Thingness

On the face of things, we seem to live in a world of objects, the list of which is seemingly endless. But what is an object? The term implies a kind of fundamental discreteness as set against an environment of other objects, or perhaps against empty space. Of course as any grade schooler can probably tell you, reality at one level of magnification can appear completely different at another. As we zoom in, we discover that a blade of grass is actually made of billions of cells. Looking closer, we find that the cells themselves are composed of literally trillions of atoms, which in turn are built of even smaller particles called quarks. And even though these little fellas are unimaginably tiny, it is theorized that they themselves might be made of objects zillions of times smaller called strings, little vibrating loops of almost-but-not-quite nothingness. It seems that at this point, we've hit rock bottom.

But then comes along field theory, and all our intuitions about what constitutes an object fly out the window. Field theory postulates that, fundamentally, there are no 'things' at all, that instead the universe is permeated with an absolutely continuous, unbroken 'field' or fields out of which our illusion of objectivity arises. Imagine you've dropped a pebble into a relatively still body of water, like a lake. Consider the ripples that the pebble's disturbance create. Now, does it seem reasonable to consider these ripples to be fundamentally discrete objects unto themselves? Clearly they are not, but instead are merely the consequence of disturbing the otherwise relatively placid surface of the water.

This analogy, though imperfect as all analogies are, describes the basic scenario in which objectivity arises from the seamless whole of fields. Admittedly this is still a theory in progress, and is a much more complex notion than what I've described here. From fields arise strings(?), which in turn gang together like bubbles sticking to one another (again, a simplistic analogy but it's the best I can do for now). On up to sub-atomic 'particles', to atoms, to molecules, to grains of sand and rocks and blades of grass, and finally to you and me.

Where does this leave us vis-a-vis this 'thing' we call life? We'll leave that for my next post (I like to make my essays bite-sized for easy digestion), in which we will consider the principle of emergence. Stay tuned! :)

For further reading, here's a nice little article describing the basic ideas behind field theory- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/08/20/qft/