From Stardust To Soul: The Evolution Of Values

By Neil Griffiths

Follows a single thread leading from Big Bang and the origin of all matter, through 4 billion years of evolution to the thing we call soul.
Written in order we might better understand what makes us, and the world around us tick, it explains not only why we do what we do but where we are going; in turns: thought provoking, enlightening, amusing and alarming.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Neil Griffiths
• Release date: Oct 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301768615

Book preview

From Stardust To Soul

The Evolution Of Values

Neil L Griffiths

Published by Neil Griffiths 2013

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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from Right Here, Right Now by Jesus Jones

The Author

Neil Griffiths trained as a Chartered Surveyor and worked in property investment and development in London for almost 20 years before he decided he had had quite enough of that, and his then wife decided she had quite enough of him. He then returned to doing the things he had loved doing in childhood: playing with ideas, painting, inventing, making things, composing music and thinking about why things are as they are and how they might be different. In 2000 he met Jane Rosser (who was then working as head of people at the coffee chain Café Nerro) at a party and asked her what her dream was. She said it was to run her own business. After two businesses, a marriage, two sons and a move to a rural idyll in Wiltshire, they are working together as directors of Song, a consultancy that helps organizations and their people find better ways of realizing their dreams and ambitions.

Cover art: Airfield Angelus (N L Griffiths) with kind permission from the David Lathwood AAIW Collection

This book identifies and follows the single thread that leads from Big Bang and the origin of all matter, through 4 billion years of evolution to the operation of the human brain and the thing we call soul. Gathering information from the breadth of scientific knowledge – physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, neuroscience and psychology – and relating it to aspects of human endeavour as diverse as sex, sport, humour, politics, music and business, so as to reveal the mechanisms at work.

Written in order we might better understand what makes us, and the world around us tick, it explains not only why we do what we do but where we are going; in turns: thought provoking, enlightening, amusing and alarming.

Dedicated to Jane, Jack & Noah

For giving me what I foolishly once thought I could take for granted, and then thought would never be mine, and for giving me that which I never dreamt possible.

Index

you can navigate directly to the chapters from this index

to return to the index just touch the chapter heading you have just navigated to

Foreword

Stability From Chaos: The Bedrock of Existence

The Basic Building Blocks

Brainpower

Brain Function + Memes

The Bare Bones of Psychology: False Dawns & Enlightenment

Need

Values

The Envelope of Needs and Values

Mental Processing + Perception + Deciding What To Do – Taking Action

Values – An Evolutionary Perspective

Tradition + Conformity + Security + Power + Achievement + Hedonism + Stimulation + Self-Direction + Universalism + Benevolence

Using Values To See What Makes Us Tick

SDs + ODs + TDs + IDs + MDs + Interpreting Mixed Value Systems + Development Patterns

The Evolution of Cultural Values

Soul

Music + Tastes In Food, Drink & Sex + Stress + Anger & Aggression + Competitive Sport + Guilt + Humour + Morality + Personality

The Final Chapter

So What?

This book refers frequently to DNA (Dominant Needs Analysis). This is a needs and values based tool that informs a range of personal and organizational development consultancy initiatives. It was developed by Neil Griffiths with the support of Prof. Shalom Schwartz of The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This book also frequently refers to DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) which developed Neil Griffiths, Prof. Shalom Schwartz and you, amongst others, as well as permitting the development of DNA (Dominant Needs Analysis).

Foreword

Why can some people write novels able to capture the imagination of millions, while the words of others seem to lie flat and lifeless on the page? Why are some people able to make millions in business while others work just as hard yet never make a penny? Why are some people like a volcano of emotions ready to erupt at any time while others never seem to get their feathers ruffled? Why are some people engaging and others impenetrable? Why do some people lie and cheat while others are kind? Why are some people passionate lovers and others a little more restrained? Why do people vote for different political parties? Why do people enter politics? Why do some people become ruthless dictators? Why do others follow them, let alone become devoted to them? Why do some people believe in God and others don’t? Why do we live in a capitalist society when so many call themselves socialists? Why do some people care about the environment and others aren’t bothered? What makes us different? Why should this be? Would it be better, for our own sakes and others, if we were different from the way we are? If so, how might we change?

The purpose of this book is to try to answer these questions.

