Subatomic Universes

 

I have found the answer.

 

At least, an answer.

 

And, truth be told, I have heard this elsewhere in other iterations.

 

Ever since a little boy I was fascinated with atomic and subatomic particles. My dad and my brother would be watching the Mets on TV, and I’d be curled up on the rug memorizing the periodic table in my physics book. As I grew older, and before other interests took me, I wondered – what exactly is an electron made of? What makes up an elementary particle of matter?

 

I spent two years in my twenties studying physics at Seton Hall but never got up to the classes where such topics might be addressed. True, I knew about the wave-particle duality, how the electron acts as a particle when observed and a wave when not. True, I knew how electrons were categorized a fundamental unit called leptons and protons and neutrons were made up of fundamental particles called quarks. But what were they? If I could shrink my hands down to something like ten-to-the-negative-twentieth their size now and grab an electron like a snowball in my hand and squeezed, what would happen?

 

I’m finishing up Cosmos by Carl Sagan (a read about forty years overdue) and came across this:

 

There is an idea – strange, haunting, evocative – one of the most exquisite conjectures in science or religion. It is entirely undemonstrated; it may never be proved. But it stirs the blood. There is, we are told, an infinite hierarchy of universes, so that an elementary particle, such as an electron, in our universe would, if penetrated, reveal itself to be an entire closed universe. Within it, organized into the local equivalent of galaxies and smaller structures, are an immense number of other, much tinier elementary particles, which are themselves universes at the next level and so on forever – an infinite downward regression, universes within universes, endlessly. And upward as well. Our familiar universe of galaxies and stars, planets and people, would be a single elementary particle in the next universe up, the first step of another infinite regress.

- Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, page 221 of my paperback edition.

 

How neat does that sound? It gets the Hopper Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

 

My own semi-ignorant musings, however, tell me that somehow nanoscopic black holes are involved (thus the need to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics) and photons need to be tossed in (something I think physicist Roger Penrose writes extensively about).

 

However, I am probably wrong.

 

But it’s still fun to muse on.