The point of one of the seminal books of our time, Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is that even in Science, the most rigorously logical and real-material-world-grounded of fields, there are no certainties. All the models of reality ever constructed by the human mind have undergone revisions or even total overthrow in the past. There is absolutely no reason for us to assume that any of our culture’s mental models of reality at any level of resolution—from the subatomic, to the human-scaled, to the cosmic—will be used to guide scientific research a century from now. There is nothing in the idea of an electron that is immune to being superseded by another, more useful, scientifically effective idea, any more than there was in the ideas of the ether or phlogiston—two scientific ideas that are now obsolete.

                                                                   

   

                              Artist’s conception of a carbon atom  (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

And electrons themselves? Will they cease to exist? That’s absurd, you say. In truth, it isn’t at all. Quantum physicists are investigating something far more radical—that electrons were never there in the first place. Previous generations of high school children were taught to draw the atom or the electron in a model that resembled our solar system; at the time, it was a useful model of subatomic reality. New models of the atom that have been developed recently cannot be drawn at all.

The waves of light that enable humans to use vision as a primary sense are longer than the dimensions of this hypothetical atom or electron. “What does an electron look like?” is an incoherent question. Electrons don’t “look” like anything we can imagine, even if we could pool all the seeing and imagining that our species has ever done. That solar system–like model of the atom is just a useful model that has enabled some scientists to do calculations and make predictions about the phenomena these hypothetical particles will produce at the level that is observable to us if we prod those particles in certain ways that are available to us in our laboratories and cyclotrons.

But no physicists really think clouds of tiny bullets are whirling around down at the subatomic level. That model has had its uses, but we must not become attached to it. Its day is all but up, and new results are defying many of the ideas and assumptions that it, for so long, has implied.

However, what matters for the purposes of this book is that the quantum model of reality, even if we can’t picture it, has profound implications for our world view. It thus has profound implications for our ethical beliefs, values, cultural morés, and patterns of survival-oriented behaviour.