The atomic carpet.

I was thinking about molecules. More specifically, atoms. 

For some reason, when I think of atoms, I see them laid out flat. Like carbon atoms in a sheet. A blanket, maybe, but really more like a carpet. A carpet made out of atoms, all connected to one another.

I know that probably isn’t the correct shape of everything. Atoms are arranged in all kinds of ways. They make up everything, and everything has a shape. But I think maybe I have to flatten it all out first before I can understand any of it. So I start with the carpet.

The atoms are laid out next to each other. Connected. Stretched across space. Then I start looking closer. What is an atom? There’s the nucleus. Protons. Neutrons. And then there are the electrons. The electrons are the strange part.

What I was taught in school was that an electron orbits the nucleus. Like a little planet moving around a sun. A small thing traveling in a circle around a larger thing. But then you look into it, and that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening.

The electron is there, somewhere around the nucleus, and then it disappears. Then it appears somewhere else. Then it disappears again. It is still in the area around the atom, still in some kind of orbit, if you want to call it that, but it isn’t moving through the orbit in any ordinary way. t is here. Then it isn’t. Then it is over there. 

I first started thinking about this maybe five years ago. I remember looking at it and thinking, well, this is crazy. I don’t understand this at all. So I put it back into my old model. The flat model. The atomic carpet.

The atoms are all laid out, and inside them something is moving in and out. Appearing and disappearing. Coming into our reality and then leaving it again. And if atoms connect to other atoms, then maybe the electron is part of that connection. Maybe it is sewing the atoms together.

Not sewing them together with thread exactly. More like the electron itself is the thread. It disappears from one place and reappears in another, moving between atoms, binding them, stitching the whole carpet into position.

But where does it go when it disappears? That’s where I started imagining another universe. Not another universe far away. Not somewhere across space. Somewhere closer than that. Somewhere directly underneath this one. The back of the carpet.

Maybe every time the electron disappears, it passes through the other side. It goes out of our reality, enters the reality underneath it, and then comes back through somewhere else. Down through the carpet. Across the other side. Back up again. One stitch. Then another.

Maybe every atom is attached this way. Every atom sewn into another physical reality we cannot see. The electron passes through our world, disappears into the world behind it, and returns, holding the atom in place.

Then you add another atom. And another. And another. The carpet gets larger. Molecules form. Objects form. Walls or Trees, etc... Everything built out of atoms, and every atom being stitched through some invisible underside of existence. The strange part is that the carpet isn’t really flat.

It bends. It folds. It rises into three dimensions. It becomes every shape there is. But the stitching is still happening inside it. Every atom connected to something we cannot see, somewhere we cannot point to.

Maybe that is what keeps matter where it is. Maybe atoms do not simply sit in space. Maybe they have to be fastened to it. Maybe the electron is constantly leaving this reality and returning before we can catch it, sewing the physical world together one invisible stitch at a time. I don’t know. I have to give this some more thought. 

The surface of reality stretches out in front of me. And underneath it, something else.