Everything around us is made of 'stuff', from planets, to books, to
our own bodies. Whatever it is, we call it matter or material
substance. It is solid; it has mass. But what is matter, exactly?
We are taught in school that matter is not continuous, but
discrete. As a few of the philosophers of ancient Greece once
speculated, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, matter comes
in 'lumps', and science has relentlessly peeled away successive
layers of matter to reveal its ultimate constituents. Surely, we
can't keep doing this indefinitely. We imagine that we should
eventually run up against some kind of ultimately fundamental,
indivisible type of stuff, the building blocks from which
everything in the Universe is made. The English physicist Paul
Dirac called this 'the dream of philosophers'. But science has
discovered that the foundations of our Universe are not as solid or
as certain and dependable as we might have once imagined. They are
instead built from ghosts and phantoms, of a peculiar quantum kind.
And, at some point on this exciting journey of scientific
discovery, we lost our grip on the reassuringly familiar concept of
mass. How did this happen? How did the answers to our questions
become so complicated and so difficult to comprehend? In Mass Jim
Baggott explains how we come to find ourselves here, confronted by
a very different understanding of the nature of matter, the origin
of mass, and its implications for our understanding of the material
world. Ranging from the Greek philosophers Leucippus and
Democritus, and their theories of atoms and void, to the
development of quantum field theory and the discovery of a Higgs
boson-like particle, he explores our changing understanding of the
nature of matter, and the fundamental related concept of mass.
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