one disappearance in the state or instance of femicide since its implementation.
Punitive discipline, on the other hand, does not work.
Implementing Indigenous approaches to education in Alaska increase learning among all students.
Yelling at my daughter in the morning does not work. But meeting her spirit where it’s at can give her energy and power.
It only takes one person to see us in our truth, and suddenly, we feel like we can do anything.
The dead flowers in my house will turn to dust. My skin, wrinkles, and gray hairs will soon become incinerated and scattered over Auke Bay.
What is real is the spirit behind these flowers, these skin suits, this art my daughter creates, these words I plink on this ugly-ass Dell keyboard in this staff room that is one million degrees and smells like old beans and boxed taquitos.
This is why I don’t watch fear-based news and why my daughter, who is more connected to the spiritual realm, will break or take apart things to try and make sense of a physical world she does not understand.
This is why Samuel Beckett drove a Deux Chevaux (thank you for this,
).This is why materialism is obsolete and, according to
, ultimately nihilistic.Yes, we still have to do taxes, wash the dishes, and wear deodorant. We still have to live in the physical world, earn an income, and pay the mortgage; but we don’t have to hitch our identity, worth, or truth to it. In the physical realm, everything should be in service to the spirit.
Knowing that energy is real, while unseen, gives me hope. Conjoining science, religion, and spirituality offer assurance that we extend beyond this small, insignificant life. The pettiness of life is immaterial. What does it matter when we transcend time and space?
I wish someone had told me this when I was young, losing relay races, ostracized from social groups, my skin frying under the sun. In my own way, I developed my quantum theory coping mechanism by believing I was an alien from the sun sent to Earth to observe the humans.
Now I’m wondering if maybe I was right.
Thank you for reading this long post! I’m curious about your thoughts on the physical and spiritual implications of this “discovery”?
In the next installment, I will share what I learned about centering energy over materialism while living in Caribbean and Latin American cultures and marrying a Venezuelan Witch.
Stay tuned!
Summer <3
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Spiritual beings having a human experience... I've often thought that reality is a human construct, like time. It's a convenient way to categorize and define our experiences, but it's always seemed more fluid to me than that. Your post captures this well.
Only energy is real, and it can't be created or destroyed. We are infinite. This life is neither real nor infinite. I've believed and known for a long time. This is unsettlingly frightening and soothing together.