CHAPTER SEVEN


Sir, he said guiding me toward a podium, carved in a complex design of gargoyles and angels carrying the literary weight in science and medicine, it’s a pleasure to meet you and after such a lengthy absence…

Struggling to make sense of the sudden and unexpected change in décor, my nerves fry. Scared, polarised, I felt as if they’d screwed me to the floor, expecting some sort of consummate delivery. I couldn’t blink, let alone reply. An eternity of tension. He turned out to the audience…. gentlemen, he declared, your attention please… It gives me great pleasure to introduce a prophet, if I may encumber you with such a tile, whose bastion of knowledge goes back further than we can imagine…

Aside from a complete change of scene, there was a distinct familiarity about his voice,… his demeanour and standing were that of some masterful player who’d played me out in one of those past incarnations.

In science there is always doubt, as most of us here can vouch first hand, when the halls and corridors of these chambers of excellence saw fit to close the door on our hypothesis, his perseverance and standing, his breakthroughs, turns our time of defeat toward a clearer horizon. A place of insight and understanding that now seems within reach. He comes to us through epochs of life, a ray of hope in these darkest hours… in his presence we find purpose, a purpose to unravel the universe, loosen the particle of form and witness the possibility of that which we are in something smaller than a microcosm of dust.

Drifting, in and out of focus, trying to keep the story afloat… the words fell off the tongue, before I had a chance to reign them in. I’m sorry I said, I’m somewhat disorientated, a little lost… like the fish that got away.

He looked at me, a hint of bemusement in his eye… there was a brief pause, like he was waiting for a further explanation. I went to speak. but he continued… two thousand plus years in the wilderness, he declared, a long time, by anyone’s understanding,… a long, long time to be adrift, in an ageless sea… who wouldn’t feel lost…

Now I was really confused… How did he know where I’d been, how did he know my name? Was he talking in, or out of character, as a storyteller? Was I a voice in his head, or his in mine? This was all getting a bit beyond my capabilities…

Matter, he decried to the packed auditorium, though divisible in the extreme, is nevertheless not infinitely divisible. That is, there must be some point beyond which we cannot go in the division of matter. … I have taken the word “atom” from your good name to signify these ultimate particles.

I’m with you to the letter, I chipped in, but the ending… the end is debatable, is it not?

How so?

my name for one… oh, I once knew…

Later, later, he whispered as an aside… then back out to the audience… the atoms of each element are different from the atoms of all other elements, nevertheless, particles, as in nature are made up of finite substance…

I still wasn’t sure and wanted to call this unfamiliar puzzle to question… could I trust him enough to admit that I wasn’t one hundred percent certain of a conclusion… that I was prepared to put in more time, years if necessary to summarise… I decided to risk the humiliation…

Nature is cyclical, I said thinking on my feet… if you live in it for the long haul, as many of us have, you may not master the subject, but you certainly get to know the lesson well… nature repeats itself, repeatedly… and when we bring time into the equation it can seem as if the life has an ending… yet, we know that even a plant in the dead zone can regenerate after epochs have passed… if circumstances are right, a logged kernel caught in a tangle of branches, for decades, yanks free, falls to earth… overturned, by weather and animal, buried in fertile ground, the once dormant seed germinates. A shoot wriggles and pushes toward the surface of sun and rain, to live again…

That domain, the lifecycle of the plant, that you so elegantly transpose, is made up of elements animal, mineral and vegetable, elements that breakdown into partials each particle is itself indivisible….

You speak of dividing nature, without declaring the unique beauty of its flowering, its coming of age… this talk of matter is still very much a taboo… On that note the doorman entered and announced that a carriage awaits outside….

The light drew in, to rapturous applause

we’ll go deeper, further than this tomorrow night… no ifs, or buts…  

The  massive curtain descended, plunging us into darkness. As I started to wonder, the light snapped back up and I found myself sitting at large round table. I presumed as a guest at the house of the protagonist. Again, I wasn’t sure where I was or what I was doing there, especially as my clothes were altogether different and there were faces I didn’t recognise sitting along side, doing a remarkable job, it seemed, of concealing the fact that they were as equally baffled, as I.

