Richard Smoley - Richard Smoley's Blog

It's gotten fairly common to read announcements of the discoveries of new subatomic particles. The latest example is the article (link to the left) on some possible new version of the Higgs boson.

Of course I am in no position to comment on these things scientifically.

I wonder, though, where it is all leading.

What is matter, after all?
Read More

4 Comments

Comments

Dec 17, 2015 10:57 AM EST

I'm never caught up on subatomic physics, but I've long gotten the impression that getting smaller and smaller in our parsing of particles we do not come to Democritus style particles (though he was right in a *way* because at a certain level of "smallness" particles are, well, particles--atoms can be photographed.)...it's more like seeing a hurricane as one thing: that's "a particle". But parsing the hurricane we come to an intricacy of conflicting and reactive forces tending a certain way. Particles appear to be, eventually, waves. But we shouldn't lunge into the simplifications that clever book salesmen like Deepak Chopra engage in -- since it's "all just waves" therefore we can impinge our reality on it etc... (it isn't all just waves, actually, even though it is sort-of, on some levels; the human perspective can't fully encompass it...it's more like Heraclitus than Democritus, seems to me)...

There seem to be subatomic fields of relationship with points of intensity in a given sequence of events that add up to being "particles' with varying characteristics...

I may have to make myself take an adult-school physics class at some point. I can already see my 63 year old self weighted with humiliation as I struggle to grasp the big picture...

- John Shirley

Dec 17, 2015 12:23 PM EST

It doesn't really deal with the problem to say these things are "waves" rather than "particles." The question is the same. So what> is moving in a wavelike manner?

- Richard Smoley

Dec 18, 2015 4:04 PM EST

"So what is moving in a wavelike manner?" The whole that is more than the sum of the parts? Anyway it may be that it's the productive force of deterioration and reformation that creates spacetime foam that in turn is the foundation of the cosmos (so some suppose). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam - and so it's a kind of down and upness that endless reiterates. If there is a third, or, as some would have (cf, Gurdjieff) a "reconciling" force, that may be consciousness which nudges the endless iteration, unable to control it completely but--perhaps--giving it some spin that leads to orders of complexity capable of holding mind...

- John Shirley

Dec 19, 2015 10:19 AM EST

http://scaleofuniverse.com/

- John Shirley