There is an illusion of reality that most people have. The strange part is not that we see so much the same, it’s that any of us see anything that looks even remotely similar to what others see.
Take color for example. Barney the Dinosaur is purple. That’s OK in the sense that he is a caricature, and not representative of Tyrannosaurus Rex specimens that may have existed eons ago. While there may be debate going on even today as to whether the species was a hunter of a scavenger, very few people would suggest that in either case t-Rex is likely to have had a purple coloration over most of it’s body, and all would agree that ‘fuzzy’ is pretty much out.
For all we know, t-rex may have had the ability to shift colors in response to it’s environment, as chameleons do. I think it’s specifically unlikely, but from the perspective of what we know, and don’t know, it’s really in the ‘don’t know’ category.
That’s not the significant issue that I want to bring up though. For the longest time, I didn’t see Barney as being purple. Part of that is that I already have associations as to what purple looks like, and in comparison to that I was seeing ‘blue.’ About the only thing I see as purple that comes even close is the purple in the Minnesota Vikings uniform colors, and even that seems (to me at least) to be a very different color.
Our eyes detect light either as emitted, or as reflected. Examples of emitted light that we see are LEDs, light bulbs, the sun, stars, various forms of plasma, aurora etc. In almost all cases the source of the light we see is an electron moving from an outer shell of an atom to a lower shell. The distance between these shells defines the wavelength of the emitted photon which is what gives light it’s color.
While sunlight itself is emitted light from the electrons in the atoms of the sun loosing energy and moving to a lower orbit, not every color is represented by the potential electron shells of the atoms in a given star. In fact there are bands of color that are missing from the spectra of the sun both because of the fact that not every possible wavelength is available, but also because there is a substantial amount of material that will absorb some wavelengths and re-emit them in a different portion of the spectrum. The result is that there are ‘filtered’ portions of the spectrum, as well as those you would expect to see via emission. Finally there is a way for emitted light to be shifted to a different color.
If you’ve seen those green laser pointers, or green led’s, you very likely have seen color shifting in action. That’s because until the last couple of years, green was not the color that was actively generated by emission. The frequency of light that was actually emitted by the diode is outside of the range that the human eye can see, but it is at a frequency that can be ‘doubled’ to give a green output. Of course the process isn’t 100% loss-less, so if you pump 10 watts into the diode, you will not get as much light in Green as you would with a red LED. But it does work, and a side effect is that if you see the particular color of light in a star’s spectra, it is very possible that you’ve encountered this situation there as well as with the laser pointers.
Reflected light can have a color that appears to be different from light that is emitted. Reality is that the light you see in a reflection, is colored by what wavelengths of color are absorbed by the object. Paints and pigments are the obvious examples. But a practical example is chlorophyll.
Because of the makeup of our atmosphere, blue light tends to be scattered more than other colors of light. You see this as a blue sky on a clear day. It scatters enough light over the entire sky that our eyes reduce sensitivity of light to the point where we do not see stars during the day, with some somewhat unusual exceptions. We can see the occasional Nova or Supernova if they happen in a part of our sky that is in daylight when it happens, and if the event is close enough that it’s light is of high enough brightness. As an alternative if you can reduce your exposure to the scattered blue light, you can also see stars on a clear day. For about the past century, if you found a chimney standing where a building burned down some time ago, you may have had the experience of looking up through the chimney from the fireplace, and been able to see stars above you. That’s because the amount of light scattered in just that portion of the sky you can see through the chimney is less than the emitted light of those stars.
Back to chlorophyll. Shortly. Another artifact of the scattering of blue light is that the light that make it furthest into the atmosphere, say at the horizon where the sun is rising or setting, is going to be red. This is what causes sunsets and sunrises to have a red cast to them. So if you want to be able to get the most energy from the sun, over the longest period of time, you want to collect as much red light as you can. During the summer, with a fading red sunset, or sun rise, you will see things that are blue, or red, but green leaves will appear very close to black, as they are absorbing as much of the available light as they can. So why are leaves green rather than blue? Well we have already scattered as much of the blue light as we are going to, but green light is not scattered as much, and red light is absorbed very strongly. This means that the color most strongly reflected off the leaves will be in the green spectrum. There will be some yellow, less orange, a bit of cyan, and less purple. And we perceive the resulting light that is reflected to our eyes as green.
This also serves another purpose within chlorophyll. What chlorophyll is doing is using the energy that the light provides to break the bonds of carbon-di-oxide to recombine the carbon with other elements making starches, and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. The problem is that blue and more specifically ultraviolet light tends to be very bad for organic processes. In our atmosphere the ozone layer of our atmosphere does a great job of reducing the amount of ultraviolet light that reaches the earth. It acts as a filter.
Ultraviolet light has a very ‘high’ energy state, or more specifically a high frequency, which interacts with a wide variety of chemicals to cause them to break down. This is why you will not find light sources that produce high volumes of UV lighting art exhibits. It is also the principle reason that exposure to UV causes skin cancer. Some of the UV radiation breaks DNA strands. In many cases the dna is broken in such a way that the cell can not reproduce at all, however in a few cases the breakage involves the control of that reproduction. In some of those cases the breakage results in a run-away reproduction process that is skin cancer. While you may be thinking of skin cancer as the worst of these side effects, it is actually one of the least important from an environmental perspective. The real problem is when bacterium and yeasts experience these effects. Neither really have a ‘counter’ system in their DNA reproduction process, however both have DNA, and how that DNA breaks and re-combines, or mutates affects how that variety of bacterium interacts with its environment. It can change a benign bacterium that does little more than turn sugars into energy to reproduce, into something that releases toxins into it’s environment to reduce competition, or as a result of it’s own biological processes breaking down catastrophically.