And when all were in readiness, and none of the enemy had observed them, not expecting such a thing, the moon was eclipsed in the night, to the great fright of Nicias and others, who, for want of experience, or out of superstition, felt alarm at such appearances.

If everything and nothing is God, the realm of the physical is God incarnate. Nature cares for the species rather than for the individual; it lets the individual reproduce and then die. Nature is neutral and blind; she makes no distinction between saints and sinners, and destroys both fools and philosophers,

Just as in the animal and plant kingdoms an individual begins,…grows, endures, perishes, and passes away, could it not be likewise with entire species? If faith did not teach us that animals come from the hands of the Creator such as we see them, and if it were allowed to have the least doubt of their commencement and their end, might not the philosopher, abandoned to his conjectures, suppose that animality had from all eternity its particular elements, scattered and confounded in the mass of matter; that these elements happened to unite, since it was possible for this to happen; that the embryo formed from these elements passed through an infinity of organizations and developments; that it acquired in succession movement, sensation, ideas, thought, reflection, consciousness, feelings, passions, signs, gestures, articulate sounds, language, laws, sciences, and arts; that millions of years passed between these developments; that perhaps it [the organism] has still further developments to undergo, other additions to receive, now unknown to us;…that it may lose these faculties as it acquired them; that it may forever disappear from nature, or, rather, continue to exist under a form, and with faculties, quite other than those which we notice in it in this moment of time.) Denis Diderot 1754  

When you write or act, think no more of the audience than if it had never existed. Imagine a huge wall across the front of the stage, separating you from the audience, and behave exactly as if the curtain had never risen. Denis Diderot

In knowledge of what had happened scientists, academics and artists across the globe involved in the project became so affected by the outcome… science had created an unimaginable force, the likes of which no person had ever witnessed before. From the ashes of the dead, Albert Einstein said The creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind.

Two days before testing the first atomic bomb, Robert J Oppenheimer expressed his hopes and fears in a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita:

In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him.

After WWII, Oppenheimer joined with Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Rotblat and other eminent scientists and academics to establish what would eventually become the World Academy of Art and Science in 1960. The Academy was founded in the shadow of devastation, on the premise that knowledge can bring destruction and hell, or follow through with life saving miracles.

By the light of a broad mistake, I guess I didn’t do so badly.  

Fuelled by bursts of adrenalin, tons of bluff and speed – I spent the first sixteen years of my illustrious life in Cambridge. Shortly after that I moved to Barrow-in-Furness, earning an Equity card on route. Followed by a stint in Paris, I landed in London, where I caught a glimpse of the world’s end, taught yoga, forged lifelong friendship and saw some success, as an actor on stage and screen. Twenty odd years later, I moved out of the big smoke to Shropshire, with my wife Lena, renovated a derelict mill, in which we raised our son Mick, and camped out, for over a decade.

460 BC
Democritus, from Greece, developed the concept of dividing matter into smaller and smaller pieces until you could divide it no more. He called these smallest pieces atoms ( atomos = indivisible in Greek ). This was a philosophical idea rather than a scientifically based theory.
After the Greek era scientific investigations greatly diminished. The Romans, although great engineers, were less interested in the nature of matter. And with the onset of the Middle Ages dogma became more important than science.
As a result
 for over two thousand years   –   the atomic theory lay dormant.
1803   –   atomic theory
John Dalton, English chemist, revived the term of the atom when he suggested that each element was made up of unique atoms and the atoms of an element are all the same. He formulated his theory that chemical reactions result from the union and separation of these atoms and that atoms have characteristic properties.
Combinations of atoms bound to each other he designated as  molecules.

In the beginning it was a question, with a twist of mystery, then  then it became a fact… until 1981 the atom was thought to be invisible… less than a mote of dust that is a million atoms wide, it hides  

Reference https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/can-see-atom/

Science has gone so far into breaking down an object that boundaries between them have become unrecognisable, blurred beyond recognition.

