I’m captivated when my plane lands, of making out the individual things on the ground, the trees, buildings and cars individually coming into focus. Before the plane landed I either didn’t know about them or I can even imagine they did not exist, a little like the tree falling in the forest and no one to see or hear it. I like to take pictures under the microscope and while I’m focusing and can finally see things clearly and even take their picture the exact same thing comes to me. In seeing something I imagine I am giving birth to it. This is strikingly the same as G-d hovering over the waters and saying by fiat, “Let there be light.”and its coming to be and moreover looking back on it again and finding that not only it exists but it is good. Now they that all cultures have their own creation myths, but I know of no other culture there a being merely pronounces things into existence. In the myths I know one big brutish god fights with another bashes him to pieces which are so vast and large as to become something vast and large like enormous pieces of continent or people or big bears and stuff.

In sending up the Hobble telescope or the new many times more precise planned James Webb scope that NASA is working on in looking far away we are looking back into the past, getting closer to our most distant past 14 or so billion years ago at the start of the universe. So by looking farther away we will finally see our past maybe light that is so old it will be close to the origin of the universe, who knows. In looking back on it, perceiving it in other words are we in a way giving birth to it? In some respects,  I think so.

I was looking again at the two slit experiment you learn about in college physics classes. This is an experiment where you arrive at the unexpected. You shine a light made of individual particles called photons which is made to go through two slits or alternately you can fire subatomic particles maybe protons or alpha waves through two slits speed apart, to a far screen past the two slits. What you get on the far screen is not what you expect. You expect the photons or the particles merely to gather on the screen right in front of the slits so you get a bright slit like brightness in front of each slit. That isn’t what happens. Instead each slit distributes the light or the particles over a distribution of waxing and waning intensity what is a wave of distribution on the far screen. If you superimpose these waves induced by each split there will be a pattern of interference which is the sign that a wave of distribution actually occurred. Each slit is the distributor of a wave.  The reason is that each photon or each particle is not in one place but is smeared out in over a wave-like distribution of uncertainty or indeterminacy.

Now you put a detector on each slit and you can see how many photon particles pass through each slit portal. Should you do that you will destroy the wave of distribution of particles on the far screen, The very act of detection or measurement destroys or collapses the wave of indeterminacy.

It occurs to me that the act of perception or focus or measurement is a metaphor for creation. It is as if the percept collapses a wave of indeterminacy into a firm percept, knowledge of something is thus tied to creation. Perception is birthing of something which before being perceived was merely indeterminate or at least only a wave of probability. Schrödinger’s cat is thus no longer both dead and alive but becomes one or the other. Coming to be, creation nothing but measurement and certainty, just as saying, “Let there be.” and it is and it is good.