Prequel

There was this young man who had tried to make Nadine drink just a tiny jar of water. It was a strange game they were playing, every day, day by day: the four-year old who wouldn’t drink versus the nineteen-year old who knew that her life depended on it.

That day, he lost the game again.

Sad and worried, he gave up. He lifted Nadine from her child’s chair and sat her on the ground, where she could do what she liked most: play and explore.

Nadine was always on the brink of dehydration, but she was a true discoverer. Almost blind and multiply challenged, she could move only one arm, which meant that she was crawling on the floor in a circle. But what a beautiful circle it was! All smiling and her eyes lit up, she was rolling her ball, touching and moving her toy bricks, and discovering her big little world with grace and determination.

There was something that began to dawn on him. Nadine seemed like a prisoner of her body, and her circles and limitations a perfect symbol for the brutal power of the material world over her self. Physics tells us that all there is supervenes on the atomic building blocks of this one, fundamental world of cruel concreteness.

Or does physics, really? Could the light in Nadine’s eyes convey a message for us that things are truly different?

What if we got this all wrong?

M. P. Muller—Dedicated to Nadine, and all the other fearless stubborn explorers out there.

M. P. Muller (B)

Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Boltzmanngasse 3, 1090 Vienna, Austria

e-mail: markus14m@gmail.com

M. P. Muller

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, ON N2L 2Y5, Canada

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 63

A. Aguirre et al. (eds.), What is Fundamental?, The Frontiers Collection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3- 030-11301- 8_7

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