Einstein, Quantum Mechanics and God

Right when I was beginning to grasp the fundamentals of Euclidian geometry back in 1954, someone pointed out that it wasn’t true. Specifically, parallel straight lines do not stay parallel when stretched on to infinity. They either curve toward each other (elliptical geometry) or they curve away from each other (hyperbolic geometry), but they don’t stay parallel.
This was my first encounter with something that WORKS perfectly fine, but simply is not true. In other words, you can build as tall a building as Superman can leap using Euclidian geometry and the building will stay right up there. But the parallel lines postulated in the construction and the very existence of the building don’t really exist.
I am neither mathematician nor scientist, but the notion fascinated me. A lot about science fascinates me. For example in college I was forced to take a course in physical science. I paid as little attention as was required to pass the course until they mentioned electricity.
The professor went on and on about its properties and all the wonderful things it can do. I finally raised my hand and asked, “What IS electricity?” He looked startled for an instant. Then he replied that no one really knows.
I was appalled. Here is a force we use constantly in nearly every aspect of our lives. We generate it and send it hither and thither. But we don’t really understand what it is. I’m just a liberal arts major with a limited grasp of the forces of mathematics and nature, but it seems to me that I would stop everything and set everyone to work finding out what the stuff IS before I attempted to DO anything more with it.
Who knows what all we might discover if we knew what it really was. We might avoid dangers, and we might create things unimaginable now—if we took the time and money to discover what things are at their most basic level.
Another ten years or so down the road and I attended a lecture by Nobelist Linus Pauling. My ears pricked up when he made the following statement: “Matter (stuff, things) act QUALITATIVELY differently in the mass.”
In other words, if you have mega-tons times mega-tons of the stuff, it is going to act differently than when you only have a ton or so of it—it may even BE something different. In my fuzzy little mind that connected with the whole question of Euclidean and non-euclidean geometry.
Another case, it seems to me, of something wandering out into infinity and being/becoming something different. Another case of something that works on this planet’s surface not being true out in the vastness of the cosmos.
It leaves me wondering—how much of what works for us in the limited realm of space and time we can see from this finite space and time called Earth—may not really be true at all?
For instance, Einstein and people like Planck and Bohr came up with two theories to describe nature as we can see and understand it from here. Einstein’s relativity does a decent job describing and predicting the motion of planets and stars; Planck and Bohr’s quantum mechanics does a fine job of predicting what sub-microscopic are liable to be up to and even offers hints as to where.
The problem is they are not compatible with each other. It would seem if one is true, the other cannot be. Yet BOTH WORK. (Steven Hawking, “A Brief History of Time”) Whoa. Have we somehow slipped the traces and wandered out into infinity?
Are we dealing in a near-science fiction area with dimensions we don’t even know are there—let alone understand? That’s the way I began to feel the more I thought about something as finite as Euclidean geometry. I’ll go on a bit more tomorrow.