What makes up everything in the universe

Normal matter consists of the atoms that make up stars, planets, human beings and every other visible object in the Universe. Clusters of galaxies emit lots of X-rays because they contain a large quantity of high-temperature gas.

By measuring the quantity of X-rays from a cluster, astronomers can work out both the temperature of the cluster gas and also the mass of the cluster. Theoretically, in a Universe where the density of matter is high, clusters of galaxies would continue to grow and so, on average, should contain more mass now than in the past. However, if electrons are instead sufficiently widely spread-out lumps of energy and charge, there is no need for faster-than-light motion, and the energy and charge still flow in a circular way about some central axis, producing electron spin.

Lazarovici then moved from classical to quantum electrodynamics. His research program for fixing up the theory has a number of nonstandard elements. First, Lazarovici is aware that quantum electrodynamics suffers from the quantum measurement problem, and he thinks that we ought to adopt a solution proposed by David Bohm, which posits the existence of point particles that are distinct from the quantum wave function.

This Dirac sea was central to early research in quantum electrodynamics but has fallen out of favor in most contemporary presentations of the theory. This simulation shows a theory called lattice quantum chromodynamics , which describes the fundamental strong interactions between quarks and gluons as they compose particles such as protons or neutrons. Lattice quantum chromodynamics aims to understand the complex phenomena emerging from this quantum field theory, including how spontaneous fluctuations occur in the fields of gluons that lead to these interactions.

Combined with quantum electrodynamics, which explores the electrodynamic force on small scales, these pieces of the Standard Model of particle physics can together be used to explore the underlying properties of subatomic particles, including the fundamental nature of matter itself. These ideas fit together well, and Lazarovici hopes that they will allow us to avoid certain unpleasant infinities that arise in quantum electrodynamics.

In my contribution to the debate, I advocated a different point of view on quantum electrodynamics. Following Faraday, I argued that we should get rid of particles and just have fields. We need another field as well: the Dirac field. It is this field that represents the electron and also the antiparticle of the electron, the positron. A laser that hits a slab of acrylic at the correct angle is completely reflected inside the material and highlights the existence of photons.

So if a theory considers electrons to be particles, it has to either eliminate photons entirely or treat photons as fields. However, in theories that consider electrons to be fields instead of particles, photons can be thought of in the same manner, creating a consistency that adds credence to this theory. In classical electrodynamics, this approach replaces the point electron particle with a spread-out lump of energy and charge in the Dirac field.

Because the charge is spread out, the electromagnetic field that is produced by this charge will not get infinitely strong at any point in space. That makes the self-interaction problem less severe. But it is not solved. We saw this problem before, in the idea that the electron is a little ball. However, the style of this new proposal is quite different. The goal here is not to invent a model of the electron but instead to find one in the existing equations of quantum electrodynamics. I was driven to this all-fields picture not by studying the self-interaction problem, but by two other considerations.

First, I have found this picture helpful in understanding a property of the electron called spin. The standard lore in quantum physics is that the electron behaves in many ways like a spinning body but is not really spinning.

It has spin but does not spin. In , researchers in Japan observed massless electrons, evidence of electrons being just fields rather than particles. Using a scanning tunneling microscope, the researchers found that the movement of the electrons in the metallic surface can be represented by a wave function with components related to electron spin. These electrons differ in spatial distribution and magnetic structure from ones that have mass and are thus particles. If the distribution and movement of these electrons could be controlled, they could be used in a type of experimental information storage called spintronics.

Takao Sasagawa; Y. Fu et al. If the electron is point-size, of course it does not make sense to think of it as actually spinning. If the electron is instead thought of as a very small ball, there are concerns that it would have to rotate faster than the speed of light to account for the features that led us to use the word spin.

This worry about faster-than-light rotation made the physicists who discovered spin in the s uncomfortable about publishing their results. If the electron is a sufficiently spread-out lump of energy and charge in the Dirac field, there is no need for faster-than-light motion.

We can study the way that the energy and charge move to see if they flow in a circular way about some central axis—to see if the electron spins. It does. The all-fields approach replaces the point electron particle with a spread-out lump of energy and charge, which makes the self-interaction problem less severe. Dirac invented an equation that describes the quantum behavior of a single electron.

But we have no similar equation for the photon. On the other hand, if you think of electrons as a field, then you can think of photons the same way. I see this consistency as a virtue of the all-fields picture.

As things stand, the three-sided debate among Einstein, Ritz, and Faraday remains unresolved. It is not yet clear what classical and quantum electrodynamics are telling us about reality.

Is everything made of particles, fields, or both? This question is not front and center in contemporary physics research. Theoretical physicists generally think that we have a good-enough understanding of quantum electrodynamics to be getting on with, and now we need to work on developing new theories and finding ways to test them through experiments and observations. That might be the path forward. However, sometimes progress in physics requires first backing up to reexamine, reinterpret and revise the theories that we already have.

To do this kind of research, we need scholars who blend the roles of physicist and philosopher, as was done thousands of years ago in Ancient Greece. This essay has been expanded from one that was originally published in Aeon , aeon.

Skip to main content. Login Register. What's Everything Made Of? By Charles T. Sebens To answer the question of whether the fundamental building blocks of reality are particles, fields, or both, we must think beyond physics. Page 42 DOI: Albert Einstein argued that electrons were particles and fields; Walther Ritz thought that electrons were just particles; Michael Faraday proposed that they were just fields.

One argument for electrons as all electromagnetic fields without particles is that it reconciles some observations of the property of electron spin without violating the speed of light. Facebook Twitter. Wikimedia Commons. Since the quantum mechanics is going to change the laws of electrodynamics, we should wait to see what difficulties there are after the modification. The universe is filled with billions of galaxies and trillions of stars, along with nearly uncountable numbers of planets, moons, asteroids, comets and clouds of dust and gas — all swirling in the vastness of space.

But if we zoom in, what are the building blocks of these celestial bodies, and where did they come from? Hydrogen is the most common element found in the universe, followed by helium; together, they make up nearly all ordinary matter. All the rest is made of stuff that can't be seen and can only be detected indirectly. It all started with a Big Bang , about Milliseconds later, the newborn universe was a heaving mass of neutrons, protons, electrons, photons and other subatomic particles, roiling at about billion degrees Kelvin, according to NASA.

Every bit of matter that makes up all the known elements in the periodic table — and every object in the universe, from black holes to massive stars to specks of space dust — was created during the Big Bang, said Neta Bahcall, a professor of astronomy in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University in New Jersey.

About seconds after the Big Bang, the temperature dropped to a still-seething 1 billion degrees Kelvin.