The Hazelnut and the Supercollider:
On Quantum Mechanics, Mystery, and What We Can Know
When physicists probe the quantum realm, they encounter phenomena that seem to defy understanding. Particles behave like waves. Individual photons sent through a double-slit apparatus produce interference patterns as if each particle interferes with itself. Yet measure which slit a particle passes through, and the interference vanishes. These observations have spawned endless debates that often treat quantum mechanics as fundamentally mysterious, even inexplicable.
But what if the mystery arises from our conceptual framework? And what if quantum mechanics isn't describing ultimate reality at all, but rather our systematic way of navigating a reality that exceeds our comprehension? This essay explores how a fourteenth-century mystical vision might help us understand what quantum mechanics reveals—and what it cannot reveal.
Particles Are Part of the Wave
The supposed paradox rests on Aristotelian logic: something must be either a particle or a wave, either discrete or continuous. But what if reality simply is both? When you send the 'particle' through the slit, you're also sending the wave through—because they're not two different things.
Consider bisecting a curve. You create a discrete point, yet the curve remains continuous. The discrete and continuous aren't opposing—they're complementary features of the same reality. Measure the wave, and you get a particle. Observe the particle, and you get a wave. Each measurement is like making a different cut through the same continuous thing from a different perspective.
We're making smaller and smaller bisections—atoms, electrons, quarks, leptons. At each level we find both discreteness (the outcome) and continuity (what we're cutting through). Quantum mechanics reveals what was always true: reality is continuous but yields discrete results when we bisect it through measurement.
Measurement as Co-Creation
Why does adding detectors at the slits change the pattern? When you don't measure which slit, you're bisecting reality at the screen, allowing the continuous aspect to express itself. When you add detectors at the slits, you're making an earlier bisection, creating discrete events there. You can't bisect the same thing in two incompatible ways simultaneously.
Measurement isn't passive observation—it's interaction, relationship, genuine participation in how reality unfolds. Our choices about how to engage shape which aspects manifest. This explains why discovery feels like gift rather than achievement, why moments of understanding have that quality of revelation. We're co-creating not reality itself, but its unfolding, the way discrete manifestations emerge from continuous sustaining.
The Classical World Is Real
Consider QBism (Quantum Bayesianism): the wave function doesn't describe objective reality but represents an observer's expectations about measurement. The quantum formalism succeeds because it's an excellent parable—capturing patterns while being fundamentally about our relationship to reality rather than reality itself.
The real world is the classical world we experience. Einstein was right. The quantum world is an abstract representation, like calculus treating curves as infinitesimal pieces. The quantum formalism is like measuring echoes—systematic patterns in our interactions with reality, but not the thing itself. We're encountering something real, but always through limited perspective, never directly.
The Ineffable
If quantum mechanics is a parable, what is it pointing toward? The answer gestures toward something ineffable—not unintelligible, but exceeding our categories entirely. The classical world is real. The quantum formalism works with extraordinary precision. But the thing itself has this quality of elusiveness, of being more than our descriptions can capture. Not just "we don't know enough yet" but something genuinely beyond complete specification.
Quarks and leptons aren't really different things—they're different ways we partition reality at fine scales, different perspectives on a continuous whole that transcends complete description. We keep bisecting, and reality keeps offering more to discover—but the ultimate nature remains beyond our grasp.
Julian's Vision
In May of 1373, a thirty-year-old woman in Norwich, England, lay dying. She had requested Last Rites. As she gazed at the crucifix brought by a priest, expecting death, something extraordinary happened. She received a series of visions—"showings"—that she would spend the next two decades contemplating and interpreting.
This woman, known to us as Julian of Norwich, later became an anchoress—voluntarily enclosed in a small cell attached to St. Julian's Church, where she lived in prayer and contemplation, offering spiritual counsel through a window while observing church services through another. In this solitude, she wrote "Revelations of Divine Love," the first book in English known to be written by a woman.
In one showing, she saw "a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball." She wondered what this tiny object might be and received the answer: "It is all that is made."
Julian marveled: "I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]." The entire universe appeared so small, so fragile, she couldn't understand how it continued to exist. The answer: "It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God."
Reality doesn't persist through self-sufficiency or mechanical momentum. It is held in being, moment by moment, by love. And love is relational—requiring relationship, communion while preserving distinction. The hazelnut in the palm: held, sustained, maintained in relationship. All of creation exists within relationship, within love, sustained by God revealed as Logos.
The Monastery and the Supercollider
Julian had a monastery cell, perhaps twelve feet square. CERN has a supercollider twenty-seven kilometers around.
In contemplation, Julian saw all that is made as a hazelnut in a hand, sustained by love. She wasn't measuring echoes—she was encountering reality through direct relationship with the infinite. She received understanding about being held in love, about the sustaining nature of existence itself. This was genuine encounter with the source, with the One who holds all things.
CERN builds a massive ring, employs thousands of physicists, generates petabytes of data. And what do they find? They measure echoes—interference patterns, probabilities, correlations. The formalism works with astonishing precision for predictions, but cannot tell them what things actually are. It's a parable, powerful and technologically transformative, but fundamentally indirect.
