Dr David Hamilton Home Page

The Quantum Body
(www.drdavidhamilton.com)

If you were to peer inside any part of your body with a microscope, you would see cells. If you look inside the cells, you'll find molecules - proteins, enzymes, and DNA. Look up close at what they are made of (using a Scanning Tunnelling Electron Microscope) and you'll find atoms. This is where it gets really interesting, because if you try to look inside an atom there isn't really anything there - at least there is nothing solid.

Atom Smashers in nuclear physics labs show us that the atoms are made of tiny particles - protons, neutrons, electrons, and others. They are not solid things - not matter. They are energy vibrations. And so, these elementary particles that we are made of are not even solid. They are energy vibrations. And amazingly, there are vast amounts of space between these particles inside an atom.

Recently, I watched a program about the great scientist Stephen Hawking. One scientist being interviewed was describing the interior of atoms. He said that if the centre of an atom (the nucleus - containing protons and neutrons) was the size of a small marble then an electron, which buzzes around outside it, would be the width of a hair. And it would be buzzing 2 miles away from the nucleus. Incredible isn't it? You're pretty much empty space.

Have a look at the photograph below, showing the distance of the Moon from the Earth (recently photographed using a telescope on one of NASA's satellites orbiting Mars). It would take approximately 1.25 seconds for light (travelling at 186,000 miles per second) to travel from the Earth to the Moon. If an atom's nucleus was the size of the Earth, it would have to travel for another 3 hours to reach an electron.

Isn't it weird that we appear to be solid, and so does everything around us? Yet every atom in your body is mostly, vastly, empty space. It's interior is much like the above photograph, although with much, much, much more empty space.

The human brain can only perceive information in a certain way. Electrons buzz around so fast that matter appears to be solid to us, but it is not, just as a bicycle wheel appears solid if you spin it fast. But if you were to slow it down, you would be able to put your arm right through the spokes.

So all is not what it seems. Maybe this is why the mystics have always said that everything is an illusion.