What Is Something?

In a Nutshell Animations

What is something? On the most fundamental level thinkable, what are things? Why are things? And why do things behave the way they do?

Transcript

00:00The simple questions are the hardest ones to answer.

00:03What is a thing?

00:05Why do things happen?

00:07And why do they happen the way they do?

00:09Let's try to approach this step by step.

00:12What are you made of?

00:14You are matter, which is made of molecules, which are made of atoms,

00:18and those are made of elementary particles.

00:21But, if elementary particles are the smallest things that exist,

00:25what are they made of?

00:31To answer a simple question, let's start simply.

00:35Let's wipe the universe clean,

00:38away with matter, antimatter, radiation, particles, anything.

00:42Now let's take a closer look at absolutely nothing.

00:46What is empty space?

00:48Is it what we call a vacuum?

00:50There are no atoms, no matter, nothing.

00:53Is it really all that empty?

00:55Nothing gives us the building blocks for everything.

00:59In a sense, empty space is a lot like a vast calm ocean.

01:04While the water is very still when nothing is happening,

01:07a stiff breeze can create some serious waves.

01:10Our universe works a lot like this.

01:12There are these oceans everywhere.

01:14Physicists call them fields.

01:17This might be strange and new, but think about radiation, for example.

01:21By exciting what's known as the electromagnetic field,

01:24a little kink is created, which is the particle we call the photon,

01:28a particle that carries radiation.

01:30We perceive it as light.

01:32This isn't unique to light.

01:34Every particle in the universe is made this way.

01:37There are fields for every particle of matter, all with their own rules.

01:41For example, along with the electromagnetic field,

01:44there is an electron field everywhere in the universe,

01:46and little kinks in that field are electrons.

01:49Altogether, the fields of our universe can produce 17 particles,

01:53which can be divided into three categories.

01:56The leptons and the quarks and the bosons.

01:59Leptons consist of the electron as well as its cousins, muon and tau particles.

02:04Each has an associated neutrino.

02:07Then there are quarks.

02:09The quarks are the nuclear family of particles.

02:12They're always found bound together in groups and pairs

02:14and make up protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms.

02:18Together, the leptons and quarks are the matter particles.

02:22They make up all the things you see.

02:24The air you breathe, the sun that warms you,

02:26the computer you're using right now to distract yourself from the stuff you should be doing.

02:30But things don't just exist, they also do stuff.

02:34In some philosophical sense, the properties of a thing

02:37are just as much a part of it as existence itself.

02:40This is where the bosons and the fields that make them come into play.

02:44While the quarks and leptons are made by matter fields,

02:47the bosons are made by force fields.

02:50We call a rule of the universe a force,

02:52and so far, four fundamental forces have been discovered.

02:55Electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.

03:00These forces are the rulebook of a game where the pieces are particles

03:04and the game is the universe.

03:06They tell particles what they can do and how they can do it.

03:10Bishops move diagonally, massless particles move at the speed of light,

03:14knights can jump, gravity attracts.

03:17The forces are the rules for how particles interact,

03:21which ultimately make them the rules for how particles assemble

03:24into all the big things we see in the universe.

03:27Gravity isn't just the rule for orbits around the sun

03:30or apples falling from trees.

03:32As a rule, it says matter attracts, which builds planets and stars.

03:36Electromagnetism isn't just a rule for magnets attracting or repelling

03:41or electric currents in light bulbs.

03:43It governs all atomic bonds, building every molecule.

03:47Together, forces and particles are sort of like the Tinker Toys of existence.

03:52The bosons are like messengers,

03:54passed between, you could say, connecting the matter particles,

03:57which they use to tell each other how to move.

04:00Each particle uses a certain set of the forces to interact with other particles.

04:05Quarks, for example, can interact with each other with electromagnetism

04:08and the strong nuclear force,

04:10but electrons don't use the strong force, just electromagnetism.

04:14The quarks exchange strong force bosons,

04:16communicating the strong nuclear attraction to each other,

04:19while the protons they build exchange particles of electromagnetism,

04:22photons, with the electrons.

04:25Thus, the quarks end up locked up in nuclei,

04:27while the electrons remain attached by their electric attraction, building atoms.

04:32Even though the universe has lots of big, messy phenomena like life,

04:36supernova, and computers that seem complex on the surface,

04:40if you zoom in far enough on anything,

04:42you just get 17 particles emerging from underlying fields,

04:45playing a game with four rules.

04:48To summarize, in the most basic form we know right now,

04:51this is what things are.

04:53This theory is what physicists call the standard model of particle physics.

04:57You are basically nothing more than disturbances

05:00on an ocean that's excited by energy

05:02and guided by forces that make up the rules of the universe.

05:08But why? And what is a force?

05:10We'll have to explore a few more simple questions to get to the bottom of this.

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