Ripples in A Pool Revisited

My post of August 28, 2015, asked a series of questions about those ripples in a garden pool that many of us enjoy creating at one time or another. The ripples travel the length of the pool and return, over and over—for how long? If no one else makes waves in the pool, would our ripples continue traveling back and forth from one end of the pool to the other forever?
The intuitive answer, I believe, is "yes". In the absence of some opposing equal or greater force, the ripples will continue to diminish forever, never reaching, but always approaching, the zero point. That intuitive answer, I believe, is correct, but the logic for the answer is faulty because it fails to take into account an important point—we live in a quantum world. Let me explain.
It is important to establish first that the waves are waves of energy, not waves of water—no water travels the length of the pool—only the energy provided by your initial push travels the length of the pool and returns. (To see this for yourself, drop a cork in the water prior to starting the ripples—the cork will remain at the end of the pool where you dropped it.)
This is important because we live in a quantum world and one of the most important features of a quantum world is that energy is made of fundamental units, indivisible packets, rather than being divisible to a vanishing point. As the successive waves lose more and more of their energy, they eventually will reach that minimum size necessary for energy to exist in our time-and-space world and at that point will simply disappear. Are they gone forever?
It is well-established that at the quantum level time does not pass but is. Just as in our three-dimensional world you do not say that space passes, it simply is, in the many-dimensional quantum world time (one of the many dimensions) does not pass but is.[1]  Those ripples will be there forever, tucked away in their own segment of time. But I must attach a proviso to this answer.
The proviso: The ripples will be there as long as our time-space world continues to exist. Is that forever? I will answer that question pragmatically: It is forever in every sense that matters to us as creatures of time and space.
That established, does it matter that the ripples will be there forever? Very much so since, by extension, we can say that all those "ripples" created by things we share our world with—now, in the future, and in the past—will continue to exist forever. Our ancestors and descendants and the "ripples" they create, will continue to exist "forever".
I would very much enjoy discussing this "forever" question with you. Please comment.

Note 1. See Donald W. Jarrell, At the Edge of Time, 2014, p. 34. See At the Edge of Time.

Next post on a bi-weekly schedule: October 9, 2015.

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A Comparison of Realities

A Comparison of Realities
Compare the realities of the rapidly-emerging virtual reality experience, of our everyday reality, and of the reality the mystic sees. Today's VR experience can seem very real but, experts predict, it will pale in comparison to VR of the future. Virtual Reality will not just be about games. (See Wall Street Journal.) “By the 2030s, virtual reality will be totally realistic and compelling and we will spend most of our time in virtual environments ... We will all become virtual humans.…. this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people.” (See The Atlantic.)
In spite of the compellingly-realistic nature of the upcoming VR experience, when we return from the VR experience to our more-real everyday environment, we will see that VR is not as "real" as is our everyday world—from the vantage point of our everyday world we will see that the VR experience is not the "real" world. For a fuller discussion of this point, see: [1]
Is there an even more "real" world beyond the world we experience every day? Persons who have practiced mysticism contend that there is. Mystics contend that the reality they see is the ultimate reality and that our everyday world is only virtual. From the vantage point of the reality the mystics discover, they see that our everyday world is not the "real" world.
I am sure I have turned off those readers, including the self-proclaimed "hard scientists", who believe that any mention of mysticism means I have lost all claim to be objective. However, an impressive number of scientists believe otherwise.
Paul Davies, an eminent theoretical physicist in his own right, believes that mysticism may provide answers to ultimate questions that our modern-day sciences cannot answer. He says:
“… many of the world's finest thinkers, including some notable scientists such as Einstein, Pauli, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Eddington, and Jeans, have also espoused mysticism.  My own feeling is that the scientific method should be pursued as far as it possibly can.  ….  It is only in dealing with ultimate questions that science and logic may fail us.  I am not saying that science and logic are likely to provide the wrong answers, but they may be incapable of addressing the sort of [ultimate] questions we want to ask.” (Paul Davies, The Mind of God, (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1992, 226)
I believe that as more and more of us experience the immersive technologies of the VR experience and see how difficult it can be to decide if an experience is real from within the reality itself, we will become more acceptant of the idea that the mystics may be right: our everyday world is itself a virtual reality that is so real that we can discover its virtual nature only by experiencing the true reality of the mystical experience.
Please share your thoughts about any of the realities discussed above. If you are, or share the beliefs of a "hard scientist", tell me what, from your viewpoint, I am failing to see. If you are a mystic or have practiced mysticism, please share your experience.

Note 1.
Donald W. Jarrell, At the Edge of Time: Reality, Time, and Meaning in a Virtual Everyday World (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012, 2014.) See especially pages 11-17, of At the Edge of Time.

Next post on a bi-weekly schedule: September 25, 2015.




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