Truthfully, I am pretty lost reading these web sites. I don’t what know Cartesian tensors are or what Euclidian space is and I don’t understand the formulas and symbols. However this is what I think I understand….
At one time folks thought that things could be divided only so far… and that was what atoms were, the smallest bit of matter.
By the early 1900s physicists had a more complete picture of the atom, acknowledging the sub-atomic particles; electrons, neutrons and protons. But physicists were (and still are I think!) trying to understand how the atom functioned. They wanted to know why certain atoms absorbed and radiated specific amounts of energy.
There were other ‘problems’ or rather characteristics/behaviors of substances that could not be explained by the contemporary scientific thinking. So they started thinking different…..
In 1905 Einstein suggested the idea of the wave-particle duality. He observed that light can be both a wave and a particle (I’m not sure precisely what it means to ‘be a wave’ however). Another scientist, Broglie, said if energy can be both wave and particle, why not matter as well? Eventually physicists began to think of atoms as changing all the time. When electrons; the bit that spins around the nucleus, absorb ‘packets’ of energy (quanta), they ‘disappear’, reappearing in a different energy state.
Nowadays, there are even more ideas about sub-atomic particles and how they behave. Electrons belong to a class of particles called leptons; protons and neutrons are baryons and are made of quarks. And then there’s bosons and gluons!
It seems that the quest is still on for the absolute smallest bit of matter…folks still want to know ‘what we’re made of’. I suppose it is difficult for many to really and truly embrace the notion that there is a spectrum of existence…that energy and matter are joined aspects of this spectrum, not fundamentally different states of being.
It seems to me that this relationship was represented beautifully over two thousand years ago with the names of Yin and Yang. If you look at the four principles of Yin and Yang you can see the echoes of these quantum discussions: Yin and Yang are apparent opposites, as are matter and energy. Yin and Yang are interdependent—one can not exist without the other, again as in matter and energy (though it looks like we’re still debating that!). Yin and Yang can turn into each other (inter-transformation) as do matter and energy. Yin and Yang consume each other…do matter and energy?
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