Pushed down to a certain scale, the laws of physics seem to fall apart. Astrid Eichhorn, a leader in an area of study called asymptotic safety, thinks we just need to push a little further.
A woo-woo aside only loosely connected to the actual article. Loosely is being generous tbh.
But I’ve always loved the idea that there isn’t any matter, that everything we think of as matter is just the energy of the universe rippling around, and our minds, our true selves, are just a pattern of ripples that eventually fades and dissipates into the background noise of the cosmos.
There’s a grace and poetry to the idea for me, no matter how inaccurate and hippy-dippy it may be.
But that idea, due to it being poetry and wishful, gives me a strange comfort in the face of the infinite, unknowable scale of the universe. It also gives me a strange comfort on the small scale of the horror and dread that mortal life contains within that nigh eldritch scale of the universe. If we were really just light bouncing off of other light and making sparkles and ripples that we call the self, that’s a thing of beauty that makes all the ugly we see while our pattern is held together a little more bearable.
A woo-woo aside only loosely connected to the actual article. Loosely is being generous tbh.
But I’ve always loved the idea that there isn’t any matter, that everything we think of as matter is just the energy of the universe rippling around, and our minds, our true selves, are just a pattern of ripples that eventually fades and dissipates into the background noise of the cosmos.
There’s a grace and poetry to the idea for me, no matter how inaccurate and hippy-dippy it may be.
But that idea, due to it being poetry and wishful, gives me a strange comfort in the face of the infinite, unknowable scale of the universe. It also gives me a strange comfort on the small scale of the horror and dread that mortal life contains within that nigh eldritch scale of the universe. If we were really just light bouncing off of other light and making sparkles and ripples that we call the self, that’s a thing of beauty that makes all the ugly we see while our pattern is held together a little more bearable.