I have often been fascinated by this idea that everything happens in the squishy space between things: it's all about relationships - you are not so much what you are made of, but the relationship between those items (within and without).
Well, my man Dr. Derek Muller has knocked it out of the park again. In a recent video he shows how the very color of light - its frequency or wavelength, is a construct of relationship. Whether the photon is blue or red depends not just on its intrinsic properties but also your relationship to the photon (are you moving away/towards? Are you cosmically far from it? Are you at a different location in a gravitational well?). Mass, color, your personality: all constructs of relationship. So little is actually intrinsic!
If a real tree falls in the woods, it certainly creates sound waves even if no one is there to hear it. But, if a quantum particle pops into existence and then out again and no one sees it, was it ever there? If I live by myself on an island for my entire life, do I even have a personality? I'm not so sure...
Even the attributes of fundamental particles are ones of relationship: Spin Up or Down? Need an external field to define up and down. Intrinsic mass? Needs Higgs field to interact with. Charge? Wouldn't know you have it if I didn't have another one to respond to it...
I find myself returning to that classic Carl Sagan saying that gives us all a reason to exist: "We are a way for the Universe to know itself." Deeper every time I think about it, Carl.
Now, What is that frequency, Kenneth?
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