The point of one of the best books of our time, Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is that even in Science, the most rigorously logical and real-world-grounded of fields, there are no certainties. All the models of reality ever constructed by the human mind have eventually been heavily revised or else tossed out altogether. There is absolutely no reason for us to assume that any of our culture’s current models of reality at any level of resolution—from the subatomic, to the human-scaled, to the cosmic—will be used to guide everyday thinking or scientific research a century from now. There is nothing in the idea of an electron that is immune to being replaced by another, more useful, scientifically effective idea, any more than there was in the ideas of the ether or élan vital or phlogiston—three scientific ideas that are now obsolete.

                                                               

   

                   Artist’s conception of an atom (credit: Greg Robson, via 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 much more radical—that electrons were never there in the first place. Previous generations of high school students 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 see things are longer than the dimensions of an atom. “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 picture that has allowed some scientists to do calculations and make predictions about the reactions these hypothetical atoms will go through if we prod them in ways that are available to us in our labs. 

Even these events at the sub-atomic level that we can predict before we do an experiment have to be watched by instruments that make the events visible to us at our gross, macroscopic, human level. The whole model is very theoretical and there are lots of assumptions made about what is going on between our prodding and an atom’s reaction to it.

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.

What matters for the purposes of this book is that the quantum model of reality works, even if we can’t picture the reality it describes. The formulas enable scientists to predict upcoming events and to build powerful techonologies. Furthermore, quantum theory has profound implications for our world view. It thus has profound implications for our ethical beliefs, values, cultural morés, and patterns of survival-oriented behavior.