After two sessions discussing the work and sayings of Albert Einstein, he remains one of my heroes.  Einstein is remembered for his worldview altering theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity.  The math and the experiments show that space and time and matter and gravity exist in dynamic relationship.  Space and time are no longer the stage upon which matter does its thing; tadpoles becoming frogs, marginally verbal toddlers into chattering school children, and beans into reliably good coffee at Starbucks.  The space and time of the coffee in my cup, imperceptibly are bent not only by the earths gravity, but by the gravity of the full cup.  My mind spins.  I intend to do additional reading to absorb more of this theory.

Einstein is also remembered for his discomfort with quantum mechanics. His statement, “God does not play dice” is widely known.  Quantum mechanics indicates that at the foundation of reality, matter is composed of energy that acts in a strange and random matter.  Einstein believed that the theories of Heisenberg and Bohr were incomplete, and with additional research a more fundamental structure would be discovered.  Einstein was uncomfortable with uncertainty; subatomic “particles” popping in and out of existence.  According to Heisenberg’s work the position of an electron orbiting a nucleus and its momentum cannot both be determined at the same time.  Your experiment, the nature of the question which is posed will reveal one value or the other.  The experiment itself interferes with the system (nucleus and orbiting electrons) and one property alone can be determined with precision,  position or velocity.  If you want to know the position of your electron, then you will have to forgo knowing its velocity.  You and I, observers, interact with the object of our attention, and there are limits to what can

be known.

Another way of putting it:  A particle exists in many possible states at once,–not quite real until it interacts with something.  The object transforms what might happen into what does happen.  Interaction (quantum measurement) creates an actuality of what was a mere potentiality. –Andre Linde, Russian-American theoretical physicist and the Harald Trap Friis Professor of Physics at Stanford University.

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I’ve been asked more than once, “Why did you join the women’s march in Chicago?  What did you expect to accomplish?”  (This is in reference to the world wide protest the day after the Trump inauguration)  The only satisfying answer that I can formulate:  By virtue of our interaction together, tens of thousands of human “particles,”–what might happen, human rights, perhaps will be transformed into something that does happen.  The possible can be realized, becoming certain.

God dances.