A Witness of Physics

I remember it as if it happened yesterday. I was very small, about five years old. I was walking around a library when I tripped over a dangerously intelligent piece of floor and flew straight into my new faith. It was the very sharp corner of a physics book.

It hurt so much that I immediately believed it had happened for a reason. I believed I had not yet sinned enough for God to punish me so painfully. Then I understood everything: God had pushed me, and He had pushed me very hard, toward something I would never have noticed otherwise. Why would I, at five years old, open a book, especially a physics book, when some of my dolls still had all their arms and legs, and there was still a little of Mom's lipstick left? Lipstick makes much more colorful pictures on the pavement!

Anyway, there was the physics book. I immediately believed it was not there by accident. I opened it and started reading. At first, all the letters were familiar. Then I turned to the table of contents. After that, just to be safe, I turned five more pages. There were more letters now, and some of them I did not know. But I believed the author had not made a mistake and invented those letters by accident. He had done it because not everyone was supposed to understand. Only the chosen ones were supposed to understand. The rest were simply supposed to believe.

I turned a few more pages. Nothing changed, so I decided that I understood everything and started looking at all the pictures. But only the colored ones! The black-and-white pictures were boring because they were meant for people who did not believe in science. They were there to scare people away. Nothing can frighten or stop a true believer: not strange invented letters, not black-and-white pictures, not a huge number of pages, and certainly not the sharp corners of a book, especially when you are five and your forehead is very close to them.

After the tenth page, I finally understood that I truly believed, and that nothing could break my faith. Even those devilishly colorful comics with no letters at all could not tempt me. My faith was strong! And so was my forehead, although the bump on it did eventually become smaller. I believed that too, of course, but not nearly as strongly as I believed in physics.

Years passed. I did not go to school because I had faith in the power of physics. I did not need stupid knowledge, especially geometry, where everything has to be proved! Why should I prove a theorem that says you can draw only one plane through three points? Or that two parallel lines can never meet? When I draw them with a pencil, they do not just meet — they get completely tangled together into a beautiful braid.

And now I am an adult. Unlike everyone else, I am filled to the very top of my unlimited consciousness with faith. I believe there are atoms, because they were drawn so beautifully in the divine book of physics. Nobody has ever seen them, but thanks to my book, I have seen them and I believe. Nobody has ever actually seen gravity, but I have seen with my own experience how faith in physics pulled me toward that book.

Faith is a powerful force. It is so powerful that every attempt to prove that something in this book is wrong simply breaks like waves against rocks. Nobody can prove the opposite. Everything written in this book is true! I believe, and I do not need understanding. I already have the most important thing: faith. The book says an atom is indivisible, and I believe. The book says there is a force called gravity, and I believe. I do not need to watch falling apples. They do not believe in gravity, and that is why they fall! I believe, and that is why I have not fallen since I was five.

And the speed of light is my absolute favorite. The book says that nothing and nobody can move faster than the speed of light. I must confess that there was one moment when my faith almost shook, and I decided to test my faith in this commandment. I tried everything. I threw a stone at a house window, I blew up a frog and let it go, I kicked the neighbor's dog — and nothing, absolutely nothing, ever moved faster than the speed of light. What a wonderful thing this faith in physics is!

Or what about believing that a particle of light can be both a wave and a particle? Or that electrons can simply appear and disappear? What miracles!

You may argue with me and say that the physics book contains not only many facts that have to be believed, but also many facts that can be proved through experiments. Well, how do you think we convert complete non-believers to our faith? If someone does not believe that there is such a thing as electric current, even though it has no color and no smell, we simply tell them to put two fingers into an electrical socket. After a short period of shaking and screaming, they begin to believe. We call these people “the enlightened by the amp.”

And then I made the logical next step. I had no education, no knowledge, and nothing behind me except a great deal of faith, so I created my own religion: The Witnesses of Physics.

It was difficult to spread this religion in our village. Especially when I told everyone that the Earth goes around the Sun. The villagers immediately burned... a sheep. Apparently, it was some Orthodox religious holiday that required a sacrifice.

It was also difficult to prove that the Earth goes around the Sun. On one hand, people had trouble believing that the Earth was round in the first place. But, thank physics, we had a crooked table, and any apple placed on it would always roll away. On the other hand, that nasty Sun kept moving across the sky all the time, almost as if it were doing it on purpose! But I had a super-argument.

Faith.

And they believed me.

Life in our village improved!

Especially when people became “Witnesses of Physics” and stopped believing in resurrection after death. They also stopped believing that fire can appear once a year, without matches, at exactly one special place on Earth. They stopped believing that you can simply kill people for their faith, go on military expeditions, burn and torture people, and especially animals, taking their lives, their eggs, and their babies just to prepare a tasty meal for some religious holiday.

That is our faith. It keeps developing. It does not stand still like other religions. Every year, we get a new holy book of physics with new corrections. For example, the nucleus can now be divided, and time does not flow at the same speed everywhere. Although I already knew that myself, because when you are waiting for something, time moves very slowly and seems to stretch forever, while when you are eating a delicious little piece of something, time flies incredibly fast.

Of course, there are other sectarians in our village. For example, there is one fellow here who goes around preaching faith in mathematics. Oh, what a storyteller! He starts talking about how apparently you can divide by zero now, and how there is some kind of infinity, and some kind of limits... What a fantasy! I have never seen an infinite chocolate bar, and I have certainly never seen a chocolate bar that can be divided by zero forever. What a storyteller!

You can meet him here, if you really want: The World Is Not What You Think

But I would not recommend it.

There is something very suspicious about him.