The ultimate building block of all life.

I recently wrote that we are actually a package of organized energy. I wonder how many discounted me as crazy or, at best, a comedian. In reality, I am absolutely serious (and correct). Most readers have heard of Einstein’s development of the equation E=MC². No scientist has yet been able to disprove this as not true.  I do, however, question whether C is really the speed of light or was that simply a known very large number which was convenient to use. In any case, it should really be written M=E/C². Looking at it that way, so far as we know energy (E) has no weight, and speed does not carry any assumption of weight, so what are we measuring when we stem onto a scale? We are measuring the attractive force holding our mass to the surface of an extremely large mass, or package of energy, called “Earth.” That force is conveniently called “weight” and the magnitude is proportional to the size of two energy packages. Slowly, but surely, scientists are beginning to understand what is going on.

Let’s take a tour through the understanding of human bodies – opening of the doors of understanding is becoming more and more rapid. In the earliest days I am sure that there was no thought other than the unity of a human being. It may have been magic to see a woman’s stomach gradually enlarge followed by production of a baby. It probably was not long before this was associated to an enjoyable activity in which man and woman engaged. People, animals, trees, etc. were simply considered units which started out small and grew to “adulthood.” Humans, however, are curious and inventive. By the sixteenth century, AD, it was known that, if carefully formed, one could enlarge items by looking through glass. Hans Janssen was a lens maker, which provided his son, Zacharias, with plenty of lenses to play with and in 1595, at the age of seven, he invented the compound microscope (perhaps with his father’s help?).

The microscope opened up whole new worlds to investigate. Not only was it turned to the heavens in the form of a telescope, but very small things could be enlarged for examination. In 1665, Robert Hooke reported the discovery that wood was actually a collection of cells. In 1674 Antony van Leeuwenhoek was first to describe living cells, in this case, the green charophyte alga, Spirogyra. As a result of his work, the complexity of our makeup began to become understood, but how was a different story.

Even so far back as the Greek philosophers it was thought that everything was somehow made up atoms, but the atoms of the time were earth, fire, air, and water. (this, of course, led to the belief you could rearrange the components to form different materials, i.e. alchemy). In 1799, the French chemist Joseph Louis Proust established the fact that compounds were made up of atoms, and would always be of the same “recipe.” About 460 B.C., the Greek philosopher, Democritus, develop the idea that atoms would be the smallest unit into which a substance could be broken. However, it was not until the early nineteenth century that people begin again to question the structure of matter. An English chemist, John Dalton, reported that matter consists of elementary lumpy particles (atoms). Although he couldn’t describe a structure, the evidence pointed to something fundamental. In 1897, the English physicist, J.J. Thomson, discovered the electron and proposed an atom structure. Knowing electrons had a negative charge, Thomson proposed that the atom matter must also contain positive charge. His model looked like raisins stuck on the surface of a lump of pudding -- i. e. the “pudding” model of the atom.

In 1909, Ernest Rutherford found that most of the mass and positive charge of an atom is concentrated in a very small fraction of its volume, assumedly at the very center. Further experimentation indicated that positive charge of the atom must be concentrated in a very tiny volume producing an electric field. Rutherford therefore proposed a planetary model in which a cloud of electrons surrounded a small, compact nucleus of positive charge. An excursion into theoretical theory ensued in an attempt to understand what kept the electrons away from the nucleus. I won’t go into that, but simply say that, in 1913, Niels Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which electrons orbit the nucleus in particular circular orbits. The Bohr model was taught to me in High School Chemistry (1952-3) and college introductory Chemistry (1958). The Bohr model still had some theoretical problems, and has been displaced by a “modern model” which basically says the electrons are not in orbit, but in a cloud around the nucleus. I won’t go into that here either. I will just say that I was not introduced to this model until undertaking Physical Chemistry. By the time I finished graduate school, the Bohr model had been abandoned in Introductory Chemistry, and it wasn’t much longer until it had been abandoned in High School Chemistry.

By default, within this development, the electron was displaced as the smallest possible unit of mass. It has now been possible to split electrons into something even smaller. When it is split, there are small units flying away in different directions. Each with a unique path, so the units are given unique names. Are they, in fact, the smallest possible unit? Whether they are or not, we may have to stick with the idea, because these units only exist for microseconds and are gone. Why? Because they are small units of energy, which is quickly dispersed. All evidence also indicates that atom nuclei are also nothing more than conglomerations of energy. The whole idea carries some very interesting implications, but I will go into that elsewhere. For now, I will stop at the understanding of all mass being nothing more than organized energy.