Imagine if you were shrunk down to the size of a molecular particle. You wouldn’t see walls, chairs, or solid objects anymore; you’d see millions of other particles flying around, darting in every direction. It might look a bit like the inside of a Champagne glass – millions of tiny bubbles, jittering, popping, shimmering in and out of view all around you at the quantum level.
What you’re seeing at this microscopic level isn’t just a bunch of particles – it’s the pixelated foundation of reality, like the tiny dots that make up an image on a screen. Up close, you’d see individual pixels – red, green or blue lights – but when you zoom out, they blend into the full picture. In the same way, these particles are the smallest “dots” that build everything you see in the world around you.
Every type of particle comes from its own field. There’s an electron field, a photon field and a quark field. These fields overlap and interact with one another constantly, forming a unified foundation for everything. Together, they make up what scientists call the Quantum Field – a single, connected fabric made from many invisible layers.
The Quantum Field isn’t something “out there” in deep space. It’s right here. It’s the invisible fabric reality is made from – and you are made from it, too.
Your body, your brain, and even your thoughts are built from particles that rise up from these fields. Every atom in you – carbon, calcium, oxygen – comes from ripples in those same invisible fields.
How do we know?
In 1801, physicist Thomas Young ran a simple experiment with light. He shined it through a single slit, then through two narrow slits, and observed the pattern it made on a screen behind.
If light behaved like tiny particles – like little bullets flying through the slits – he would’ve seen just two bright spots. Instead, he saw something strange: a series of bright and dark bands.
This experiment became one of the first major clues that light behaves like a wave.
Years later, with the rise of quantum mechanics, scientists ran a modern version of the same test –not with beams of light, but with individual particles, like electrons.
They fired these electrons, one at a time, like bullets from a gun, through the two slits, and something unexpected happened.
When no one was watching, the electrons didn’t behave like particles at all. Instead, they landed on the wall behind in a wave pattern, just like Young’s light. It was as if each single electron somehow went through both slits at once.
How did the scientists figure this out?
They tracked where each electron landed. And over time, instead of forming two neat lines, the electrons built up a pattern of light and dark bands – the unmistakable fingerprint of wave behavior.
But then came the twist.
When scientists watched the particles pass through the slits, the particles behaved exactly as expected – like little bullets passing through one slit or the other. But when no one was watching, the particles behaved in a completely different way.
The only thing that changed … was the act of observing.
When the particles were observed, they behaved the way the scientists believed they should. When not observed, the particles had a mind of their own.
We all live our lives with an underlying expectation of what we think will happen. We expect certain outcomes in our relationships, our work, our health – even without realizing it.
If you expect failure, you’ll probably see it. But if you expect success, and you are present, focused, and emotionally aligned with that outcome, quantum physics suggests that you may literally begin to tune into a version of reality where that success starts to show up.
Just as the observer changed the outcome of the particle’s path, quantum physics suggests your awareness and expectation will shape the path of your own life.
The Quantum field is not distant. It’s all around us, it’s inside of us.
We are not separate from it; we are expressions of it.
We are constantly sending signals into the field through our thoughts, our emotions and our beliefs. Put those three together, and you get expectations.
The Quantum world is telling us something. It’s not just what we see, but how we see, that shapes our reality.
• Toby Moore is a Shaw Local News Network columnist, star of the Emmy-nominated film “A Separate Peace,” and CEO of CubeStream Inc. He can be reached at feedback@shawmedia.com.