Gestalt - How It Is You May Have Visited The Galactic Core, And Why You Didn't Stop At The Duty-Free Shop

Let's talk about photons for a bit.

The photon is a massless elemental particle or wave or (most accurately) both. By virtue of being massless, it must (not just "can") travel the speed of light (at least in a vaccuum.) I'm not going to get into the physics of it, but that's how it works out, no exceptions: No mass = speed of light.

But where do these perfect little bits of massless non-stuff come from? Well, when you have a massive particle and a massive antiparticle ("massive" as in "they have mass," not "lots of mass,") and they come into contact, they annihilate each other, turning into one or more photons. When an electron falls from one energy state to another, photons may be produced, as well as from mass/energy conversions occurring during fission and fusion. And it goes the other way, too; a photon can turn into a particle and an antiparticle, or can be absorbed by an atom, boosting an electron to a higher energy.

And those particles and antiparticles can combine and recombine and turn into other particles and antiparticles, and take on charge and change energies and do all kinds of other weirdness that, luckily enough, results in us having an observable universe.

In fact, given sufficient time and a bit of energy, both of which the universe has in abundance, any photon is capable of eventually morphing through a bewildering series of steps into any particle, subparticle, energy packet, or waveform that exists.

More to the point is that the whole menagerie of particles, sub-particles, and quantum quasi-particle events, including electrons, protons, neutrons, gluons, gravitons, quarks, neutrinos, rays, AND all their anti-particles -- all have a life at some point or another that was/is/will be a photon or, more accurately, a massless particle.

Now, an important thing that you probably don't know about anti-particles (presuming you know anything at all about them:) They can be considered as "normal" particles which are travelling backward in time. For example, an anti-electron (positron) is not just an electron with a positive charge and opposite "spin," but actually can for all purposes be considered an electron which is travelling backward in time.

And what about our photon? Well, not only is a photon its own anti-particle, it is also time-independent. That is to say, the photon acts exactly the same whether it is moving forward or backward in time and one cannot be differentiated from another on that basis.

(Do we need to talk about time? Probably, but for now, just accept that time is simply another of 11 or so dimensions needed to explain our universe, may not exist at all except as a construct of how our consciousness perceives things, and our that our observation of it as a one-way stream is almost certainly wrong; and in any event, which direction it is being traversed matters not a whit to the universe in general nor our photon in particular.)

Now, let's combine that with the previously mentioned ideas that

1. All particles can be derived from massless particles in general and photons in particular;
2. All massless particles travel at the speed of light.

And now toss in the final bit: Things moving at the speed of light are "outside" the time stream of the universe; that is to say that the faster an object/particle travels, the more the object's internal "clocks" slow down, as observed from outside the particle. Something travelling near the speed of light "ages" MUCH more slowly than objects which are not - and objects travelling AT the speed of light (say, our photon, for example) don't age at all - their time stops.

The result of this is that an object moving at the speed of light can travel any distance without getting any older, without changing. Since time has stopped for the particle/object, it can travel literally from one side of the universe to the other in zero time (from its point of view.) From our point of view, this might take trillions of years or more. From the particle's point of view, it occurs instantly.

In fact the particle can navigate the fantastically complex geometry of our little enclosed infinity and move back and forth across the universe a near-infinite number of times in near zero time, periodically pausing to convert to particles and anti-particles (or time and anti-time particles, as you prefer) and all their progeny; all the types of particles that exist, in other words.

Since this is actually creating and annihilating particles moving both backward and forward in time, and almost always in pairs, the "time" the photon is spending in "real" particle space works out to zero.

Which means - and here we finally arrive at the point - that there is no particular reason to believe that everything in the universe that we can observe (and a whole lot of stuff we can't) wasn't created by a single photon moving back and forth across space and time, like a loom's shuttle, building our entire universe one infitesimal line, color, particle, and piece at a time as its travels intersect our "now" over and over and over again.

Which would actually be pretty cool, if it were true (and it may well be.) The result would be that not only are we all related, not only are we affected by everything in the world or the universe, we actually, in a very literal sense, ARE everything in the world, and indeed, the universe.

If true, our photon created and IS every single particle and hair and bit of meat and bone of us and is in fact the very breath in our nostrils; and it's the same photon which is the meat and bone and breath of everyone, of every animal, plant, of every stone, or drop of water, quantum of heat, gamma ray, sunbeam, and galaxy.

How's THAT for connectedness?

Or maybe not.

But just the fact that something like that is possible, and is supported by the physics we know, along with all the quantum bubbles, and inflaton fields and infinite, "can't get my head around the scale of even the local parts of it" EVERYTHING, sort of mitigates against the idea that we are a unique thing, or that it was all done to produce US, right?

Ah, but then that assumes a pretty limited definition of "us."

Perhaps more about that later.

In Our Next Episode: Overlapping Infinities, Multiverse Matrices, Inflaton Fields, and Backwoods Arkansas Stills: A Spiritual Journey