The limits of reality

Everyone loves to tweet that one sentence that's going to be retweeted hundreds of times. That's why facebook keeps track of likes and why we stare at that little like counter whenever we post something valuable, and wait for it to boil. But unless you're some kind of celebrity, or a hot girl, chances are your stuff won't cause much stir. And the humility this experience teaches us should make us wonder about the limits of our own perception.

Electrons interact with each other and with protons through little tweets we call photons. Light, turns out, is simply a large number of tweets between a large number of electrons. They can be seen with a photomultiplier. When one free electron tweets with a specific energy another electron in the photomultiplier, the latter will retweet the tweet to his neighbours and so on, creating a cascade of interactions and a movement in the trillionfold electron population strong enough to generate a macroscopic current. If you think of it, this little electron's tweet is a tweet only akin to Snowden publishing his data on internet surveillance, only akin to Russell Brand tweeting his latest outrageous say or to a syrian journalist posting pictures of a chemical massacre. It is the tweet that starts a revolution.

Knowing just how difficult and rare it is to tweet anything popular, one might sympathize, feel proud and even awe at this electron's achievement. It could also lead us to question our own experience. Can anything in the microscopic world create macroscopic structures, signals in our detectors and memories in our brains? Next comes a thought experiment which draws stringent limits on reality at the large scale and exhibit behaviour that reminds of quantum mechanics.