ONE FAMILY PLAN
Quanta
"One startling discovery made by quantum physicists was that if you break matter into smaller and smaller pieces you eventually reach a point where those pieces - electrons, protons, and so on - no longer possess the traits of objects... Although an electron can sometimes behave as if it were a compact little particle, physicists have found that it literally possesses no dimension... if you try to measure the width of an electron, you will discover it's an impossible task. An electron is simply not an object as we know it."(Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, p 33)
"When an electron manifests itself as a wave it can do things no particle can. If it is fired at a barrier in which two slits have been cut, it can go through both slits simultaneously. When wavelike electrons collide with each other they even create interference patterns. The electron, like some shapeshifter out of folklore, can manifest as either a particle or a wave. This chameleonlike ability is common to all subatomic particles. It is also common to all things once thought to manifest exclusively as waves. Light, gamma rays, radio waves, X rays - all can change from waves to particles and back again."
"Today physicists believe that subatomic phenomenon should not be classified solely as either waves or particles, but as a single category of somethings that are always somehow both. These somethings are called quanta, and physicists believe they are the basic stuff from which the entire universe is made."
"Perhaps most astonishing of all is that there is compelling evidence that the only time quanta ever manifest as particles is when we are looking at them... when an electron isn't being looked at, experimental findings suggest that it is always a wave... it should be noted that this is only one interpretation of the evidence." (Talbot, p 33-34)
As imagined behind his back, the world is always "a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup." (Physicist Nick Herbert) but as he turns around and attempts to see this 'quantum soup' it turns back into ordinary reality. "Likewise humans can never experience the true texture of quantum reality because everything we touch turns to matter." (Herbert)
"At the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory Bohm began what was to become his landmark work on plasmas. A plasma is a gas containing a high density of electrons and positive ions, atoms that have a positive charge. To his amazement he found that once they were in a plasma, electrons stopped behaving like individuals and started behaving as if they were part of a larger and interconnected whole. Although their individual movements appeared random, vast numbers of electrons were able to produce effects that were surprisingly well-organized... the plasma constantly regenerated itself and enclosed all impurities in a wall in the same way that a biological organism might encase a foreign substance in a cyst... he'd frequently had the impression the electron sea was alive."
In further experiments at Princeton, "...these were no longer situations involving two particles, each behaving as if it knew what the other was doing, but entire oceans of particles, each behaving as if it knew what untold trillions of others were doing. Bohm called such collective movements of electrons plasmons..." (Talbot, p 38)
Published in 1952, building on the premises that particles such as electrons do exist in the absence of observers and that a subquantum level still awaited discovery, "Bohm called his proposed new field the quantum potential and theorized that, like gravity, it pervaded all of space. However, unlike gravitational fields, magnetic fields, and so on, its influence did not diminish with distance. Its effects were subtle, but it was equally powerful everywhere." (Talbot, p 40)
