Our thought experiment on being and appearances begins with the philosopher Plato.

We then move on to Kant, Schopenhauer and Max Planck and address the following questions:

• Does our world consist of matter or merely of pure vibration?
• Is our world really the way we see, hear, smell and feel it?
• Or is our reality only a construct of our brain based on external vibrational stimuli, which our brain then presents to us as a whole as reality?

Join me on a short but exciting journey into the world of vibrations.

Philosophical consideration

Even the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (427 BC - 347 BC) stated:

"It is human fate never to be able to see reality, but always only appearances"

Plato recognised even then that matter in itself does not exist.

Plato defined reality at that time as an "idea".

In his view, the word matter is a refuge of uncertainty "refugium ignorantiae".

How right he was with his view even then will become clear in the course of this article.

The German philosopher of the Enlightenment Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) took up this idea as Plato's greatest student.

His main work "Critique of Pure Reason" represented a turning point in the history of philosophy and laid the foundation of modern philosophy.

His main merit was to have proved what we recognise and what we do not recognise.

What we are not able to recognise, we can believe - or not.

Things of faith, however, have nothing to do with science.

A disciple of Immanuel Kant, namely the German philosopher and university teacher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), took up this topic again and proved in his main work "The World as Will and Imagination" that we can only have an idea of the world.

However, I don't want to bore you with philosophy here and, as already mentioned at the beginning, I propose a little thought experiment.

The thought experiment

Take 5 minutes, sit down undisturbed and think of an animal, let's take a dog as an example.

Now please think of a dog.

When you thought of a dog, what did you think of when you heard the word dog?

• A brown and strong German shepherd?
• A Swiss shepherd dog, all white?
• A dachshund that stubbornly refuses to continue its walk?

When I heard the word dog, I thought of a white Swiss shepherd dog, wildly bathing in the water and enjoying its life.

We both thought of one and the same word: dog

However, we both imagined completely different types, colours, sizes of a dog.

This confirms that there is no such thing as a dog, but there is my Swiss shepherd, Mr Meier's dachshund Walter and the dog you have just imagined, possibly even yours if you own one.

If you had an idea of a dog when you heard the word "dog", then you had the idea of a dog, then you had the "dog as a thing" about you.

Even if there were a dog standing right in front of us now, let's further assume it was my German shepherd Kira, can you guarantee that you see the dog exactly as I do? Do you see, hear and smell the dog exactly as I see, hear and smell it?

Why do we both see this dog at all?

Why do we see, hear, feel, smell?

Energy moves in waves. Energy is characterised by the speed with which it travels. It is also characterised by the amplitude of the waves, i.e. by the distance between the crest and trough of a wave.

And finally, the frequency of oscillations per second determines its character. If a wave passes through 10 crests and troughs in one second, then we speak of 10 hertz.

However, we can only perceive energy when it affects our body.

We see certain waves as light, hear certain waves as sound, feel certain waves and smell certain waves.

Now, when we both see this dog, what specifically happens during this process?

Rays of light fall on the dog. The surface of the dog reflects this light back from itself and a part of these waves hits our eye.

Our retina is now stimulated by these rays and converted into electrical impulses via chemical processes. These impulses are then transported via the optic nerves in the retina to our visual centre in the back of our head.

The image of a dog now appears in our brain. However, the image is upside down. Through our life experiences, however, we have learned that the dog's legs are down. That is why we perceive the dog as being downwards. However, experiences and emotions also play a big role in this process.

So an object that we see is transformed by my organism into electrical currents and then interpreted back by the brain as an image.

Hearing, smelling, feeling, all these abilities underlie similar transformation processes in the brain. There is always a place in our brain that is stimulated by the finest energies.

Either we see a dog or we hear a sound (barking) or we smell the dog's smell or we feel the dog's fur with our eyes closed.

All this happens in our head.

And if something in our head does not function properly, then false images, false sounds or false smells arise there. This is the case, for example, with a colour-blind person.

It has not been proven, but there is much to suggest that two people do not hear the same sound or see the same colour in the same way....

Although an object (in our example the dog) emits the same waves for all receivers, but

• do the three to six million taps on my retina receive the same messages as another person?
• do you process the stimulus in the same way as I do?
• do your optic nerves not differ in construction and quality from other people?
• do you direct your stimuli to the visual centre in the same way as others?

Let us now return to the shepherd dog Kira and the white colour of her coat.

Colours are also so commonplace for us that no one actually thinks about where the things in life get their colour from.

Without light there would be no colour. Light consists of electromagnetic waves, with each colour having a different wavelength. The natural scientist Isaac Newton (1643-1727) discovered the different colours of light.

Did you know that we, as humans, can only see about 40 percent of the colours contained in sunlight?

All objects to which we can assign colours receive their colour by absorbing different rays and reflecting others, depending on the material.

Water, for example, absorbs long-wave light much better than short-wave light. The red part of the sunlight is therefore swallowed up after only a few metres under water.

Divers know this phenomenon, that the colours of objects change under water.

If you go even deeper, the orange, yellow and green components disappear one after the other. Blue light, on the other hand, is swallowed the least and reflected the most, which is why the sea is blue.

So colour is not simply there. It only comes into being at the moment of seeing. Every moment of our seeing is continuously reprocessed and reinterpreted. This is how we can perceive colours.

But does everyone see colours in the same way?

I have to deny that too and give you two examples:

Purely mechanically, organic errors can occur (defective or defective rods (receptors) on the retina), this could lead, for example, to a red-green deficiency.

It has already been explained above that all transformation processes are also strongly influenced by emotions or experiences:

• There are colours we like and colours we dislike, but this is perceived quite differently by our fellow human beings.

• Certain colours evoke sensations through certain vibrations, which can turn out completely different personally.

Why does one person get a feeling of well-being from classical music, while another person shudders with horror?

It is the same waves that hit the auditory centres of both.

At this point in the article at the latest, you can see that seemingly completely normal things in life are not as simple as each of us thinks.

Up to this point I had consulted the philosophers, but one of the most important physicists of our time has also made the discovery that matter in itself does not exist.

Matter or vibration

Max Planck said: "Matter only becomes what we understand it to be through our mind.

Of course, he knew solid matter such as mountains, trees, houses, etc..

But he also knew that matter consists of atoms.

And he wondered whether the atom is already matter or not yet matter.

Imagine a grain of sand one millimetre in diameter as an atom.

The electrons then circle around this nucleus at a distance of 50 metres.

The diameter of the atom is greater than 100 metres.

These electrons are not a body, however, but vortices of energy.

They race around the atomic nucleus at such a high speed that we can never tell where they are at any given moment.

Very figuratively, this electron vortex has been compared to an electric fence, i.e. no matter.

What about the atomic nucleus?

The atomic nucleus is not a piece of matter either, but also an energy vortex that rotates around its own axis at a speed of 100,000 kilometres per second.

The atomic nucleus consists of nucleons. In today's (2020) standard model, nucleons are defined as those baryons that are composed exclusively of the light up and down quarks and have isospin 1/2.

Atomic scientists assume that a thimble full of nucleons would weigh about 100 million tonnes.

What we call matter is in reality almost all empty space.

Once again, we do not see reality as it is. It is only through our mind that energy vortices become matter.

Whether we see these energy vortices as bricks, trees, cars, people, the moon or galaxies, they are not matter but vibration.

Conclusion:

• Reality is not as it seems.
• Matter is not as it presents itself to us.
• Everything is vibration and resonance.

We will come to Virchow's model and his cellular pathology later on. But Professor Rudolf Virchow, to be called a medical genius without envy, did not yet know what Aleksey Speranski (Russia) researched and called neural pathology.