Chapter 31: Pen and Paper (2)
While physical Jack was trying on the fat-suit, soul space Jack created a new Subatomic level snapshot with a radius of 50 meters, just enough to cover his house. It was time to explore the detail limits of a snapshot.
When the snapshot sphere appeared, he moved his wood chair next to it and sat. Then he placed his hands on the sphere and began zooming in. he explored the navigation features and found that he could not only move the view around but he could also peer inside of objects and peel back layers.
He could examine the wiring and plumbing inside the walls of his house, look inside the engine of his car, even look underground and locate the water and sewer pipes. Though he wished he had not looked inside the sewer pipes.
Next, he picked a random plant in his backyard and zoomed in on a single leaf. He kept zooming in until he could see individual cells, then kept zooming in on a single cell. As his view approached the cell wall, he could see the shadow of the nucleus inside. When he zoomed in further and peeled back layers of the cell, he found he didn't recognize or understand most of what he saw. The only structures that seemed recognizable were the green chloroplasts, the reddish-brown mitochondria, and the dense clump of the nucleus.
He zoomed in on the contents of the nucleus and kept zooming in, and kept zooming in. At first it was just a jumbled mess, but eventually he could make out what he thought were strands of DNA. He zoomed in further and found that he could finally see individual atoms!
As far as he knew, individual atoms didn't have color because their outer electrons re-emitted photons as the same frequency as when they were absorbed. This was why some substances like nitrogen were transparent under normal conditions. But what he was seeing were individual atoms, each with a different color. Though, when he focused, he realized the color was registering not in his eyes, but in his mind. The color of the atoms was conceptual, not physical.
When he zoomed in on a single atom, he found that each individual electron shell was represented with a faint fuzzy outline with a bright spot. Thinking that the bright spot represented the current position of the electron, he zoomed in, wanting to be the first person to ever directly see a subatomic particle. But the closer he got, the more confused he became. No matter how he tried, he just could not understand what he was perceiving.
The best he could figure was that he was looking at pure math. Not math formulas or a graph, but some kind of pure mathematical construct. It wasn't something he could see with his eyes, or perceive as a solid object. He'd read about the concept of particle wave duality for photons, but this went beyond that. It was like what he was perceiving was just too complex for his mind to comprehend, and the best his brain could manage was, "Umm, math?"