An Exercise in Mind Expansion: What is Reality?

Science, in all of its breakthroughs and advancements, is still struggling to explain Reality. What is the universe made, who made it, why was it made? We attempted to explain it theologically, through Newtonian physics, through quantum mechanics, through theories of relativity, inflation and multiverses. Some of these theories may explain how the universe works or why it was created, but they fail to actually explain what Reality is, how we can even know there is a Reality, or what the true nature of existence is. 

We really don’t know what the universe is made of. The best answer right now might actually be that it’s made of nothing. 70% of the universe as we know it is made of dark energy. We can’t actually see it, hence the dark description, but if we’re right about gravity, then it has to exist. Dark energy is a force that acts to rip space apart and move galaxies further away from each other. We don’t know what it is, but we can see what it does. It’s actually strange to think that if humans exist long enough, future generations won’t be able to see the 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 estimated stars in our currently known universe.

Eventually, galaxies will continue to move further and further apart, faster than the speed of light. So much so that the light of these stars will not be able to reach us. In the distant future, scientists may think there is only our galaxy and our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, in the entire universe. It’s both sad and funny to think that historians and theologians in the future will claim that trillions of galaxies exists, and hardcore scientists will be like...prove it...and we won’t be able to. Crazy. But enough about that….

So to recap, 70% of the universe is dark energy, which leaves 30%. Of that, 26% is something called dark matter, which is an invisible entity like matter, but it doesn’t contain atoms. Since it’s non atomic, it doesn’t reflect light or emit light (we only see things because energy in the form of photons bounces off atoms and gets sensed by our eyes or the equipment we’ve created to see things). We know it isn't atomic, but it behaves like matter in that it bends space-time the same way regular matter does. It’s actually responsible for the majority of the gravity in the universe. If dark matter didn’t exist, planets would spin out of control and the universe would disintegrate.

What’s left is the 4% of the universe that is atomic, of which 99.99% is invisible interstellar dust like hydrogen gas. So the visible universe is 0.01% of all that exists, which includes hundreds of billions of galaxies, trillions of billions of stars, and trillions upon trillions of planets, all made of atoms. 

These atoms are made up of subatomic particles. Scientific experiments have shown that when these particles are not actively being observed, they remain not as matter, but waves of possibility referred to as Hilbert space. Essentially, they remain “possibility waves” in a mathematical imagination, not something that would be experienced as matter.

So what is the universe made of? We simply don’t know yet. And I love that. I love the mystery, the magic and the empowerment I feel from trying to understand that the material world is ultimately insignificant (mathematically speaking).