Page "religion" Paragraph 244

Then came the scientific revolution in the late 1920's.

A suggestion from Louis De Broglie, a physicist in France, showed us that these electrons are not point particles but waves.

And to see the meaning of this new picture, imagine that you can put on more powerful glasses and go back inside the atom and have a look at it in the way we view it today.

Now as you step inside, instead of seeing particles orbiting around like planets, you see waves and ripples very much like the ripples that you get on the surface of a pond when you drop a stone into it.

These ripples spread out in symmetrical patterns like the rose windows of a great cathedral.

And as the waves flow back and forth and merge with the waves from the neighboring atoms, you can put on a magic hearing aid and you hear music.

It is a music like the music from a great organ or a vast orchestra playing a symphony.

Harmony, melody, counterpoint symphonic structure are there ; ;

and as this music ebbs and flows, there is an antiphonal chorus from all the atoms outside, in fact from the atoms of the entire universe.

And so today when we examine the structure of our knowledge of the atom and of the universe, we are forced to conclude that the best word to describe our universe is music.