Moving Mountains

This post involves bringing together a couple of complex / speculative concepts, but it has intrigued me ever since it crossed my mind. The first is the idea that all matter has intelligence. "All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence." (D&C 93:30) If there is no existence without intelligence, you can infer that anything that exists has intelligence. We know that the Earth will be resurrected and inherit a celestial glory for its righteousness. "For after it hath filled the measure of its creation, it shall be crowned with glory, even with the presence of God the Father;" (D&C 88:19) That means that it has will and can choose to obey God's laws or not, just as we do. There are also passages that suggest that animals can also choose to obey truth. Though we know nothing about the threshold needed for a being to have that ability to choose to follow God's will, we can imagine that different beings have different levels or complexity of laws. Humans, in the image of God, have the most complex and nuanced set of laws. Animals have simpler laws, built-in probably through what we call instinct. I imagine that the Earth has simple laws as well, probably what we call the forces of nature, like gravity, and momentum. Could what we call the laws of nature really be God's laws for particles and elements? Very speculative and nothing to base a testimony or much though to. But if it is literal, it would explain how the Earth stopped over Gibeon in Joshua 10.

That brings us to the second, more scientific, part of this speculation. In the early days of quantum mechanics, scientists learned that light acts like a wave in certain instances and a particle in others. This was learned in the two-slit diffraction experiments. The details are better explained in the link. A word of advice: don't go too far down into the "delayed choice and quantum eraser", it makes no sense and suggests some very speculative physics not applicable to this area. Anyway, after light was discovered to have this dual property, they tested the theory with ever larger particles (electrons, neutrons, atoms, molecules) and realized that normal matter has this dual-nature property, but people do not observe it on the larger scales that we interact with everyday. It only becomes apparent at small, quantum scales. It turns out that a particle seems to be at its location on a sharp spike of probability as a wave. When we observe the particle, it normally appears at the location of the spike of high probability. But the key is that this probability extends out at a very, very, decreasingly low level beyond the area of the sharp spike. It actually extends out across the entire universe, as far as we know. So that means that the particle will usually manifest itself at the point we see it at, with 'usually' meaning 99.9X% with a ton of 9s behind it part of the time. There is an incredibly small possibility that the particle could appear a millimeter away without any force acting on it. The effect has been observed in scientific experiments and in cases where a particle gets past a barrier higher than it should, it is called quantum tunnelling. This is like a ball starting from rest on a hill 10 feet high, rolling down and over the next hill, which happens to be 15 feet high. It just doesn't happen, unless the ball has a small probability of existing far from where it actually is (and acts like a wave). The ball would roll down and start up the next hill, then appear on the other side of the hill. Since the probability is so low of this happening, even at the particle level, that it takes experiments with streams of billions and trillions of particles hitting a barrier to observe them appearing on the other side.

So, combining these two ideas leads to an interesting conclusion. If particles have will, and particles have small probabilities of existing in other places, then if it is God's will and the particles obey, the particles could exist at, or move to, different locations. Moving mountains would then only require the Lord's will and the obedience of the particles in the mountain. Shouldn't be too hard, right?