The search for the answers has taken me into the realm of psychology. This is not always a great place to be. While the mists of ignorance have largely retreated from most areas of the heath of human understanding, in so doing exposing the proclamations of snake oil salesmen, intoxicated shamen and their ilk to the revealing light of science, in the world of psychology patchy mists prevail, obscuring evidence and inhibiting rational analysis. The ‘wisdom’ of the Victorian and Edwardian ages, and of older traditions, lingers, miasma like, in the airless hollows.

My professional involvement with psychology relates to the world of occupational psychologists, coaches and psychometrics, in which consultants still peddle dark-age enlightenment. This is not to say their work is always ineffective. Some help their clients significantly, despite the tools in which they put their trust.

I am reminded of the story attributed to Albert Szent-György but more often associated with Karl Weick, which goes as follows…

A small group of Hungarian troops were camped in the Alps during the First World War. Their commander, a young lieutenant, decided to send out a small group of men on a scouting mission. Shortly after the scouting group left it began to snow, and it snowed steadily for two days. The scouting squad did not return, and the young officer, something of an intellectual and an idealist, suffered a paroxysm of guilt over having sent his men to their death. In his torment he questioned not only his decision to send out the scouting mission, but also the war itself and his own role in it. He was a man tormented.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, on the third day the long-overdue scouting squad returned. There was great joy, great relief in the camp, and the young commander questioned his men eagerly. Where were you? he asked. How did you survive, how did you find your way back? The sergeant who had led the scouts replied, We were lost in the snow and we had given up hope, had resigned ourselves to die. Then one of the men found a map in his pocket. With its help we knew we could find our way back. We made camp, waited for the snow to stop, and then as soon as we could travel we returned here. The young commander asked to see this wonderful map. It was a map not of the Alps but of the Pyrenees!

The moral of the story being: when you are lost, any old map will do. If Jungian guesswork, ‘seven stages of consciousness’ mysticism or the daily horoscopes give you something to start a conversation with a client, and this leads to a pleasing outcome for all involved so be it. However, if it was possible to give people an accurate map rather than just ‘any old map’ I can’t help but think this would be very much more useful. If I am wrong the Ordnance Survey, Google and Tom Tom are wasting an awful lot of time and effort.

The journey I want to take you on will end up in psychology, but, since this area of science lacks the solid foundations available in others, it has to start somewhere else. Where physics has Newton and Einstein, chemistry Mendeleev and biology Darwin, Crick & Watson, all of whom discovered laws and processes that provided wholly reliable within their field, as far as human experience could ascertain at the time, in the field of psychology there have been no such figures. Freud and Jung are the prominent names that spring to mind, but while they had some interesting things to say, and made a contribution to advancing thinking in the field, ‘interesting things’ are not necessarily true. While plausible, and therefore acceptable to many people, their ideas were not capable of being proved true. Indeed we can now prove they were not true.

This lack of truth hasn’t stopped people laying down the collected ideas of such thinkers as foundation stones for psychology. Many have added bits of religious teachings here, mystic, spiritual insights there, cut and pasted attractive snippets of real science around the edges and then attempted to bind the lot with half-baked, home-spun intuition into some sort of pseudo universal philosophy masquerading as knowledge. As a foundation on which to build a real understanding of the subject they are the intellectual equivalent of quicksand.

Blessed with an absence of a formal or informal indoctrination in these ‘teachings’ I have not been encumbered by having to make sense of reality through this miasma. Perhaps the reason why psychology has not thrown up a Darwin or an Einstein is that it doesn’t need one. The scientifically proven theories they came up with provide the only foundations needed to understand the workings of the human mind. The continuing work of neuroscientists bears testament to this: with each new revelation capable of being understood within the combined framework of relativity and evolution.

It is in my nature to ask questions of myself and others and try to figure out the answers. The answers haven’t always come quickly, partially because I am interested in just about everything. While all the questions posed at the beginning of this foreword concern our psychology, what makes us tick, if all I was interested in was psychology, I would have probably come up with some answers much quicker than I have. While they might have been plausible, it is far less likely they would have been true.

Distracted by such questions as why are stars and planets round, how do fish find their way back to spawning grounds, how is a chair made, how does electricity work, how do you install central heating, what is cancer, how do computers work, what makes hard things hard, why are large organizations so inefficient, why does food go off, why do politicians behave the way they do, what makes Radiohead and Led Zeppelin so great, what’s the art of a great risotto, why do I sometimes have to colour a wall green in a painting for it to look like grey stone, why is Barcelona such a good football team, why is the sky so beautiful and why am I here, I have been making slow progress in all directions rather than steaming ahead in any one.

