Reality
Today, we wonder what is real. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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A disturbing view of reality has flickered for centuries. The Greeks had a word, Acatalepsy. It meant the impossibility of any complete knowledge of reality. Philosopher Immanuel Kant framed that idea in harsher terms. He talked about the “Ding an sich” – the “Thing in itself.” It goes something like this:
We humans are bound by our limited senses to see reality much as one of the blind beggars did, in the old fable. They came upon an elephant. One touched its ear and thought it was like a leaf. Another, its tail and thought it was like a serpent.” And so on. Our limited senses likewise reveal only the slimmest flicker of true reality.
Is what we see, just a flicker of reality? (Photo by JHL)
So how much more than those blind beggars can we see? Our eyes see only the tiniest sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our instruments greatly extend human experience. But how can we think that they show all of reality? Kant pointed out what should be obvious: We see only a faint shadow of what’s surely more. His “Thing in itself” is that ultimate, but unreachable, reality.
So: Is his “Thing in Itself” any more than speculation on our part? We had no experimental support until the 20th century. But then, a modern physics experiment made a surprising suggestion.
Einstein – no lover of quantum mechanics – joined with physicists Podolsky and Rosen. They showed that, if quantum behavior is real, then we get a crazy result: That the behaviors of certain particles can match one another instantly, no matter how far apart they are. That’s clearly impossible on the face of it. But: physicists have now made experiments that appear to show exactly that. Here is a result that doesn’t just violate our senses. It lies beyond anything we’d call plausible.
We have a word that describes an inaccessible reality – reality beyond any human comprehension. It is the Noumenon. And we must ask: Have we humans ever experienced a whisper of that ultimate reality ... which lies beyond our access? [Flicker of Reality image]
Well, there’s an arena that I won’t enter here. You must draw your own conclusions. But we do have that unsettling fact that, under the right circumstances, particles really can affect one another instantaneously at any distance. Some reality, which we cannot know, does seem to be at play.
Maybe advances in our knowledge will, one day, penetrate this unseen world – this world that physics suggests might exist. This reality which, ever since the thinkers of antiquity, has been dangled before us. I, for one, feel hope – hope that there might be more to the world “out there”, than our rational minds can reach.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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For a clear introduction to these ideas, in far greater detail, see this video produced by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research: Atomic physics and reality · CDS Videos · CERN
Underlying the possibility that reality might present two conflicting sides is Niels Bohr’s concept of Complementarity. See Complementarity (physics) - Wikipedia
John Bell made it possible to test what Einstein called “Spooky action at a distance.” Bell's theorem - Wikipedia and What is quantum entanglement? A physicist explains Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’
For a further explanation of Noumenon, see: Noumenon - Wikipedia
The Einstein idea that questioned the completeness of quantum mechanics was his 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox. See: Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox - Wikipedia
In this older episode, I look at ideas kin to this episode, see: Hidden Reality | The Engines of Our Ingenuity
In this book: Boyd, E. Andrew. Beyond Comprehension: A Scientific Look at the Challenge of Knowing Everything. Hamilton-Haverbrook, 2017, Boyd gives further insight into issues I talk about here.
One idea that I have not called upon in my text, but which might well be used to further explain these ideas is “Plato’s Cave”.
This Episode first aired April 20, 2026.