style="font-size:15px;"> rotating,
slipping and sliding universe we’re living in.
There is no universal up;
there is no ultimate down;
there is no objective, stationary, unmoving place of rest where you can observe all that ceaseless movement.
Sitting still, after all, is no different than maintaining a uniform approximate constant state of motion.
There is no absolute viewpoint; there are only views from a point.
Bendy, curvy, relative—the past, present, and future are illusions as space-time warps and distorts in a stunning variety of ways, leading us to another matter: matter.
The sun is both a star that we orbit,
and our primary source of energy.
It is a physical object,
and it is the engine of life for our planet.
The sun is made of matter,
and the sun is energy.
At the same time.
Albert Einstein was the first to name this, showing that matter is actually locked-up energy. And energy is liberated matter.
Perhaps you’ve seen posters of the Swiss patent clerk sticking his tongue out, with the wild hair and the rumors of how he was supposedly such a genius that he would forget to put his pants on in the morning. And then there’s his famous E = mc2 formula, which many of us could confidently write out on a chalkboard even if we couldn’t begin to explain it.
Beyond all that, though, what exactly was it that he did?
What Einstein did, through his theories of general and special relativity, was show that the universe is way, way weirder than anyone had thought. I realize that weirder isn’t the most scientific of terms, but Einstein’s work took him from the bigness of the universe to the smallness of the universe, and that’s when a string of truly stunning discoveries were made, discoveries that challenge our most basic ideas about the world we’re living in.
II. Who Ordered That?
For thousands of years people have wondered what the universe is made of, assuming that there must be some kind of building block, a particle, a basic element, a cosmic Lego of sorts—something really small and stable that makes up everything we know to be everything. The possibilities are fascinating, because if you could discover this primal building material, you could answer countless questions about how we got here and what we’re made of and where it’s all headed . . .
You could, ideally, make sense of things.
Greek philosophers—among them Democritus, who lived twenty-five hundred years ago—speculated about this elemental building block, using a particular word for it. The Greeks had a word tomos, which referred to cutting or dividing something. Out of this they developed the concept of something that was a-tomos, something “indivisible, uncuttable,” something that everything else was made of. Something really small, of which there is nothing smaller. Something atomos, from which we get the word atom.
Imagine what we’d learn if we could actually discover one of these atoms! That was the quest that compelled scientists and philosophers and thinkers for thousands of years until the late 1800s, when atoms were eventually discovered.
Atoms, it turns out, are small.
About one million atoms lined up side by side are as thick as a human hair.
A single grain of sand contains 22 quintillion atoms (that’s 22 with 18 zeroes).
An atom is in size to a golf ball as a golf ball is in size to Earth.
That small.
But atoms, it was discovered, are made up of even smaller parts called protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons are in the center of the atom, called the nucleus, which is one-millionth of a billionth of the volume of the atom.
If an atom were blown up to the size of a stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a grain of rice, but it would weigh more than the stadium.
The discoveries continued as technology was developed to split those particles, which led to the discovery that those particles are actually made up of even smaller particles. And then technology was developed to split those particles and it was discovered that those particles are actually made up of even smaller particles. And then technology was developed to split those particles . . .
Down and down it went,
smaller and smaller,
further and further into the subatomic world.
The British physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, which led to the discovery of an astonishing number of new particles over the next few
years, from
bosons and
hadrons and
baryons and
neutrinos
to
mesons and
leptons and
pions and
hyperons and
taus.
Gluons were discovered, which hold particles together, along with quarks, which come in a variety of types—
there are up quarks
and down quarks
and top quarks
and bottom quarks
and charmed quarks
and, of course,
strange quarks.
When an inconceivably small particle called a muon was identified, the legendary physicist Isaac Rabi is known for saying, “Who ordered that?”
By now somewhere around 150 subatomic particles have been identified, with new technology and research constantly emerging, the most impressive example of this happening at a facility known by the acronym CERN, which is near the Swiss–French border. Workers at CERN, an international collaboration of almost eight thousand scientists and several thousand employees, have built a sixteen-mile circular tunnel one hundred meters below earth’s surface called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). At the LHC they fire two beams at each other, each with 3.5 trillion volts, hoping that in the ensuing collision particles will emerge that haven’t been studied yet.
Physicists have talked with straight faces for years about how with this unprecedented level of energy and equipment and billions of dollars and the brightest scientific minds in the world working together they might be able to finally discover that incredibly important, terribly elusive particle called
