While examining samples of moon-dust, scientists discovered the stuff is a bit unusual, even by the standards of those who study ethereal stuff and relationships on a regular basis. Moon-dust, seemingly macroscopic stuff, shows quantum properties of the sort usually found only in such entities as individual atoms or subatomic particles. It seems that some dust on the surface of the moon is so thoroughly pulverized as to be small enough that it exhibits some quantum properties. Remember that quantum properties come from small energy transfers or related transitions — small is defined in terms of, as one example, the energy it takes for one electron to move to the next `orbit’ as it kind-of circles a nucleus. That’s a pretty small amount of energy but such wee bits of energy are apparently large enough to affect this moon-dust.
This was even a little surprising to me with my understanding of created being as a spectrum from the things of a concrete realm of being, such as ordinary dust, to abstractions, such as quantum wavefunctions. To be sure, quantum effects can be seen at the macroscopic level in at least a few cases under study, perhaps even in some parts of the human brain so finely balanced that an orbital transition of one electron can change the overall state of that macroscopic system. Recently, I’ve read that quantum effects play a role in photosynthesis. Back in 2007, I wrote an essay in response to a claim of Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution: Creation and Freedom. In that essay, I wrote about scientists producing in a lab, in 1995, a “state of matter predicted decades ago by Albert Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.” In this state of matter (close to a temperature of absolute 0), an assembly of atoms behave as one.
At that, few have expected to find a large mass of stable material which exhibits weird quantum effects on an ongoing basis. The article discussing this weirdness in some moon-dust is: Nanoparticles Found in Moon Glass Bubbles Explain Weird Lunar Soil Behavior. The article speaks in a very general way of the reasons the pulverized dust can remain in its strange state. Under the conditions we know of on the earth, the dust wouldn’t remain in such a state. The dust would recombine and become normal dust with macroscopic properties which don’t allow quantum effects to show through.
What does this mean? If anything.
This moon-dust is thing-like being which exhibits some of the nature of more abstract forms of created being such as that we know as quantum wavefunction. I’ve claimed in my writings that the abstract being from which thing-like being is shaped remains in that thing-like being. We and the things around us are yet the truths manifested by God as the raw stuff of Creation, the stuff from which all created being is shaped. Moon-dust provides an interesting and unexpected support for the Thomistic claim that “Things are true” and also of my additional claim that “Truths are thing-like.” For one of my earliest, but still relevant discussions of this issue of abstract and concrete realms of created being, see Negative Theology in Physics and Metaphysics. A somewhat more advanced viewpoint, with simple graphs, is developed in the essay: From Abstract Being to Concrete Being and Narratives.
The abstract stuff from which we’re shaped is still here and particularly here in moon-dust.