Matter exists, with or without thought, not as we think. A thought, ideas, assume matter.

It is said that the beginnings of atomic science started in ancient Greece. Around 460 B.C., a Greek philosopher, Leaucippus and his master pupil Democritus, debated the form of existence. It was sugested that if you break an object such as a stick in half, then break it in half again, then again and again, the breaks ended at some point, at the tip, the last and tiniest particle… The idea that all matter is made up of tiny, indivisible particles, or atoms, is believed to have originated with the Greek philosopher Leucippus of Miletus and his student Democritus of Abdera in the 5th century B.C. (The word atom comes from the Greek word atomos, which means “indivisible.”). Leucippus contended that something exists only in its relation to nothingness. a stick, for example, broken down to dust and ground further, you end up with minute particles in a vacuum… 

It was debated then that the vacuum, void, a no-thing, a non-place, had to be there for substance and form to exist.

It seems there has always been a tussle, to put the atom and its nuclei in its place, both philosophically and scientifically… the nature of what we are and the assumptions of nothingness… but this crusade, this desire to pinpoint a god particle lost momentum, until relatively recent times.

The dispute over the atom, that which is or is not, was basically put aside until some scientists/philosophers were asking similar questions to their Greek counterparts, some two thousand years later… atoms were still thought to be the smallest possible division of matter; the void was there to inform matter…

British philosopher Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753). Berkeley brought out the position that the immediate objects, which we call physical objects, do not exist independently of us. Rather, their form depends on our interpretation….

In the 1800’s an English chemist, John Dalton performed experiments with various chemicals that showed that matter, seem to consist of elementary lumpy particles (atoms). Although he did not know about their structure, he knew that the evidence pointed to something fundamental.

The physicists brought together under the umbrella of the Manhattan Project, where imbibed with a child’s enthusiasm, an innocence, that open eyed wonder for humankind and mystery of the universe… they were innately curious, they had a spark for the building blocks of nature… what makes us tick…  Standing on the cusp of a vital epiphany…  they go where the play had never gone before… and woke up, after the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima killing 86,000 people.

Indirectly, directly, in sync, out of sync… it doesn’t matter how its fed to us, our obsessions for a tangible and fixed reality, tie us to a framework, a regime that imprisons us… whatever the label, whether it be political, capital, academic, artistic, religious, or otherwise, so many of us are feel trapped, inherently unaware of the straightjacket, sacrificing those that can and those that can’t, on an altar of encrypted beliefs that tear us apart… a rule of law that’s become a way of life, separating us from the all-powerful, the omnipotent present that sustains and nurtures us.

The cost of our lorded utopia, the outcome for such a rack of fortune sees diminishing returns –  our needs and aspirations sees 1% of the population reside over the remaining 99%…  we are plagued by inequality, decimating conflict, externally and internally, to ourselves and our existence.

Many lapsed into torments of self-accusation and spent much of their lives expiating guilt. Physicist Mark Oliphant, for example—who had played a critical role in persuading the U.S. to build the bomb—“could hardly believe the early reports of the incineration of Hiroshima…for he had not really come to grips with the possibility that a civilized and reputedly Christian nation was capable of such a deed.”

Albert Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 described how energy was released in an atomic explosion, and gave scientists a broad roadmap on how to produce the atom bomb, but contrary to popular belief he wasn’t involved in building the first atom bomb.
certainly had an input on an advisory leval, By the time world war 11 broke out Einstein was already high profile, he was seen as a security risk by the US.

Robert Oppenheimer American physicist and the scientific director of the Manhattan Project.
was very much excited about his invention in the beginning, but when he actual saw the test explosion (Trinity Explosion) he began having a change of heart. Quoting the Bhagvad Gitremarked after the trinity explosions he said “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”  (He loved reading Bhagvad Gita and quoted it many times). When the bombs were dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he regretted having dropped the bombs on a defeated enemy (Japan) and not making the bomb in time to use it against Germans. His growing guilt and moral confusion reached peak when he met President Truman and announced – “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands”. His self- loathing and guilt resulted in his downfall as he stressed on the moral question of weapons of mass destruction. The effect his actions had on his soul were irreparable and he slowly faded away from limelight and public life and lived alone on an island with his family while trying to stress on the impact of scientific discoveries on human life

There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.

