TAKING THE COSMIC RIDDLE PERSONALLY

Unraveling the mystery of the universe is something we leave to physicists and astronomers, with most people taking only an occasional interest in spectacular photos taken from deep space by the most powerful orbiting telescopes.

- Deepak Chopra

But if you change your perspective, the mystery of the universe faces everyone on a daily basis, as does the solution to the mystery.

The cosmic riddle is easy to state: Is the universe whole? Do its parts all work together, and if so, how? Clearly the universe isn't a machine, because machines are assembled from mechanical parts with visible connections like the gears in a car's transmission. But the universe has a peculiar feature. The moving parts, meaning any physical object, whether as large as a galaxy or as tiny as an atom, suddenly vanish at the quantum level. Subatomic particles do not have a stable identity. They flicker in and out of one state in which they are invisible waves. The same peculiarity holds true for the other basic ingredients of everyday reality, time, space, and energy. All have an invisible source beyond the physical.

Physics, like all of science, depends on reductionism, the method that explains a phenomenon by breaking it down into smaller parts. Reductionism is tied to the fundamental idea that reality is physical. Even though modern physics is hugely complex, the outmoded notion that the universe is a gigantic physical mechanism keeps persisting a century after quantum theory dismantled the notion that the mystery of the universe lies in its tiniest bits and pieces.