I’ve just got back from a wonderful barge holiday along the leafy Oxford section of the River Thames. A holiday like this is all about slowing down from the normal hectic rhythm of life, where travel along the canals is based at walking speed, and the landscape transforms itself slowly. Fields slide past and approaching cities announce themselves with the peak of church spires over the tree line.  

Entering Oxford, we slipped under its bridges to moor on the towpath at the heart of the city. At once memories of Phillip Pullman’s Northern Lights novel (renamed The Golden Compass), flooded back to me and it was easy to see where his inspiration for the Gypsums came from. A quick visit to the Pitts Rivers museum and of course the obligatory viewing of the shrunken heads (which also features in Pullman’s work), matched up to my startling memories of when I’d first seen them as a child.

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."   – Albert Einstein

The world is real isn’t it? You're in it so of course it must be, but have you ever wondered what happens to the universe when you turn your back on it? 

Some quantum physicists believe that electrons and even the nucleus of the atoms all around us, exist everywhere at the same time. This is called super positioning, where matter exist as waves, that is at least until we get involved. The moment it is observed and the spotlight of our senses sweep across, it stops being a wave and locks into position as a particle in our reality.

It’s a bit like that child’s game Statues, in which the curator turns their back on the other players. They then have to try to sneak up and tag the curator, but the moment the curator turns they have to freeze into statues, Now imagine the children could be everywhere at once and you have a reasonable metaphor for how reality may actually work. The curator, the observer, you, turns and the world becomes solid. In other words we create the world as we experience it!