It is true that the greater the breadth of one’s foundations the higher one can build one’s knowledge, but perhaps more importantly, the wider your field of knowledge the more you are likely to find unexpected similarities and patterns in disparate areas. If one is able to connect these it is possible to find keys by which to unlock large areas of previously missing knowledge very quickly; just as one if is playing the equivalent of the ‘minesweeper’ game supplied on every PC I have ever used: one click of the mouse and, instead of the contents of just one tile being revealed, a whole section of the grid is exposed.

The meanderingly slow progress made in my early formative years has eventually paid dividends. While I remain a Jack of All Trades and master of none, my mastery of certain aspects of behavioural psychology would now seem to be greater than far too many of those who set themselves up as masters, or if not masters, as practitioners.

As a Jack of All Trades I am indebted in particular to two individuals, both of whom are masters, and whose insights have helped me turn what was a recognisable, if slightly hazy, black and white, small screen picture of what makes us tick into a high definition, richly coloured, wide screen picture in which the seeming miracle of human existence and consciousness is revealed.

Professor Shalom Schwartz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is an internationally garlanded psychologist, and the author of the Portrait Values Inventory, which, through extensive, peer reviewed, international and pan cultural research involving hundreds of thousands of people, codified the system of values we all use to make decisions. Once introduced to his work, after a short period of consternation, the extraordinary significance of his work has been an ever unfolding and illuminating source of joy to me. His kind response to what was effectively a cold call from an amateur has enabled me to develop his work to offer practical help for many people and organizations, and his subsequent support has led to further research I hope will extend the reach of this.

Secondly I want to thank Tom Mitchell. Tom was educated as an evolutionary biologist specialising in botany and graduated from Cambridge with a 1st before continuing there for his PhD. While he subsequently veered from the path of intellectual righteousness to become an investment banker, I met Tom shortly after he had returned to botany, having emotionally crashed and burned during the vertiginous climb to what became the precipice of the global financial meltdown, and set up a specialist nursery growing various exotic species raised from seed he combs the world in search of.

Evolutionary biology remains Tom’s passion - all manifestations of it. Included in which is the field of psychology; an area Tom has something of a special interest in, having suffered protractedly from depression; although, perversely, he is one of the least depressing, most engaging, fascinated by life and good humoured people I have ever had the good fortune of getting to know. In our early, red wine soaked evening discussions he pointed out the preposterousness of my staking out any claim to understand the operation of the human mind without first understanding evolution.

I considered myself familiar with the basics of evolution, and perhaps I was, but as I was soon to discover, this basic understanding did not include a full grasp of the fundamentals. At Tom’s introduction I have now enjoyed conducted tours of the fascinating world of genetics that is evolutionary biology, and from this developed some greater understanding of the workings of the brain in terms of evolutionary psychology. It is both extraordinary and so typical of human frailty that I should have previously thought it possible to understand psychology without understanding genetics. Looking back it seems as ridiculous as thinking one could understand accountancy without understanding arithmetic.

This book is intended to encapsulate what I have come to understand about why we are here, how our brains evolved, the nature of consciousness and how we came to have a quality people recognise as soul. It is a book that addresses the question why. Unfortunately knowing why isn’t as much use to people as it should be; too often we either respond with a that’s interesting or so what? This book is for people who are more likely to respond with an aha and a so that means if we just ……

My interest is always drawn to why, because once I understand this I can more often than not generally answer the ‘so what’ and work out how to put the knowledge to good use. For those who haven’t the time or interest to invest in gaining an understanding of why, it is my intention to follow this book with a more concise book of ‘how’s that will be quicker to read and easier to follow. Since I don’t possess the elevated status that might incline the potential audience for a book of ‘how’s to believe what I say is any more worth listening to than the next soap box ranter, my hope is for this book to fall into the hands of people capable of recommending my thoughts to a higher authority and, through them, they might acquire some greater credibility. While it is something of a personal mission to encourage people to think more clearly for themselves, and stop needlessly deferring to and believing in others, I understand those who have already acquired some level of authority, and are therefore able to deliver simple messages to a credulous audience, enjoy a competitive advantage over those whose sole weapons are reliable information and reason.