All of this is ‘driven’ by light. Photons which behave as particles or waves depending upon how they are tested.
And that brings us to the crux of the matter. If you go into ‘empty’ space, Feinman calculated that there is enough energy in 1 cubic centimeter of ‘empty’ space, as quantum events caused particles to spontaneously come into existence, and vanish that if you could tap all of that energy at once, you could immediately boil off all of the water of all of the oceans on earth. There is strong evidence that Feinman was off by an order of magnitude or 27, such that there is enough energy there to annihilate every atom in the Milky Way Galaxy.
The thing is that the particles being described are not atoms, or even electrons, protons or neutrons. These particles are quarks. And evidence suggests that what these particles actually represent is standing waves within the universe at a level we call quantum physics.
At these levels really weird things happen. When you ‘create’ a photon, you also create an ‘anti’ photon. If you manipulate the one particle, say rotate it 90 degrees in some direction, it’s paired photon will rotate 90 degrees in the opposite direction. What’s ‘strange’ here is that it does not matter how far apart you take those two particles. If you move it a quarter of a wavelength of light away, or put it on the far end of the universe, manipulating one particle manipulates the other at exactly the same time. Einstein called this ‘spooky action at a distance’ and refused to accept quantum mechanics as a result.
But that’s not even the weirdest of things. We have long held that there is a time relationship between cause and effect such that effect happens always after cause. Some call this “time’s arrow.” What Feinman was able to demonstrate in Quantum Electro Dynamics was that not only did spooky action at a distance flow from quantum mechanics, but you can also have cause following effect. I will leave it to you to go look up the math involved.
The thing is that all experience is the transfer of energy. Chocolate has a smell, taste, look and feel that each individually may be simulated, but to make the combination, you have to have Chocolate. Smell and taste are the result of chemical processes that touch nerves. Touch is a chemical process within your skin that releases electrons into nerve cells that gives you the sensation of texture, density, and more. Your eyes are the closest to doing an active energy transfer from the photons that pass through the lens of your eye onto your retina, where cones and rods react in a chemical process to stimulate the nerves running through the back of your eyes into your brain. Hearing is a very similar process, but can be thought of as feeling sound waves. In fact you often do feel sound waves. The ground shaking in an earthquake, or as the truck rolls by on the freeway is often passed to your body through direct stimulation and you ‘feel’ it,
All of this energy is the same stuff. And the very oddest characteristic of it is that it responds to our expectations and desires. If you ‘want’ to see something, it tends to show up. That happens all the time at the quantum mechanics level. And there are belief systems, even religions which suggest that this is a fundamental means of doing things. If you ‘want’ something in an organized way, it will happen. Whether you call that organized method Praying, affirmations, belief, doubt, or ‘using the force,’ if the result is what you were working at, then that organized method ‘worked’ for you.
Are there flaws with these systems of beliefs? Sure. We know that at the quantum level beliefs and expectations do have an effect. However we have no way of verifying that this effect scales up to a level that it will actually affect the world in ways that human senses or experiences can detect.
Pascal postulated that there was no harm in prayer. If you prayed to your god and your god interceded on your behalf, then that was good. If you prayed to your god, but your god did not exist, then it did no harm. Of course the logical extension to this is that if you prayed to your god, but your god did not exist, and my god did and was offended by your prayer (or lack of prayer to her) and responded by interceding against you, then your prayer did harm. But how would you know?
Do affirmations work? We don’t really have a way to test them in a ‘clinical’ setting. What would we do for a double blind? Have people from various cultures write down both positive and negative phrases in their native writing system, which they would pass to people who couldn’t read in that language, and tell them each to copy each phrase 10 times a day, collect the results at the end of some period of time and evaluate whether those phrases had any affect on the people who either initially set them down, or who wrote the phrases multiple times a day?
About the best explanation I have for the entire idea of affirmations comes from ‘Think and Grow Rich.’ It can also be seen in the methodology of Steven Covey and the Franklin Planner systems. If you set down your goals, your objectives, what you want to do in life, and have those firmly in mind as you make decisions about what you will do now, you will influence your own actions to achieve those goals and objectives. It is not the act of repeating the affirmation multiple times that generates the result, it is having the goal in mind as you make decisions. If you have the objective to go to the Superbowl this year, and you see a chance to go being an outcome of buying a snickers bar, or a bag of Doritos because the package indicates that there is a prize piece inside, you have an opportunity to cross the “if you don’t play, you can’t win” line.
If you set an objective of becoming a successful writer, you are more likely to see and respond to an advertisement for a writer’s workshop next month than someone who is not even considering writing. After all if you want to become a successful writer, you are more likely to pick up magazines about writing and writers, writers markets and publishers. And these are far more likely to be a place where someone setting up a writers workshop are going to publish information about it, then for example the Home Journal, Builders Monthly, Popular Science, or Physics Today.
Hmm… looks like we got a bit off track there. Perhaps. The problem is that at some level, reality is malleable. It does respond to our desires and expectations. The thing is that we each have different desires and expectations. So why is it that if we see a purple smiling dinosaur, we think of Barney?
