For much of history atoms were thought to be the smallest building blocks of nature—the word literally means indivisible.
Then as electrons, neutrons and protons were discovered, a new label had to be created. The novel particles were said to be “elementary”, signalling a belief that these subatomic constituents were the ultimate components of matter, the stuff all other elements were made up from.
But as high-energy colliders kept getting more powerful, the list of experimentally validated subatomic particles grew. Quarks, leptons, bosons, gluons, muons and tao; what was supposed to be the most fundamental constituents of matter seemed more like Russian dolls than anything else
I’m reading Fritjof Capra’s 1975 classic The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, and I come across a reference to a school of thought pioneered by Andrew Chew, called Hadron Bootstrap Theory (also known as the Bootstrap Hypothesis).
Chew argued that hadrons—particles like protons and neutrons—exist as part of a self-consistent and essentially ‘flat’ network, where each entity is defined by its relationship to the entirety of the rest of the network. The term bootstrap reflects the idea that this network essentially pulled itself into existence.
The ideas marked a radical departure from the mechanistic view that had dominated physics ever since the Enlightenment. Instead of dissecting nature into ever-smaller parts, Chew championed a vision of reality as a web of interconnections, where relationships trumped the components themselves.
I’m reading that Chew’s hypothesis, which gained traction in the 80’s, had a corollary in the thinking of David Bohm, a brilliant physicist whose work bridged that of Louis de Broglie and John Stewart Bell.
Bohm had appeared occasionally in books I’ve read over the years, but I was unaware of his theory of the so-called “implicate order,” which proposes that the universe operates as a deeply interconnected whole, with every part enfolded into a hidden, underlying reality that gives rise to the observable world.
Though Chew’s and Bohm’s theories are out of vogue, their core idea—that no fragment of reality can exist in isolation—has found fertile ground elsewhere. Cognitive neuroscience, for example, uses similar principles to explain consciousness as a network of nodes, where elements blend seamlessly, like watercolours bleeding together.
Bohm & Chew were both aware of the chink in their theories’ armour; their models of the world were so profoundly far-reaching that it would be a tall order, if even possible, to ever empirically validate them. In a sense, they pushed the envelope for what science even is, blurring the line between it and the general space of philosophy.
I suppose the same can be said about cognitive neuroscience, let alone about systems theory, which is another field heavily indebted to Bohm & Chew.
Questioning that there’s such a thing as elementary particles—whether it be in the subatomic or the cognitive realm, cuts to the bone of western thinking. If there’s no such thing as fundamental building blocks, then what is there to hold on to?