Atoms make up everything. How can we trust them?
It's funny. It might also be true. "Make up" does two things at once. It means to fabricate, to invent, to lie. And it means to compose, to constitute, to be the stuff of. The joke, if it is a joke, is that atoms are liars. But both meanings might be operating simultaneously and the distance between them is where something important lives. Not sure what. But something.
The Oxymoron
First of all, saying atoms are made of stuff is an oxymoron. It is the same category of mistake as saying there are other verses outside the universe. If a thing is atomic it is by definition irreducible. That is the whole point. You cannot subdivide the indivisible and still call it indivisible. So either atoms are not really atomic or the word has drifted so far from its origin that we are using a name for a concept to describe something that violates that concept. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what making something up means.
But here is the thing. The principle of atomicity is logically unfalsifiable. Not the specific particle we happen to call an atom today. The principle. Everything is made of something, no matter how small, no matter how unmeasurable that something turns out to be. Whether or not that irreducible thing is what we call an atom is neither here nor there. The symbol, the conceptual idea of some atomic component, some quantum of measurement that is fundamentally irreducible, is not falsifiable. And it is not provable either. It just is.
And we cannot ever exactly measure an atom. We can take a frame of it and get an idea. But because of the uncertainty principle and the absurd difference in scale between our level of observation and the atomic one, it cannot be pinned down. We can probably say we know exactly where it is. Or where it might be. But not both. Not at once.
Symbolic Necessity
This follows something called symbolic necessity, which comes out of a slightly heterodox reading of Godel's incompleteness theorems. The idea is that some symbols are exactly known and absolutely true but not measurable. Tau is the canonical example. We know exactly what tau is. We know exactly how to find it. We can compute it to any arbitrary precision and will always get a more accurate value knowing precisely what it should be and how to approach it. But convergence on its final exact value will never arrive. Known perfectly. Not measurable completely. And the conclusion about such objects is always the same. When we encounter something like this it is because we are inside the system in which that thing is the fabric. You do not discover the walls of your house by leaving. You discover them by bumping into them from the inside.
This is likely similarly true for atoms. Even if it is not physically possible to achieve, conceptually it is possible. And if it is conceptually possible then it is in some way real, because the thought occurred. A thought cannot be falsified by the thinker who obviously had it. The thought itself is real. The concept is real. Even if it is not physically manifest. That might sound like thinking things into existence. Maybe it is. That does not make it wrong.
Made Of vs Made Up
So. The question. Are we made of atoms or do atoms make us up?
Being made of something is passive. Ingredients on a label. But being made up is different. If atoms make us up then they imagined us. From their perspective, if they had one, we are the fiction. We are the subjective experience, not the other way around. Yes, that is anthropomorphising subatomic particles. But the committee metaphor makes it clearer.
The Committee
A committee is made up of members. The members are real in the sense that you can point at them and shake their hands and watch them argue about the minutes from last Tuesday. The committee itself is something else. It is an idea made manifest but it is not a physically real thing per se. You could point at a congregation of people and say that is the committee but the committee is really just some separation or division of unity relative to the observer. An illusion. A useful one. But an illusion.
Members are to committees as atoms are to me.
You cannot divide a member into just an arm. But a member can lose an arm. An atom can lose an electron. There is some tolerance for change, some bandwidth of identity in which the thing remains the thing. Change enough members and the committee changes. Change enough properties and the committee loses the function of committee entirely. But the members must be substantially whole to function. And what we are really talking about is not a thing but a state. "Atom" is a relative state. Calling our atoms atoms is like calling our star the Sun and our moon the Moon as though those were proper names rather than job descriptions. The star's name is Sol. The moon's name is Luna. A sun is the central star in a system where one body can harbour life. A moon is any body orbiting in that system. The moon part is solid. The sun part might be a semantic stretch. But the point stands. We promote the generic to the specific and forget we did it.
Light That Joined a Committee
Now here is where certainty decreases and excitement increases, which is usually a sign that something real is nearby.
What is an atom when it is not being a member of a committee?
