What is something?

The simple questions are the hardest ones to answer, like : What is a thing? Why do things happen? And why do they happen the way they do?

Let’s do a step-by-step analysis: What are you made of? You are matter, which is made of molecules, which are made of atoms and those are made of elementary particles, which are further made of quarks. But if they are the smallest objects in the universe, what are quarks made of?

To answer this so-called simple question, let’s start simplifying everything. Let’s wipe the universe clean away with matter, anti-matter, radiation, particles and everything else. Now imagine what’s left and try to visualise and think of it. Yes! I am telling to visualise and think of what can be called absolutely nothing.

What is empty space? Is it what we call a vacuum? There are no atoms, no matter, nothing. Is it really all that empty? Nothing gives us the building blocks for something and everything else. In a sense, empty space is lot like a vast, calm ocean. While the water is very still when nothing is happening, a stiff breeze can cause some serious waves.

Our universe works a lot like this. There are such oceans everywhere. Physicists call them fields. This might be strange and different and new, but think of radiation. By exciting what’s known as an electromagnetic field, a little kink is created which is the particle we call Photon, the particle that carries radiation. And yeah, the particle that we perceive as light. This isn’t unique to light, all particles in the universe are created this way.

There are fields for every particle of matter. For example, like the electromagnetic field there is an electron field everywhere in the universe. And the kinks in the field are the particles we call electrons. All the discovered fields of our universe can create 17 particles, which can be further divided into 3 categories. That is, Leptons, Bosons & Quarks.

Together, the Leptons and Quarks, are the meta particles. They make up all the things you see, the air you breathe, the sun that warms you, the food you eat and the device you are using right now to distract yourself from the useful stuff you should be doing.

Things don’t just exist, they do stuff. In some philosophical terms, the properties of a thing are just as much a part of it as is existence itself. This is where Bosons and the fields that make them come into play. While the leptons & quarks are made of matter fields, bosons are made of force fields.

We call a rule of the universe a force. So far we have discovered four fundamental forces: Electromagnetism, Gravity, and the Strong and Weak Nuclear forces. These forces are the rulebook of the game where the pieces are the particles and the game is the universe.

In simpler terms, the forces tell the particles what they can do and how they can do it. The forces are the rules for how particles interact; and yes, they are also the rules to how particles assemble to make all the big things we can see.

Gravity isn’t just the rule for orbits around the sun, or apples falling from trees. As a rule, it also says matter attracts, which forms the stars and the planets. Electromagnetism isn’t just the rule for magnets attracting or repelling, or electric currents in light bulbs. It governs all atomic bonds building every molecule.

Each particles uses a certain set of the forces to interact with other particles. Quarks, for example,can interact with each other through electromagnetism and strong nuclear force, but electrons just use electromagnetism, and not strong nuclear force. The quarks exchange strong force bosons communicating the strong nuclear attraction to each other while the protons they build exchange particles of electromagnetism photons with the electrons. Thus the quarks end up locked in the nuclei, whereas the electrons remain attached by their electric attraction, thereby building atoms.

Even though the universe has big, messy phenomenons like life, super nova and computers, that seem complex on the surface. But if you zoom in far enough, you’ll just get 17 particles, emerging from underlying fields, playing a game with four rules.

So, to summarise in the most simplest and basic form,this is what things are. Physicists call it The Standard Model of Particle Physics. This states that: You are nothing more than disturbances, on an ocean that is excited by energy and guided by forces, that make up the rules of the universe.

Yeah, yeah! There still remains all these questions to be discussed:

*Will discuss them in future posts*

*Written by Saurav*