W(here)

A thing may be said to be wherever it acts; but the notion that a particle is absolutely present in one part of space and absolutely absent from all the rest of space is devoid of all foundation.

— Peirce (CP 1.38, c. 1890)

According to Swimme and Berry (1992, 28),

to speak of a proton as a separate particle restricted to a certain patch of space-time is to speak of its microphase mode of being, a valid though limited understanding. The macrophase mode or presence of the proton includes all particles with which it is correlated, which includes all those particles it has interacted with at any time in the past. Since the universe bloomed from a seed point, this means that a full understanding of a proton requires a full understanding of the universe. The fireball manifests itself as a quintillion separate particles and their interactions, but the nature of each of these particles speaks of the universe as indivisible whole. No part of the present can be isolated from any other part of the present or the past or the future.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.