Guest Article: Jason Mendel - The Last Proton
A thought experiment that merges physics, consciousness, and spirituality
Ahoy folks.
So, look, for some reason that I cannot put my finger on, I’ve been lucky enough to land a whole load of new subscribers here on Substack. So, thanks to everyone for joining of late, and, of course, to the people who’ve been here for a while.
I wanted to share the love a bit, so I’ve asked a buddy of mine who’s quite into metaphysics and spirituality to do a guest post.
It’s mighty stuff. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
The Last Proton
Follow me on a thought experiment through some simplified physics. An understanding of why physics works like this is not a requirement, so just sit back and enjoy the journey.
When we talk about looking for the Divine, we often consider it to be in a specific direction: Up.
You can take a stairway to Heaven, where God lives above the clouds. Spiritual beings are entities from a higher dimension. We have to raise our “vibration” to reach specific levels of consciousness.
And consciousness we consider something to be a property that Humans have, shared by some animals, though perhaps without a clear border as to which creatures possess it and which do not. Are microscopic organisms conscious? Humans certainly have sapience and sentience; most complex animals have at least sentience, but where does the line lie?
I’d like to examine the idea that consciousness fundamentally holds the entire universe together, and that we find the Divine at its most base level rather than in some lofty place above it.
Conscious Particles
A proton is one of the fundamental building blocks of matter.
We have macroscopic objects which are composed of molecules. Molecules are composed of atoms. Atoms are composed of a nucleus and an electron cloud. The nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons.
Protons are composed of quarks, however quarks are interesting in that they do not occur in isolation. If you have enough energy condensed in a singular location, they pop into existence in pairs.
There are a slew of other microscopic particles, but we will ignore them for this thought experiment.
Protons are conscious. Every other particle is as well, but today, we’re examining protons.
Consciousness, for this discussion, can be considered as a state in which a subject is aware of its surroundings.
A proton is certainly aware of its surroundings and reacts to them. Gravity and Electromagnetism pull and push on it, tossing it around in any number of directions. The Strong Force holds it together in the nucleus of an atom. The Weak Force can change it into a neutron if one of its quark’s decays and changes flavor.
In fact, Gravity and Electromagnetism have infinite ranges. This means that every single proton is conscious of every other object in the whole of the cosmos. Every single thing that exists pulls or pushes on it from across space and time.
Perhaps this makes a proton as conscious as we are. It “knows” about the entire universe, and though it may not have “thoughts” about it, it still is capable of reacting to it.
Relative Measures
The only way that we can describe things in our universe is by relating them to other things. We do not have any absolute scale of measurement.
We live within four dimensions: height, length, width, and time.
Height, length, and width are what we call “spatial” dimensions. This means they have a physical property of size. They are directions in which we can travel.
However, the only way we have to measure them is by relating them to objects. We can set a standard and measure something by a physical item, such as a ruler, which is the same size as other measurement items. We can measure by the distance an object of a known speed travels over a period of time. We can even use light to do this since it moves very fast and always moves at the same speed.
But light does something interesting: It always moves at the same speed, no matter what your speed is in relation to it. It always travels at the “speed of light.”
This means that someone standing still and someone moving measures the distance it has traveled differently, since its speed is seen as the same by both of them.
In measuring in this fashion, we are using time as our relative observation device instead of a physical object.
Time is not a spatial dimension. We cannot physically move along its axis by traveling.
Instead, its arrow is entropy: the tendency of things to change from an ordered state to that of disorder. This is why jenga towers always fall down, instruments go out of tune, and headphone cables get tangled in your pocket.
But even this is relative. If we are moving very fast relative to someone not moving at all, we will actually measure different amounts of time passing for each of us. We cannot even say which of us is moving and which is still without comparing our speed to that of other objects around us.
Because of the way our measurements change with movement, and that we do not have any absolute perspective from which to measure things, we can say that the reality of anything we observe is subjective. That is, it is only “real” to the subject observing it. A different subject may see it in a different way.
So, in this fashion, reality requires observation. There is no objective state we can say it is in without including the perspective from which we observe it.
So what happens when there is only one perspective remaining?
The Far Future
We have our conscious proton, existing in space since the beginning of the universe.
But protons, theoretically, do not persist forever. Entropy claims all victims, and in 10^40 years or so, a proton will break down releasing a positron and a pion which will also decay into pure energy in a matter of nanoseconds.
In the far distant future, we can imagine there are only two protons left. They may be near each other; they may be impossibly far apart.
They have seen the entirety of the universe appear and dissolve into nothingness. Stars flared to life and exploded over and over again. Black holes slowly evaporated. The microwave background radiation, the reason your TV antenna picks up static between channels, slowly cools to near absolute 0. Space itself expands, slowly cutting off parts of the universe from other parts forever.
Our protons have felt all of this happen over uncountably long years.
Eventually, the only thing they feel is each other.
One day, without any sort of flare, one of the protons decays.
Forces move at the speed of light, but they still take time to cross space.
A wave sweeps across the gravitational and electromagnetic fields as they flatten out, eventually reaching our singular remaining proton. Telling it that its partner has dissolved.
Though it is impossibly small, it still does have a measurable size. It has a radius and internal parts.
But it feels nothing else. Only itself.
Finally, this proton, the last thing in the universe, falls apart.
And here, an interesting thing happens.
There is no conscious observer remaining, and nothing with which to compare itself.
Distance and size no longer have meaning. There is effectively no such thing as spatial dimensions anymore. There is no difference in saying that the universe is infinite in expanse or it is a single point.
Similarly, there is nothing left to change, no further order to collapse, and so time has stopped.
We have reached zero dimensions.
And contained within those zero dimensions, at this base fundamental level of the universe outside of time and space, is the instantaneous summation of everything that ever existed as well as the potential of everything that did not exist.
History and boundless unrealized futures are encoded within this immeasurable point of nothingness. And because it exists outside of time, it currently exists for you right now.
And so it is down to zero, the removal of all dimension, which leads to the infinite all.
It is this place, without time or space, beyond death, beyond existence itself, in which spirituality tells us the Divine is found.
And we got there by moving down to nothing.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. But to find the Divine, you must look into non-existence.
Jason Mendel
A Lamp in the Underworld
If you liked this post (or wrote this post), you might enjoy Waysun Liao's 'Dimension One: the laws of the universe according to Tao'