There is No Such Thing as a Wave

Imagine you’re at the seaside at sunset soaking up the soft warm rays and watching the waves lap the shore — those waves with their undulating overtones and undertones — from broad swells with meters long crests to the minute fluctuations which form a wobbling lattice of light reflecting off the water surface.

Those waves, so polyrhythmic, have counted the beats of time for an eternity. They exemplify the enigma that is time. Those lively actions, those lappings and undulations have been going on without ceasing for millions of years.

But, there is another, stranger reality to consider: In truth, there are no waves. There is no such thing as a wave. Waves do not exist.

“Waves” are a mathematical convenience, a shorthand for the repetitive up-down movement of trillions of particles in relation to each other. Here we refer to water molecules, but there are also sound waves, light waves, radio waves...

The particles exist, but the waves do not. This is before we even get to quantum. A classical water wave is already a fiction.

The fact that waves do not exist does not mean that they aren’t useful. Try to describe the impossibly complex, interrelated movements of gazillions of water molecules. If you zoomed in you’d see each moving in such chaos as to amount only to a cacophony of noise — no discernible patterns whatsoever.

If you attempted to untangle this infinite confusion, and from that, calculate how big the next swell would be, and whether it could topple a boat, you would get nowhere fast. You’d be crushed under the weight of more entangled mathematics than even our supercomputers could shoulder.

But what if we made a little ontological pact — a deal with the devil of truthiness? Let us ignore the abstract incorporeal waves, and let’s even forget the fact that water particles do exist. We will pretend the opposite: that there are no particles, and it’s the waves that exist.

Suddenly we have an abundance of simple and elegant mathematics to describe exactly what is happening without the need for a supercomputer other than our amazing brains.

Yes. If we just say that waves do exist, and keep our little secret to ourselves — then we can do wonders. In fact pretty much all of the tech we use on a daily basis is based on treating waves as real despite any judgements from “truth”.

Waves aren’t the only example. What about numbers? Do they exist? Or how about the concept of “zero”? We may take it for granted as obvious, but it’s a rather odd concept — the idea of nothing being something to represent, something that exists. In fact it’s such an odd concept that it took humans five millennia of mathematics before some genius came up with it.

Without the foundational notions of “zero” and “waves”, nothing of modern technology today would exist. Our computers run on zeros and ones. All telecommunication first required mastery of radio waves.

How about Natural Selection? Imagine the impossibility of predicting the present outcome by analysing the billions of births, deaths, and invisible mutations that have led to fish growing wings, snakes growing legs, and mammals getting opposable thumbs.

What about our sense of self? Modern psychology posits that the idea we have that there is a singular “I” is largely an illusion? What about consciousness? Does consciousness exist or is it just an aggregate of other phenomena such as language, memory and sensory input?

This begs another question: What do we even mean by saying something “exists”? Exactly what does it mean for something to be “real”? Going back to the wave for a moment, if the notion of a wave is so good at helping us comprehend and navigate reality, and in contrast the heaps of little invisible particles are completely un-workable-with, well then, which can be said to exist more? Might the wave have the greater claim given its superior utility? We can actually see the waves after all, meanwhile, those particles, we just have to take on good faith.

During my time studying physics at Princeton, one thing I learned was that physicists don’t lose much sleep over whether something is “real”. They just care whether they can describe it, predict it, utilise it.

Lay interpreters of “science” on the other hand seem to me often more concerned with asserting a singular truth. Science in media often is telling us what we should believe rather than what has been discovered.

But the bigger point here — the step towards a more sophisticated understanding of reality — is that we are not asking for an act of “belief”. Personally, I think we should throw the term right out, along with it’s equally dubious sibling “disbelief”.

Neither is required here. We are engaging in an epistemological exercise whose merits will be measured by the end utility. Waves work better so we promote them to first class reality citizens.

But why should we stop here? Let us take a step across the threshold, away from the known. What else might there be that we wouldn’t say exists, but which we might pretend for a moment in case it turns out to yield new discoveries? What other heretical fictions might we adopt to allow us to better navigate the frontiers of existence?

With the advent of modern AI, the age old problem of understanding consciousness has come to the forefront. Some believe consciousness exists entirely as a byproduct of nervous systems, i.e. you are in your brain and that’s it. But some modern physicists and metaphysicians put forward the idea that consciousness is everywhere or in everything — either it precedes or arises with matter rather than from matter. Thus there may be a “mind” beyond your brain. Maybe your mind is beyond your brain.

These two models of consciousness — mind-in-a-box (i.e. your brain) vs mind as an open field — present a paradox. It seems like it must either be one or the other, yet evidence exists that supports both.

I learned something else during my time in the physics department — something that I suspect is of importance in the quest to understand consciousness: Given two sides of a paradox, the discovery of their resolution represents a radical breakthrough for our overall model of reality.

Well, we’ve had “zero” for 1500 years. Waves were described mathematically 500 years ago. What paradoxes are we living inside right now, too close to see? What things not yet named will one day make everything click into place — with the elegance of a wave — as that time when nothing suddenly became something?

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