Pip: Paul Carney’s Blog is asking the kind of questions that make you stare at your hands and wonder what exactly they’re made of — and the answer, apparently, is: not much.

Mara: That’s where we’re headed today. Paul Carney takes on the foundations of physical reality, quantum mechanics, and what it actually means to say something exists. Let’s start with the question right there in the title.

Read the blog post here: reality is a load of balls

Reality is a load of balls

Pip: The premise here is genuinely vertiginous: the stuff we call real — rocks, cars, our own bodies — is built from things that don’t behave like real things at all. That’s not mysticism; that’s the consensus of twentieth-century physics, and the post lays out exactly how we got there.

Mara: Niels Bohr framed it starkly, and the post opens with his words directly: “Everything that we call real is made up of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.”

Pip: So the Nobel laureate is not hedging. He’s saying our everyday reality is downstream of something that doesn’t follow everyday rules — and the post spends its energy tracing exactly where that claim comes from and what it does and doesn’t mean.

Mara: It starts with Einstein, who in 1920 imagined matter as black or white balls inside an invisible box — particles with definite properties waiting to be revealed. Bohr pushed back and said there is no box. At the sub-atomic level, particles exist in two states simultaneously: wave and particle both, until measurement collapses the wave.

Pip: Which sounds like the universe is waiting for someone to check before it commits — and that’s exactly the sensational reading the post wants to head off.

Mara: Right. It took until the 1980s, when physicist Alain Aspect confirmed there are no hidden variables, to settle the Einstein-Bohr debate. But the post is careful: entanglement applies to specific particles, human eyes cannot detect quantum scales, and instruments do the detecting — not conscious minds. The “reality needs an observer” headline is, the post argues, a misreading.

Pip: The corrective is the point. The actual conclusion is quieter and stranger than the clickbait version: “Every single piece of matter is a product of interconnected and interwoven universal energies, which are dynamic, excitable states with particles constantly fizzing and popping in and out of existence.”

Mara: So the world is real — just not solid in the way we picture it. Fields attracting and repelling, relationships and bonds all the way down. The post lands on the image of a chocolate Easter egg with a runny centre: still an egg, still real, just not what it looks like from the outside.

Pip: Quantum physics as confectionery metaphor. Bohr would probably approve.

Mara: What stays with me is the distinction between “reality isn’t real” as a headline and what the physics actually says — which is stranger and more grounded at the same time.

Pip: Fields, bonds, interactions. Next time, more of whatever’s fizzing underneath the surface.