Re-Meditations

A warning. What you will learn as you read this book may utterly change what you believe about the world and, more than that, what you believe about yourself. Before you read what follows, then, take a moment to mull over the following question. What would you say is harder to believe: i) that 500,000 atoms stacked, one on top of another, would make a pile no higher than this piece of paper, or ii) that what you see right now is not a piece of paper, not a page in a book, but part of a movie-like visual field of colors in your mind? To take in the full impact of the first item, the half-million-atom pile no higher than this page is thick, look at the page from its edge and ask if that can possibly be true.* As you think about it, consider what the author of Explaining the Atom wrote: “200, 000, 000 hydrogen atoms could be placed one next to the other in an inch.” That’s four hundred times a half-million. And most of the half-million-atom pile will be almost entirely empty space! (*A majority of my students last semester said “Not possible”!) As for the second item, consider this. It was discovered long before anyone had even the faintest notion that the true facts about physical bodies are nearly incomprehensible, and certainly almost unbelievable. What you see is something entirely private to you. Take a moment to realize that what appears to be this page is not the only thing you see right now. Stare at this X and, while you’re doing it, notice that your field of vision extends from an edge at your right to an edge at your left, from the edge above the X to the edge below it. (The edges are what “peripheral vision” refers to.) That means that you don’t see just the color of what seems to be the page, but the colors of all the other items in your total visual field. Think of it as a movie. What you see when you are watching a movie or a television program is a large picture with many colors. That will help you understand what is meant by saying that your total visual field is like a movie.