Stability From Chaos: The Bedrock of Existence

This book was inspired by my work on values: what they are, how fundamentally important they are to us, how they work, where they come from and what we can do with them. Most of us seem to have some idea of what values are; there’s enough talk of them in the media. However, unless you are a specialist in this area of psychology, you are unlikely to know too much about them, and this means you are missing out on perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of what makes you, and the world around you, tick.

Before plunging into the meat of the subject I feel I need to do my best to dispel a generalised prejudice plaguing the subject of psychology. This relates to the tendency for us to enter into the subject from our personal perspective, or from the perspective of mankind in general. The problem with this approach is our ability to fully understand what makes us tick is blinkered by preconceptions about what we are and what motivates us. And since, as I will later explain, it is our values that play a key role in motivating us, this prejudice needs to be expelled.

The general prejudice affecting our understanding of our psychology appears to come from two sources: (1) our tendency to see our world as being centred on ourselves, and (2) the belief there is some purpose to our existence. The first inclines us to give undue significance to personal experience. The second causes us to think we are being drawn toward an uncertain goal, or being propelled, by some unseen force.

The self-centred view of the world is the only one we have. It works very well for us, providing us with very specific, well-targeted information. However, as with any view taken from a single perspective, not everything may be visible to us, and even the things that are may be misinterpreted because we cannot fully appreciate them from our position. If we see only part of a picture, or know only part of a story, we can quite easily, and often do, jump to the wrong conclusion, or a whole host of wrong conclusions. So, while personal experience is important, it’s not enough.

When it comes to addressing the question ‘why are we here?’ even if we are not religiously minded, we are all conditioned to see ourselves as being at the centre of some greater process, in which humanity, and life in general, is of fundamental importance. This may seem to be an uncontentious belief, and one that should present us with no particular difficulties. However, it is a misplaced belief, and, as such, it promotes and sustains ignorance. While it is occasionally said ignorance is bliss, if we really believe this we should immediately close all our schools and universities, burn all books, shut down all institutions imparting any kind of information and, if we are going to be really thorough about it, steadfastly avoid speaking to our children so as to limit their ability to learn. Having gone this far we might as well, while we are at it, stop feeding them. Life is about learning. Learning dispels ignorance. Knowledge helps us.

If you want to understand how something works it can be helpful to examine it and take it apart. We can see how a toy car is propelled by its turning wheels. If we turn it over we can see its wheels are attached to axles, and if we take the bottom off the car we will see one axle has a cog on it that engages with another attached to a little box that is its motor. Inside this box we will find metal blocks surrounding a block of coiled wire that can be made to rotate on its own little axle, and wires attaching the metal blocks to a battery. The more we take the car apart and test each component the more we will discover about how it works. Armed with this information we would be better able to build our own car, repair this car if it broke or maybe even design an improved car.

In order to build a complete picture of what we are and what makes us tick, it might be helpful if we were able to dismantle ourselves, so we could look at every component, no matter how small, see what it does, try to understand how it works and what makes it work. Fortunately, for many aspects of a human being, this work has already been done.

Rather than attempt to start the process of explaining what we have learned from these investigations, working backwards from a complete human being toward a box full of strange and potentially hazardous bits and pieces (subatomic particles and energies), I will start from these tiniest components and work upward. This makes more sense to me because, unlike when we are dealing with the remains of a dismantled toy car, the components we are left with are all the same; i.e. the bits used to build the brain are the same as those used to build our feet, our blood, our eyes and even our thoughts. Instead of the motley collection of differently shaped bits of plastic and metal we might get from a routinely dismantled toy car designed to fit together in only one way, when human beings are fully (and I mean fully) dismantled we end up with a collection of bits that can be used to build anything: a toy car, a cloud, a rainbow, a tune or an atomic bomb. Because there is no more to us than these building blocks, if we begin by gaining a true understanding of what these blocks are and how they work, it should be easier for us to see how we are constructed, and come to realise this requires no magic or design.

I should perhaps here issue a short warning. What comes next might be filed under the heading of science, or, more specifically physics, chemistry and biology with a itsy-bitsy bit of maths thrown in for good measure. I really shouldn’t have to do this, but I know many who profess an interest in psychology struggle with science; perhaps feeling psychology is something one can fully understand from observing social interaction and the superficial contemplation of emotional issues.

