on the misbehaving naughty bits

fundamental forces at work

What the hell happened to physics?

One moment, over thirty years ago, I was in high school. Physics was pretty simple. These days? Oh boy.

In a remarkably foolish attempt to keep up, I’ve been listening to The Lightness of Being by Frank Wilzek:

A Nobel-prize winning physicist takes on the essential question: what are we made of? Our understanding of nature's deepest reality has changed radically, but almost without our noticing, over the past twenty-five years

Here Wilzek takes quantum theory head on. Though much of it is quite dense, Wilzek explores one of the most basic questions possible: What is matter made of?

Apparently things have become smaller since my high school days of protons, neutrons and electrons. Those are still there. They’ve found even smaller particles. More stuff that makes ups stuff. Protons are types of hardons. And hardons are made of quarks. That’s right. They called the fundamental parts of the fundamental parts ‘quarks’.

Me? I believe that this is part of some s…