For centuries, scientists have tried in vain to find the “bricks of matter” – the ultimate, smallest particle. A hundred years ago, they thought they had found it in the atom (which, in Greek, signifies “that which cannot be divided”). The discovery of subatomic particles led physics to probe deeper into the structure of matter. By 1928 scientists imagined that they had discovered the smallest particles – protons, electrons and photons. All the material world was supposed to be made up of these three. Subsequently, this was shattered by the discovery of the neutron, the positron, the deuteron, then a host of other particles, ever smaller, with an increasingly fleeting existence – neutrinos, pi-mesons, mu-mesons, k-mesons, and many others. The life span of some of these particles is so evanescent – maybe a billionth of a second – that they have been described as “virtual particles” – something utterly unthinkable in the pre-quantum era.

The tauon lasts only for a trillionth of a second, before breaking down into a muon, and then to an electron. The neutral pion is even more fleeting, breaking down in less than one quadrillionth of a second to form a pair of gamma rays. However, these gammas live to a ripe old age compared to others, which have a life of only one hundredth of a microsecond. Other particles, like the neutral sigma particle, break down after a hundred trillionth of a second. In the 1960s, even this was overtaken by the discovery of particles so evanescent that their existence could only be determined from the necessity of explaining their breakdown products. The half-lives of these particles are in the region of a few trillionths of a second. These are known as resonance particles. And even this was not the end of the story.

Over a hundred and fifty new particles were later discovered, which have been called hadrons. The situation was becoming extremely confused. An American physicist, Dr. Murray Gell-Mann, in an attempt to explain the structure of subatomic particles, postulated still other, more basic particles, the quarks, which were yet again heralded as the “ultimate building-blocks of matter”. Gell-Mann theorised that there were six different kinds of quarks and that the quark family was parallel to a six-member family of lighter particles known as leptons. All matter was now supposed to consist of these twelve particles. Even these, the most basic forms of matter so far known to science, still possess the same contradictory qualities we observe throughout nature, in accordance with the dialectical law of the unity of opposites. Quarks also exist in pairs, and possess a positive and negative charge, although it is, unusually, expressed in fractions.

Despite the fact that experience has demonstrated that there is no limit to matter, scientists still persist in the vain search for the “bricks of matter”. It is true that such expressions are the sensational inventions of journalists and some scientists with an over-developed flair for self-promotion, and that the search for ever smaller and fundamental particles is undoubtedly a bona fide scientific activity, which serves to deepen our knowledge of the workings of nature. Nevertheless, one certainly gets the impression that at least some of them really do believe that it is possible to reach a kind of ultimate level of reality, beyond which there is nothing left to discover, at least at the subatomic level.

The quark is supposed to be the last of twelve subatomic “building blocks” are said to make up all matter. Dr. David Schramm was reported as saying “The exciting thing is that this is the final piece of matter as we know it, as predicted by cosmology and the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the final piece of that puzzle’.”[4]

So the quark is the “ultimate particle”. It is said to be fundamental and structureless. But similar claims were made in the past for the atom, then the proton, and so on and so forth. And in the same way, we can confidently predict the discovery of still more “fundamental” forms of matter in the future. The fact that the present state of our knowledge and technology does not permit us to determine the properties of the quark does not entitle us to affirm that it has no structure. The properties of the quark still await analysis, and there is no reason to suppose that this will not be achieved, pointing the way to a still deeper probing of the endless properties of matter. This is the way science has always advanced. The supposedly unbreachable barriers to knowledge erected by one generation are overturned by the next, and so on down the ages. The whole of previous experience gives us every reason to believe that this dialectical process of the advance of human knowledge is as endless as the infinite universe itself.

  1. Financial Times, 1/4/94, our emphasis.