Alice-in-Wonderland Reality—Part 1

I'm sitting in my outdoor tub, gazing at a hairy woodpecker perched at the feeder, while I simultaneously admire a large sycamore tree behind it. I see the bird's striking shape and colorful feathers—all black and white and red. I see the tree's gray, smooth bark, punctuated now and then by chunks of peeling bark of a chocolate-brown hue. Glancing upward, I see pale green leaves just beginning their spring opening.

It's a peaceful, beautiful scene which I become absorbed into—as my mind wanders over the many attributes of these gorgeous denizens of my natural world. As I sink slowly into a puddle of flesh, the hot water working its wonders on my body and mind, I ponder the reality of what I am seeing. My eyes behold feathers and leaves, beak and bark—merely the surface features of the reality that's there.

But I'm aware that there is so much more to these beautiful things than meets my limited eye and my brain's ability to interpret. The tree's bark is made of billions of molecules that link together to bring me the overall image I see. The same is true of the bird's feathers. In fact, the colors I see in its feathers are really not there at all—I'm just noticing certain wavelengths of light that get diffracted from tiny structures in its colorless feathers. I know these things only because science, with its sensitive microscopes, has peered into the depths of them, and demonstrated the existence of molecules, atoms, and other (to my naked eye) invisible things.

I find myself wondering how these objects would appear, if I were able, in an Alice-in-Wonderland fashion, to shrink myself down a few million times—until I can begin to make out the fundamental, intricately-arranged and infinitesimal blobs of tree and bird matter that I know are atoms. When I do imagine myself getting that tiny, from my shrunken perspective, all features of the tree that I previously saw are now gone. The tree has “grown” so enormous that it's now too big for me to comprehend; it's as if, when we stare down at the ground under our feet, we try to imagine the whole planet Earth.

Now down near atomic size, I see no colors at all anymore—just the colorless blobs we call atoms. I'm excited. Now I can witness what some of the ancient Greeks presciently intuited: those things they called atoms, the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The Greek root of the word “atom” is a (meaning “not”) plus temnein (meaning “to cut”). That's a pretty good definition of fundamental: something you can no longer slice up. Those earliest Greeks (led by Democritus) posited that, although infinite in number, there are only a finite number of kinds of atoms, which can then combine themselves into countless shapes and objects. It's like having a big Lego set, with which one can build innumerable objects. Those old Greek guys did a fantastic job of developing an accurate image of the reality of matter.

But we moderns know that atoms are not fundamental. They can be split and sliced. A couple of hundred years ago some perceptive masters of science discovered that atoms are made up of even smaller building blocks: protons, neutrons, and electrons. And these scientists also showed us that the core, or nucleus, of an atom contains those protons and neutrons all balled up in a tiny central sphere, while the electrons whirl around, out at some distance. It is sort of like an infinitesimal solar system, with the nucleus like the sun and the planets like electrons.

More of Alice's Wonderland next time...