Just what is the world made of? It’s such a short, simple question, but it’s a question that we still haven’t finished answering. Our answer has developed as our knowledge progresses – from thinking that everything is made up of “elements” at the time of the Greeks, to the idea of atoms and chemical elements, to today’s view that the building blocks of creation are subatomic, fundamental particles. It’s a view that represents the culmination of thousands of years of scientific enquiry. But is this really the final answer? Is it possible that something deeper lies beyond our current understanding, perhaps something that shows that the fundamental fabric of the universe is not material at all?
Our current, best scientific view of the world is that it is at heart a very simple place. Look closely at anything in it, and you’ll see structure growing progressively simpler as you examine it at smaller and smaller scales. If you can detect scales a thousand million times smaller than us, you will see atoms. If you can detect scales a thousand million times smaller than that (or smaller, because we don’t know how small these smallest ingredients are), you will see the fundamental particles that, collected together, form atoms and everything else. A few fundamental forces determine the behaviour of these subatomic particles and how they stick together. Everything is bathed in an energy field (the eponymous Higgs field), that governs how strong the forces are – a delicate balance that ensure atoms are stable and that our universe looks the way it does to us.
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