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involvement .
    In the common view of the world most of us grew up with, there was a clear division between the subject and the object. Think of the stereotype of the objective scientist, standing cool and detached behind a glass wall, jotting observations onto a clipboard about whatever it is being studied. There is nothing wrong with this image; in fact, we owe this kind of thinking and practice a huge debt for the stunning array of technologies and inventions and luxuries we benefit from every day.
    Somebody figured out how to fit a thousand songs in our pocket. Well done there.
    But this image of detachment,
    standing back at a distance,
    watching and examining and analyzing things from a perceived place of noninvolvement, lives on in a number of ways that aren’t true.
    At the quantum level, to observe the atom is to affect it. The particle is a cloud of possibilities until it’s observed, and then it chooses a particular path. The question you ask light determines whether it will answer as a wave or a particle.
    In the view many have been taught,
    the world is out there,
    stationary and unmoved,
    unaffected by us.
    But in the quantum world,
    observing changes things.
    Matter is ultimately energy, and our interactions with energy alter reality because we’re involved, our world an interconnected web of relationships with nothing isolated, alone, or unaffected.
    Even when there is an actual glass wall—
    as helpful and accurate as traditional scientific
    understandings are—
    there is no glass wall in the end.
    Central to the isolated, detached, common modern worldview is the assumption that things exist in empty space. Us outside, looking in. Studying, analyzing, standing at a distance—observing the world that is out there in empty space .
    But the quantum world teaches us that space is—what’s the best word here?— alive . Particles can be found in what appears to be empty space. The invisible substance between us and the things and people around us actually contains something.
    We are enmeshed in the world around us, not outside looking in, but inside looking . . . inside.
    It’s all energy,
    and we’re all involved.
    These two truths,
    the one about energy and the one about involvement, lead us to a third truth, this one about surprise.
    Your toaster doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Seriously.
    As things heat up, they register different colors, each new color representing an increase in temperature. And so, according to the standard assumptions about heat and corresponding color, your toaster should glow blue.
    But it doesn’t;
    it glows red.
    Why?
    No one knows.
    Which particle will pass through the glass in the shop window,
    and which will reflect back? Where will that electron disappear, and when will it reappear—and where?
    We can predict,
    and we can identify patterns,
    but at the most basic level,
    we don’t know .
    The world surprises us.
    And it surprises scientists too,
    on a regular basis.
    Energy,
    involvement,
    and
    surprise.
    I talk about all of this because when people object to the idea of God, to the idea that there is more beyond our tangible, provable-with-hard-evidence observations and experiences of the world, they aren’t taking the entire world into account. A brief reading of modern science quite quickly takes us into all sorts of interesting and compelling places where the most intelligent, up-to-date, and informed scientists are constantly surprised by just how much more there is to the universe.
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    III. You Dirty Star, You
    Which leads us to you,
    right there in the middle of it all.
    Actually, we are in the middle of it all, with a human being (roughly a meter tall on average, kids included) halfway between the largest size we can comprehend, the width of the known universe, and the smallest size discovered thus far in the universe.
    And you,
    you are fascinating.
    You lose fifty to a hundred and fifty strands