Oppenheimer told his brother that if atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of the nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people of this world must unite or they will perish.

The shape of an object, a table for example, changes immediate shape as one walks around it, the parameters are not fixed by the reality of the object, if there is one; there are apparent possibilities and each depends on the conditions of observation between what things seem to be and what they are… an object is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an interpretation drawn from the knowledge of what we believe it to be.

British philosopher Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753) was said to have debated that the immediate objects, which we call physical objects, do not exist independently of us. Rather, they depend on our minds.

matter does not exist. What we call physical objects are really just ideas, mental products that we project onto the world.

“Does light have mass?”, this can be taken to mean different things if the light is moving freely or trapped in a container. The definition of the invariant mass of an object is m = sqrt{E2/c4 – p2/c2}. By this definition a beam of light is massless like the photons it is composed of. However, if light is trapped in a box with perfect mirrors so the photons are continually reflected back and forth in both directions symmetrically in the box, then the total momentum is zero in the box’s frame of reference but the energy is not. Therefore the light adds a small contribution to the mass of the box. This could be measured–in principle at least–either by the greater force required to accelerate the box, or by an increase in its gravitational pull. You might say that the light in the box has mass, but it would be more correct to say that the light contributes to the total mass of the box of light. You should not use this to justify the statement that light has mass in general.

That which was thought to be of no importance, an unseen star that falls off the radar into obscurity, a particle invisible, seemingly out of step, with the interminable merry-go-round of fixed parameters, is intrinsically linked with the cosmological whole.

Atoms and subatomic particles are what they are, not good or bad, neither right or wrong just significant. They bind us together, without them everything throughout the universe, that which exists, would have no form, no shape, form and life.

Until the 1960s, nucleons were thought to be elementary particles, that could not be split into smaller parts. Now they are known to be composite particles, made of three quarks bound together by the so-called strong interaction.

It is said that if an atom were the size of the Earth, then a nucleon would be the size of a sports stadium and the quark a grain of sand. Quarks and electrons remain the tiniest things science has uncovered, and physicists are confident that matter can be split infinitely smaller.

Albert Einstein said “the equation in which energy is put equal to mass, multiplied with the [by the] square of the velocity of light, showed that very small amounts of mass may be converted into a very large amount of energy and vice versa.”

Energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, tells us that the three disparate parts of nature—energy, the speed of light and mass— can now be profoundly correlated to that which we are made up of. Meaning the visable, inviseble, ehterial, litral, physical and metaphysical, like circal where the beginning meets the end to begin again, making them essencially intracly joined, as one and the same.

It seems now that there is no end of breaking down energy/matter, no matter how far we go, how deep, or how transient, there is always something tangible to split, to divide, if that’s what we choose to do.

In the vast stillness, the cosmos respires, the stars, planets, oceans, continents, plant life, release, contract, wax and wane, as particles collide, for a return. Leaves fall from the trees, grounded, on decomposing earth, the worm digests, the seed turns, at the circle’s end.

There are no concepts here, ideas, abstract thinkings, imaginings, certainly no fixtures and fittings, at this store. Science plumbs the depths, albeit the unfathomable mighty core that meanders, rolls, thunders, throughout known and unknown kingdoms, an endless ocean, all-encompassing, within and without us all, and finds another door.

as the earth moves around the sun, the substance that makes up the mud from which all things grow, molecules, Deoxyribonucleic acid DNA Ribonucleic acid, atoms, quarks and gluons distributed within protons, carries, bears the life force, through the cycle of birth and death.

This life stream, the universal thread that makes up our DNA, weaves through the seasons, through light into dark, ebb into flow, night into day, through us, with us, life into death, into life.

The Higgs field was thought to be responsible for discovering that some particles that should not have mass, do?