It is a photon. Or something like a photon. There is a relationship between the Compton radius and the Bohr radius such that if you take an atom with the same mass but extend its radius it effectively becomes a photon. When an atom is a member of a committee it is an atom. When it is not a member of a committee it is a photon. Something like that. There is some nuance missing, or something not quite right, but the direction feels right.
A photon is a quantum of the electromagnetic field with no commitments. No binding obligations. It just goes. And what happens when light enters an atom? It knocks an electron off and that emits a photon. The committee gains a member and loses one. The pattern holds. Probably.
So an atom is light that joined a committee. And a photon is light that did not. Or light that quit. Or maybe more precisely, light is an atom of its own committee. Light as a member of a committee of one. Not sure which framing is right but one of them is.
Light travels in a straight line relative to itself. Always. But light travels slower inside matter. Inside glass, inside water, inside me. And this might be the whole thing. An atom might just be light subject to the Bohr radius or whatever the relevant confinement is. Light folded up. Light oscillating in a small enough space that it acquires the appearance of mass. Mass might be what happens when light becomes relative to itself. When it divides against itself for the first time.
A Knot in the Current
And mass might be time going backwards. Not in the science fiction sense. In the symmetry sense. Time reversal symmetry is real. White holes are mathematically valid. Conservation laws do not care which direction time runs. So if the universe has an absolute temporal direction then mass might be what it looks like when something locally runs the other way. A little eddy. A knot in the current. This idea has been a year in the making and there are still pieces that need placing but it might be the most important one in the whole program and the language to express it plausibly is only now starting to arrive. The kind of language that makes people say "of course, how did we not see it this whole time."
Children of the Sun
Which brings us, unexpectedly but relevantly, to temperature.
There is a question worth asking. What is the average surface temperature of Earth under direct unobstructed sunlight? Not the average air temperature. The actual surface temperature of whatever is receiving the Sun's radiation. One square meter. Any angle of incidence so long as it is unobstructed. Ocean surface, tree canopy, bare ground. The answer clusters around 35 to 40 degrees Celsius depending on conditions and surface material.
The average internal temperature of a human body is about 37.
The hypothesis preceded the lookup. The data confirmed it independently. And it is not a coincidence. Or rather it is the kind of coincidence that stops being one once you think about what temperature actually is.
Temperature is the sum of oscillations. Every oscillator is a clock. Time is the average of all those clocks. We are children of the Sun. Or more precisely children of Earth which is a child of the Sun. What Earth receives from the Sun is a particular spectral input, a particular thermal budget, and we encapsulate some of that state inside our boundaries and carry it around and call it body temperature. Little boxes of solar coherence walking around on legs. And not everyone has the same body temp. It changes with locale and demographics and other factors. But it will still generally be relative to whatever the Sun heats the surface to. Coherence with the parent system must be maintained or the child system falls apart. Too far from equilibrium and the pattern dissolves the same way a committee dissolves when you remove too many members.
To leave, to travel somewhere radically different from the environment in which we were, in every meaningful thermodynamic sense, born, we would need to bring our Sun with us. Not the literal star. The thermal state. The spectral environment. The particular average frequency that allows the pattern of us to persist.
Cylinders with Pretensions
And one more thing which may seem like a non sequitur but is not.
A cow is not a ball.
You can model a cow as a sphere, topologically, and physicists do this all the time and it is funny and sometimes useful. But a cow is not a closed surface. A cow has holes. Mouth. Nose. Everything else. Trace the path from one end to the other and a cow is topologically a torus. A tube. Humans are the same. Far more worm-shaped than is generally noticed. Not spheres with features. Cylinders with pretensions. And this matters because the topology of a system determines its boundary conditions and its boundary conditions determine what it can contain and what can pass through it. How exactly this connects to everything above is not yet clear. But the shape of the connection is there the way a word sits on the tip of the tongue. Present. Not yet sayable.
The Pun Is the Physics
So here we are. Toroidal children of the Sun, maintaining a 37 degree thermal coherence with our parent star, composed of atoms that are really just light that joined committees, walking around on a planet that might be a ball of folded photons running time in reverse. And the question was whether atoms make up everything.
They do. Both ways. They compose us and they fabricated us. We are real and we are made up. The pun is the physics.
Probably.