As a consequence of certain value priorities people have, which we will get to later, there are people who will begin reading the next few pages and quickly decide the subject matter has nothing to do with what interests them, i.e. what makes people tick. If you are one of these people, and you are inclined to skip to the main action, or worse, to set the book aside, I would urge you to have patience and do your best to engage, because it is the foundation for everything that follows. Without an understanding of the basic building blocks of matter and life, any subsequent 'understanding' you may acquire is likely to suffer from a tendency toward subsidence.

I’ll try to keep it brief but, as the band Simian sang in an old favourite song of mine, chemistry is what we are, and, without a solid scientific foundation, psychology can quickly descend into mumbo jumbo and claptrap.

The Basic Building Blocks

At one level of deconstruction all material things in the world are made of atoms. Broadly speaking these atoms come in 92 different types: the 92 naturally occurring elements. In the average human body 60 of these different building blocks are likely to be found, but Oxygen (65% by mass), Carbon (18%), Hydrogen (10%), Nitrogen (3%), Calcium (1.4%) and Phosphorous (1.1%) are the most significant (accounting for over 95% of our mass). Also present and acting between these atoms are the forces of gravity and electromagnetism.

All matter creates its own gravitational field. Einstein’s general theory of relativity explains it as ‘a deformation in four dimensional space time’ that we might visualise in three dimensions as being similar to the effect created by a heavy ball resting in its own depression in a stretched, thin, elasticated sheet. Objects being rolled across the deformed sheet move in a similar way to objects moving through another object’s gravitational field. If they approach directly they will quickly fall into its centre and stay there. If they approach at more of an angle they may go into orbit around the centre. If they pass across the outer edge of the depression quickly they may just be deflected slightly toward the centre before carrying on their way.

The strength of a gravitational field is proportional to the mass of the object (or collected objects at its centre) and the distance at which the measurement is being taken. So it is, relatively speaking, very weak with objects as small as atoms, somewhat stronger when dealing with planets such as the Earth and very much stronger when dealing with things as massive as stars like our sun, but its effect at any one point is dependent on how close this point is to the various centres of gravity. So while the gravitational pull of the Sun is vastly greater than that of the Earth, we are only aware of the Earth’s pull on us. The gravitational pull of the Sun on the Earth is what keeps us orbiting it so that we benefit from its electromagnetic radiation (heat and light). Yet, as far as we are concerned, despite its much greater overall gravitational field, the Sun’s gravitational pull is trumped by that of the Earth when we are as close to it as we are. If it weren’t we would be drawn off the surface of the Earth and propelled toward the Sun.

Gravity is weak enough on Earth that it can be overcome by relatively little things like us every time we want to pick up small objects, but between large objects it can be irresistible, and since it exerts its pull over tremendously long distances, it is gravity, and its ability to pull matter of any size and any description inexorably together, that has given rise to the vast congregations of matter that make up our world, and upon which our very existence is dependent.

Our universe began with an event we have called Big Bang. Our perception of space and time, or space-time as physicists since Einstein refer to the stuff of the universe, originated from a singularity, a single point. All the matter in the universe was fired out from a single point at this time and has been spreading out ever since. We know this because if we rewind the chronological record of the movement of galaxies we have gathered from observations and measurements, and continue this backwards we find all the matter in the universe converges on a single point.

We don’t understand what triggered Big Bang and what there was before it. This is one of the frontiers of human understanding. It stands where the finite edges of the supposedly flat Earth and the celestial sphere that once was thought to surround the spherical Earth one stood. However, after the moment of Big Bang we are able to understand the evolution of matter and the universe as a relatively simple and predictable mechanism. Just as Newton’s laws would enable us to see just a glimpse of the starburst from an exploded firework and work out the exact place at which the firework exploded, Einstein’s laws enable us to wind back time to the beginning of the universe, identify its point of origin and account for the otherwise inconceivable truth that all the matter in the universe could be condensed into an infinitesimally small space, due to the transformational potential of matter, energy, space and time. Since the moment of Big Bang nothing unpredictable has happened, or is happening. Any god or unknowable force people choose to believe in has not intervened so as to have made any observable effect on anything in the universe since Big Bang.

The principal reason why the universe isn’t a uniformly expanding dust cloud is gravity. Particles are drawn slowly together, and as they do they become more attractive to other particles. As they increase in mass gravity crushes them into the most efficient, load bearing shape possible: the sphere. That is why stars and planets are all spherical.

