Dream Atom
There is a natural tendency to want to laugh at the very idea of a dream Atom. Indulge!
After this bit of indulgence, however, one has to wonder about the true nature of the Atom. Is the scientific Atom really so much different from our proposed dream Atom?
In each case we are dealing primarily with a conceptual or metaphorical atom. In the case of science, the atom, or, actually, the elementary particle is merely the place holder for a, nowadays, mind boggling mathematical superstructure in an at least eleven dimensional abstract space.
Just on the face of it, 'mathematical physics' is an oxymoron. There is nothing even slightly physical about mathematics. What we so quaintly used to think of as the physical has been turned into a mathematical wonderland, full of strange beasts, up to and including the notorious (at least to mathematical physicists) Monster group, q.v.
Where does the Monster group, which has more elements than Jupiter has atoms, reside, other than in the minds of mathematicians? If it is as objective and as physically significant as it seems, it must also reside in a kind of mental or Platonic ether. Both the Quantum and the Math are pushing physics toward seeming more like a mental abstraction. The closer you look at the Atom, the further does its tangibility recede into these mists.
It seems that the immaterialists are being aided and abetted in these latter days of materialism by the likes of the theoretical physicists. Perhaps the world did spring directly from the quantum potency prior to the Big Bang. Or it may as well have sprung right from the head of Zeus or some mathematician God. Now if God is as lazy as I sometimes suspect, she would not have to have worked out all this physics by herself. She could simply have recruited our erstwhile mathematicians to work it out in teleological fashion. We had better keep them on the payroll, because they are helping to design the world. Getting rid of them would be as problematic as going back in a time machine and killing one's own grandmother.
If our atoms had emerged accidentally and not been designed in such a teleological fashion by our mathematical physicists, they would never have given rise to us quantum observers to help reify their existence. This is what relational existence is all about. You scratch my back, and I scratch yours.
Because each atom implements the entire realm of mathematics, they are indeed the microcosmic cornerstones of our reality. All of the prerequisites of our consciousness are thus ensured by their very manner of design. The dream Atom is God's primary bootstrapping tool. Very clever of Her.
5/25/02