Ways of Seeing
- Exploring Modern Metaphysics -
PARTICLE PHYSICS - The MICRO view of Science
Science has provided a comprehensive understanding of the materials and energies we see around us.
Early "theories" were very diverse. One, for example, claimed that all matter was composed in different parts of the four basic "elements": earth, air, fire and water. This is easily proven wrong by experiment.
The current Standard Model theory of matter was produced by smashing small particles of matter into other small particles of matter and observing the pieces that result. This discipline is known as Particle Physics and is still very active; the theory continues to be refined as more results become known.
This theory is, briefly: Matter is composed of atoms. There are about 90 naturally occurring atoms known as elements, such as oxygen, iron, carbon, etc. Each type of atom has a different number of elementary particles of three types, protons, neutrons and electrons, the first two of which are in turn composed of combinations of the six Quarks. The theory maintains that there are five other more exotic Lepton particles, and five force-carrying particles that provide such characteristics as electromagnetism (photon) and the binding of subatomic particles to form atoms. Although the Standard Model has been validated to extreme accuracy, scientists have yet to verify the existance of the Higgs Boson which is thought to be the link to mass, or to provide a unification of the Standard Model theory with gravity per Einstein's theory of General Relativity.
Interestingly, one result of Einstein's theory of Special Relativity that has been verified by many people, is that matter can be converted completely into energy, and in fact the amount of energy in an object is exactly equal to the mass of the object multiplied twice by the speed of light. There appears to be no intuitive explanation as to why the speed of light is used in the conversion between matter and energy.
Thus all we see around us, and in fact we ourselves, are composed simply of several different kinds of packets of energy as influenced by several discrete forces. It is almost as if, according to G. Spencer Brown in "The Laws of Form", "...the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself. This is indeed amazing. Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all."
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