Ever since the discovery of the atom, physicists adhered to the philosophy of reductionism. According to this idea, nature could be grasped in a unified understanding by decomposing everything around us into pieces made up from the same tiny constituents. According to this common narrative, everyday objects such as chairs, tables, and books are made of atoms, atoms are composed of atomic nuclei and electrons, atomic nuclei contain protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons consist of quarks. Elementary particles such as quarks or electrons are understood as the fundamental building blocks of the universe.
Over the past fifty years, to work out and concretize this view, hundreds of thousands of pages have been filled with sophisticated equations full of strange symbols. To test these ideas, gigantic particle smashers have been built, tubes many miles long and worth billions of dollars, to accelerate subatomic matter close to the speed of light, let it crash together with violent impact, and search for even smaller or as-yet undiscovered pieces. With the help of NASA and the European Space Agency, engineering marvels have been launched into space to eavesdrop on the earliest incidents in the universe to understand how the world looked when it was but a soup of hot particles.
This philosophy has been tremendously successful, but there is a blind spot. Atoms, protons and neutrons, electrons and quarks are described by quantum mechanics. And according to quantum mechanics, it is, in general, impossible to decompose an object without losing some essential information. Particle physicists strive for a fundamental description of the universe, one that discards no information. But if we take quantum mechanics seriously, this implies that, on the most fundamental level, nature cannot be composed of constituents. The most fundamental description of the universe has to start with the universe itself.
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