Homily 20 th of June, 2021, the 12 th Sunday in Ordinary Time
]]Dear Brothers – Back around the turn of the nineteenth into
the twentieth century, scientists felt that they were very close to
understanding just about everything there was to know about the
world. There were only a few loose ends in the physics of the day.
One of these was the problem of light. Light was a wave, but how
did it propagate? A wave never exists outside of the material which
is waving. A wave on a lake is a wave of water. A sound is a wave
in the air – the air makes our eardrums vibrate, not the bare sound
itself. “In space,” as an advertisement for a particularly harrowing
science-fiction movie once pointed out, “no one can hear you
scream.” No sound in a vacuum, because there is no air to wave.
Scientists posited the existence of what they called the
“luminiferous ether,” which filled all of space, and which provided
the stuff for light to wave. That no one had ever observed the ether
did not bother them. They assumed that at some point, it would be
discovered. However, in 1905, a young patent clerk in Germany
showed that they were wrong. By some relatively simple
experiments, he proved that light was actually a particle. Yet it still
behaved as a wave. How this could be so he didn’t try to explain,
just that this was in fact the nature of light. Astonishingly, it was at
one and the same time a particle and a wave. The young patent
clerk’s name was Albert Einstein, and he, along with others of his
generation, went on to upend the same physics which was so sure
a few years before that it was about to answer all the questions of
the universe. We now know that every particle, not just the photon,
exhibits this same wave-particle duality, and this was the
foundation of what was soon called quantum physics. The
fundamental nature of matter is that it is not solid, not as we
perceive it. It consists of waves, oceans of waves, all interacting
with one another through various forces. Physicists are still
working to understand the implications of these discoveries.
The point of all this is simply to say that reality is often
much more complex than we can imagine. And that we just when
we are most certain about something, that is the very moment
when we find out how little we understood all along. What we
assumed to be solid and certain has dissolved into ambiguity and
mystery.