Feelings for particles

You and me, the birds, these trees, even this text as print on paper, light modulating liquid crystals (LCs), or sound waves issuing from my throat are all made up of the same fundamental bits of matter: atoms. Most of our atoms in our body were created soon after the Big Bang as hydrogen which forms 65 percent of our mass. The rest of our 10 billion billion billion atoms were created billions of years ago by exploding stars, including the 24 percent oxygen, 10 percent carbon and 1 percent trace elements that make the rest of our body. Except – atoms are not fundamental – protons and neutrons are composites. Well over thirty subatomic particles have now been discovered. The last three to be located (through the Large Hadron Collider) are: top quark (1995), tau neutrino (2000) and Higgs boson (2012). No, I don’t understand how it all works either. As physicist Richard Feynman said, ‘Anyone who claims to understand quantum theory is either lying or crazy.’ Even among particle physicists, there is no agreement on the definition of a subatomic particle, whether elementary or composite, and no agreement on how fundamental they are. Nor, how to explain that every elementary particle has both particle and wave properties.

Language loses sight and sound of the spaces between objects, events, memories. Our lives are composed of particles, ‘We ought to say a feeling of and, and a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as easily as we say a feeling of blue, or a feeling of cold,’ wrote William James. He complained that we privilege the substantive ignoring the importance of particles. [i]

We are fundamentally a body in space, orienting ourselves by embodied cognition, understanding concepts through metaphors of spatiality. Prepositions are important too. And we like order, alphabetically will do: above, across, against, along, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, by, down, from, in, into, near, of, off, on, to, toward, under, upon, with and within.