The other form of energy is electromagnetism. The electromagnetic spectrum covers such things as heat, light, radio waves and X-rays, which are all manifestations of the same thing, just with different wavelengths and energy levels. Electromagnetic energy is understood to comprise individual bullets of energy (or quanta) called photons. Photons are pure energy and have no mass. They can be absorbed and emitted by atomic particles, and it is the release of photons from electrons moving from atom to atom, and to different energy levels within an atom, that give rise to all the most familiar manifestations of electromagnetic energy we experience.

If we look inside the atoms we find a greater level of uniformity, in that inside the atom of each different element we find five ingredients common to every one: electrons, protons & neutrons (the nominally ‘solid’ bits) and the strong and weak nuclear forces (the nominally ‘invisible’ bits). The electrons in your brain are the same as the ones in your feet, and are the same as the ones you would find in a walrus, a piece of wood and a bomb, and are the very same things that make all your electrical appliances work. With the caveat that neutrons and protons are made of even smaller particles, we know that all matter is made of these things. The elements differ only because of the number of these teeny-weeny components clustered together in their atoms.

The significance of this information is we know exactly how these components behave at all times. They observe rules that can be easily understood and mathematically modelled. Our understanding of these rules may not allow us to accurately predict and immediately understand everything in our world, but this isn’t due to our understanding of the basics being insufficient, it is just the possible range of interactions between these components is staggeringly large. When we toss a coin we can’t usually be certain which side will come up, but this is only because we can’t accurately gauge how hard we flick it, the height from which we flick it, where exactly our thumb is placed and the speed and density of the air-flow around it in flight. If we were we wouldn’t need to guess. These things are knowable, and therefore if we could measure them all we could determine the outcome as soon as the coin left our thumb.

When we analyse anything new we always find it can be completely understood in terms of the known behaviours of these components. The point being, in the context of the world as we encounter it here on planet Earth, while we are still filling in the details - the Higgs Boson being a notable recent discovery - we broadly understand how it all works, and can accurately model how the tapestry of existence will respond when we interfere with it. There is no room for an unseen hand, there are no mystery ingredients, there are just these infinitesimally small things doing nothing in particular apart from just being.

This becomes particularly important to bear in mind as we build up a clearer picture of how these components make us what we are, when we might otherwise be tempted to feed in abstract forces or concepts such as spirituality or destiny. While the awesomely complex machine of existence often seems to be too fantastic to understand, when we look deeper and deeper into its machinations, all we find are countless little cogs made up of these elementary particles and forces, and they are all behaving just as we would expect them to; moving only as the forces between them compel them. There is nothing else. Absolutely nothing.

While the world we can model with our understanding of the above ingredients is fully functional, detailed and true, to better understand the way it operates, and therefore how we operate, it proves useful to look a little deeper at these sub atomic components.

When we examine all the big things in the world, peeling back layer after layer, right down to the atomic level, we find everything in its right place, where we expect it to be. However, as we open up the atom and look inside the miniscule universe within, things start getting strange. While we are able to model how sub atomic components behave with sufficient accuracy to allow us to design and build bombs capable of releasing their energy and destroying entire cities and everyone living in them in the process, when it comes to getting a clear and unambiguous understanding of what these particles are, and where exactly we can find them at any one time, things get a bit tricky.

As a schoolboy I was taught the sub atomic world was like a miniature solar system, in which the nucleus of protons and neutrons was like the sun with electrons orbiting like planets around it. However, it turns out that if we were able to miniaturise ourselves, so we might visit this inner solar system, we would not be able to locate, let alone land upon, an electron as we might a planet. It seems the best we could hope for is to dream we caught a fleeting glimpse of something that perhaps looked like a momentary holographic projection of what we might take to be an electron. Indeed, even the notion of being able to see anything at all becomes a little strained at this level, since the distinction between the ‘invisible’ sub atomic components of energy and the ‘solid’ components of matter becomes blurred and the photons we perceive as light are one of these components themselves. As encapsulated by Einstein’s famous formula E= mc², a little bit of matter is the equivalent of a vast amount of energy – c being the speed of light (a very, very large number) and c² being that very same very, very large number multiplied by itself to create an unimaginably large number. This is why only 730 mg of converted matter (i.e. equivalent to about ten grains of rice) was required to destroy the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the end of World War II.

I am no quantum physicist and cannot pretend to have any great understanding of what goes on