Here is something I have been thinking about for many many years (according to my own notebooks, as long ago as the late 1970s), but I credit the writer, artist and inventor Doug Yerchey with publishing the idea in a 2002 article on the World Mysteries web site. He begins by discussing the peculiar duality of light (photons, electromagnetic radiation) that can appear as either particle or wave. The paradox is resolved by understanding relative motion. If a photon zips past you at light speed, it is a wave. If you travel along at light speed right next to that photon, it appears as a particle. Masses of such particles tracking coherently through space at light speed form physical objects. If we are moving in the same direction at the same speed, we can see those objects; otherwise they appear as light to us.

I have long speculated that the only substance in the Universe is light — photons, moving in great arcs through the vast reaches of space. Over time, some of those photons have “clumped together” into larger and larger conglomerates, and through the course of billions of years have become the basic building blocks of physical worlds. Yet their essential nature is unchanged — they are still photons, coursing through space at light speed.

This is a subject we will return to again and again over the course of this weblog. But for now, I suggest you sit with the idea for a while.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,