I skipped a major issue a moment ago. We are in the middle of uncontrollable quantum mechanics. Fuzziness prevails here, i.e. a lack of absolute certainty.
I've talked about electrons swirling around atomic nuclei in fixed orbits, which they can jump between so that the atom as a whole gets different charges. This was Bohr's atomic model, but it's wrong.
Werner Heisenberg showed that we can never know for sure where an elementary particle, such as the electron, is located at any given time. Erwin Schrödinger came up with the equation that gives the probability that the particle is in certain places. You can find
a good account of this here.
So there are apparently coincidences involved, but we have equations that help us operationally to control atoms, ions, electrons, photons, etc. – and through that develop everything we have of electronic components and devices, for instance.
I will not try to reproduce how all this takes place but instead comment on the fundamentals. What is happening in essence? What is the explanation for this impenetrable coincidence in quantum mechanics?
Okay, hold on. I shall anticipate something that comes later, namely the complexity mechanisms. The point is to show they are active at the most minor scale. Later we shall see that they also apply at all other scales, even the very greatest, to planets, stars and galaxies, etc. – and also to mental and social processes and absolutely everything else.
In astronomy, it has long been known that when many objects of not too different sizes, such as suns, swirl around each other in a system, their orbits are almost impossible to calculate. The calculation is simple for two objects, but for three or more bodies, it is insoluble except in certain special cases. This is called the
three-body problem.
I have previously said that the elementary particles must result from a long series of emergent notions and that mass and gravity are included as factors.
The microparticles that form the raw material for the emergence of higher-order elementary particles move relative to each other in a way that is mathematically impossible to describe – as multibodies in a complex system. Thus, it is also impossible to confidently say when and where the higher-order elementary particle appears. We can only formulate this as an average probability, which is what the Schödinger equation does.
I throw this in as an idea to those who understand quantum physics to the core.
I suspect it is possible to arrive at the Schödinger equation by performing statistical analysis of the equations that govern complex systems, such as those used to study weather systems.
What I am saying here is not for lay people, but as I said, we will return to
complexity in many other contexts. Here you can see how I describe the
three-body problem later in the book.
