tiberry

All great replies, but for me they all appear to "miss the forest for the trees". A couple of replies related to our 'perception' of reality - I'd like to offer a slightly more specific version: Our ability to "measure" reality. The perception of chaos at the quantum level arises from the peculiarity that we can seem to CHANGE quantum reality simply by measuring something. Therefore, we can nearly prove or disprove ANYTHING simply by devising a means to measure a particular state of a particle. Because we're not accustomed to this it seems quite chaotic.

In order to perceive the tree floating though your office, you need to devise a way to measure it. Its very tempting to rely on your five human senses to discount this as absuridity, isn't it? I can't SEE the tree floating through my office, so its not there...I can't TOUCH the tree, so obviously it isn't there...etc. Yet you've never seen a muon, a quark, or any other quantum particle...

This is where it gets even more obscure for me...we perceive quantum particles based on the effect they have on other particles or thier surroundings...so a tree floating though your office SHOULD knock the pictures off of your desk and break your lamp - or maybe it shouldn't...maybe its a small tree, maybe its trajectory didn't pass through any other objects, maybe its existence wasn't long enough to touch any other object.

My point is - Anything your mind can conceive IS reality. You doubt that because you cannot PROVE that by measurement. In the "elementary realm" this ability becomes much more pronounced, that's all.

Sorry if there are no *real* scientific answers here; this is just my perception of the way things are...

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My life's work is to bridge the gap between that which is perceived by the mind and that which is quantifiable by words and numbers.