Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

As the meaning of the physics began to leak into the broader
culture, it caught the ear of a group of artists who were
interested in the question of the fundamental basis of visual
art, the surrealists. Perhaps the most well-known member of
the group was Salvador Dali. Some of his most famous works,
such as The Persistence of Memory, place the artistic endeavor
in direct discussion with the results of modern physics.
revision of our notion of reality. We move from a world of things
reality and undulates and condenses in ways that create what we
think to be things.
Davies, The New Physics, chapter 14.
Greene, , chapter 5.
Particles are independent things; they exist on their own. Waves are not
example, water waves are not things in themselves but just a change
in the shape of the water’s surface. The water exists; the wave is not
its own thing. Does it make sense to say that mass is a wave and that
forces are particles? Is this just a convenient way of talking because of
the math, or is it part of reality? How can this be when particles and
waves are fundamentally different types of things?
and you are made up of nothing but atoms, does that make you just a
complex wave? Are you really not a thing with an identity that maintains
itself after you bump into something?
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