The Noise of Being Real
I've been trying to understand why things become real.
I’m too extra to just be philosophical about it. Buddy, I mean mathematically. In quantum mechanics, there's this unsolved problem: a particle can be in two places at once, but a baseball can't. Somewhere between "particle" and "baseball," the universe stops allowing possibilities and starts demanding answers.
The standard story is that this happens because of "observation" or "measurement." But that always felt like a cop-out. Who's observing? Measuring what?
I think I found a different answer. And I don't necessarily like what it implies.
The Earth is buzzing.
Not poetically. Literally.
If you do the math on Earth's gravitational field (treating it as a sea of “gravitons” instead of a smooth force), you get a characteristic frequency. About 5.4 billion cycles per second.
Think of it as a broadcast.
The planet is constantly transmitting static at this one pitch. A background… “ssssss” — a hiss that never stops.
If you're simple enough (like a single, ho-ass atom), you're too small to pick up the signal. You slip through.
You get to stay quantum, stay blurry, stay undefined, and float in motion. The Earth can't see you.
But if you're complex? If you have internal structure, moving parts, and gears that can vibrate?
You're the antenna, tuned for the Lie (I said I wasn’t going to be philosophical, my bad).
Complexity is what gravity grabs.
This is the part that unsettles me.
The math says decoherence (the ongoing collapse from "maybe" to "definitely") depends on how much internal structure you have.
Gravity doesn't couple to your mass. It couples to your shape. Your quadrupole moment. The parts of you that can wiggle.
The more complex you are, the more the Earth's hiss can shake you. And when it shakes you, you heat up. You radiate. You leave a trace in the gravitational field.
That trace is what makes you real.
Reality isn't a property you have. It's a record you leave. The universe doesn't decide you exist — you announce yourself by vibrating in response to the noise, and the announcement is irreversible.
I calculated the heating rate for a silica nanosphere: about 3 Hz.
Three quanta of energy per second, injected by nothing but the ground's hum. It doesn't sound like much. But it never stops.
It's the friction of being here. The tax on having a body the Earth can see.
Diamond vs. Silica
The (potentially?) fun part.
Different materials have different internal stiffness. Silica is relatively soft — its atoms vibrate at frequencies close to the Earth's hiss. It resonates.
It absorbs the noise, heats up fast, and snaps into classical reality almost instantly.
Diamond is rigid. Its internal frequency is way higher than Earth can reach. The hiss passes right through.
My numbers say diamond decoheres 500 times slower than silica at the same mass.
Diamond is too stiff to be bullied.
It stays quantum longer. Undefined. A superposition of possibilities instead of a single fixed fact.
I keep thinking about this as a metaphor for how people move through the world.
There's a Silica way of being.
You let the noise of your environment vibrate your internal structure. You become legible to the system ("real" to the people around you), but you burn up in the process. You collapse fast. You become the one thing everyone sees.
And there's a Diamond way. The context can't shake you because your frequency is too high to match. You survive longer, stay undefined longer, but you do it by becoming untouchable.
Neither is obviously better. Both have costs.
The only place the noise stops is far away.
A million miles from Earth, there's a point called L2. It's where Earth's gravity fades and the Sun takes over. But the Sun is so massive that its "hiss" is incredibly low frequency (around 16 kilohertz). To anything nanosphere-sized (or human-sized), the Sun is silent.
At L2, the heating vanishes. The enforcement stops.
I suppose you could, theoretically, exist in superposition there. Be two things at once. Because there's no ground demanding you choose.
On Earth, the Lie of classical reality is enforced 5.4 billion times per second.
In deep space, no one is asking.
What I'm left with
I used to think reality was fundamental. Now I think it's a filter.
It protects the simple (atoms are too small to hear). It ignores the distant (space dust is too far to care). But it targets the complex and the local. Us. We're in the crosshairs.
We're complex enough to resonate with the Earth's buzz, and close enough to be shaken by it. That 3 Hz heat is the feeling of time. Of options narrowing.
Of the universe demanding you stop being everything and start being something.
The next question I'm asking: Can we build something here, on the surface, that acts like it's at L2? A structure that doesn't resonate? A pocket where the noise can't reach?
Or is leaving the only way to stay undefined?
Perhaps that’s what I mean by exile. Perhaps not.
Keep thinking. And stay in motion.