Neither approach is wrong. They're encountering the same reality through different modes. But they're not equivalent. Physics gives us systematic patterns through measurement—echoes we can formalize. Contemplative vision offers encounter with the Sustainer himself. One is indirect, mediated through mathematics. The other is as direct as finite humans can experience.
CERN measures echoes, develops parables, creates abstractions that let us navigate reality. Julian encountered the reality itself, through relationship with the One who holds it all. Both valid. Both reveal truth. But not the same kind of truth or access.
What Humans Seek
CERN can tell us how particles behave, what forces govern them. Incredibly valuable—technologically powerful, intellectually satisfying. But it can't tell us what it means to exist. It doesn't address the longing for purpose, connection, understanding our place. It doesn't speak to: Why am I here? Does my existence matter? Am I held?
Julian's vision speaks directly to these questions. "It lasteth, and ever shall for that God loveth it"—this addresses the fundamental need to know: Do I matter? Am I valued? She tells us we're not accidents in a void but beloved, held, sustained within relationship, within love, within purpose.
CERN gives us mastery. Julian gives us home. Humans need both—to understand and to belong, the precision of physics and the assurance of being held. But when we speak of what humans fundamentally seek, it's what Julian found that satisfies the deepest hunger: to know we're held in love, that our existence matters.
Resonance Without Proof
Does this prove anything? No. A physicist can legitimately respond: "Your theological framework adds nothing to my ability to do physics." They'd be right. This is metaphysics, not physics—a framework for interpretation, not a rival theory.
What it offers is resonance and coherence. The theological framework and quantum phenomena rhyme with each other, say something similar in different languages. But resonance isn't proof. Coherence isn't demonstration.
What's offered is an invitation: Here's a way of seeing that makes the phenomena less alien, more integrated with deep human insights about reality. It's coherent. It resonates. Consider it. But anyone can decline, stay with instrumentalism, and continue doing good physics. We're not proving God through quantum mechanics. We're noticing a pattern and finding it compelling. Compelling isn't conclusive.
Beyond Aristotelian Logic
The recognition that reality might not conform to Aristotelian either/or categories is not irrationality. Buddhist logic includes the tetralemma—four truth values. Chinese philosophy embraces yin-yang complementarity. Christian theology grapples with Trinity—both one and three—revealing something true about ultimate reality. Christ is both fully divine and fully human. These aren't puzzles but insights into how reality actually works.
Quantum mechanics may reveal that the particular logical framework from Greek philosophy—however useful—is not the only way to understand truth. Reality can be both discrete and continuous as a feature of richer logic that better captures how things are.
Conclusion: Held in the Palm
When we send a photon through a double-slit apparatus, we're making a measurement—a bisection of continuous reality from our limited perspective. The discrete outcome and continuous wave description are both true, both partial, both pointing toward something exceeding either description.
The quantum formalism works magnificently as a parable. But it's not ultimate ontology—it's our echo, our way of making predictions from finite perspective. The classical world is real. The quantum predictions accurate. And underlying both is something ineffable we can touch but never fully grasp.
Julian saw this six centuries before quantum mechanics. From her small cell in Norwich, through prayer and contemplation, she saw all of creation as something held—continuously sustained within relationship, within love. The hazelnut in the palm: all that is made, enduring because it is held.
Her encounter wasn't measurement; it was relationship with the Sustainer. CERN's measurements aren't relationship; they're systematic abstraction, powerful tools. Both valid ways of engaging reality, but not equivalent. One measures echoes; the other encounters the source. One gives control; the other gives home. One reveals patterns; the other reveals love.
We make smaller measurements, probe finer scales, build sophisticated instruments. At every level: discrete and continuous, particular and relational, measurable yet mysterious. The quantum realm reveals what was always true—we're encountering something real that exceeds our categories, truthfully described from multiple perspectives without any single description being complete.
The mystery remains, but it's no longer the mystery of the inexplicable. It's the mystery of gift, of being held when by all rights we should fall to naught for littleness. It's the mystery of reality simultaneously intelligible enough to be studied and transcendent enough to exceed our grasp, of participating in reality's unfolding through our measurements, our curiosity, our co-creative engagement.
And beneath all our measurements, all our parables, all our abstractions—beneath the interference patterns and probability amplitudes—is the hand that holds. Not as metaphor but as reality. Not as primitive superstition but as truth that mystics have always known and physics can gesture toward but never fully capture.
"It lasteth, and ever shall for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God."
The hazelnut and the supercollider. Different modes of engagement with the same ineffable reality. One measures echoes and builds parables. The other receives direct encounter with what holds all things in being. Both necessary. Both true. But only one can tell us we're held in love.
We have actually received a bumper crop this past winter and have eaten nearly everything we have grown. I guess we have learned that being in a climate that gets as hot and humid as ours does, we have to always plant in the winter to avoid the really harsh heats that will kill all of our plants.
