In a way, I paint nothing. Empty space. Nothing can mean many things, mostly absence, but absence does not mean nothing, but rather something else unexpected. Can there exist truly nothing? If one exercises the mindful act of seeing, then a strong argument can be made that within the void there is most definitely “something”; an inherent structure that appears to be omnipresent, homogenous, and perhaps holographic. Subatomically, there is no empty space. Physicists realized that the rate of expansion of the universe was due to a hidden mass/energy, much too much to be accounted for by all the known visible mass. Not able to see it, but knowing it was there, they called it dark energy, or the energy of empty space. Suddenly, the no-thing-ness became thing-ness. Instead of a figure on ground, there is in fact only ground and seemingly disparate objects are in fact united (see non-locality). Could this mean that consciousness itself also has thing-ness, structurally related to this “ether”? It was discovered, shockingly, that the simple observation of subatomic particles affected their behavior. They found that they could know the momentum of a particle, but not it’s position or they could know the position and not the momentum. Here determinism was replaced by probabilities, with the apparent interaction with the observer being the catalyst. What this appears to mean is that when we look at something, we are changing it imperceptibly. If Planks constant were not so small, we may have perceivable changes around us due to our perception. (a new breakthrough expiriment shows the quantum effect works on a larger scale as well- see here.) But even though we cannot perceive it, we are altering our surroundings simply by looking. Quanta exist in superposition, kind of neither here nor there, or in every possibility at once, until someone looks at it, then it takes on thing-ness. It was a wave, now it is a particle. And it turns out that these particles are not really particles but wave packets of standing wave patterns interfering: the ether.

The Creative Act of Seeing | 2011 | dark energy, empty space, ether, non-locality, nothing, painting, plank's constant, standing waves, superposition, uncertainty principle, wave packets | Comments (0)