[kayo_20211030]

A particle is a thing you can "look" at, and say "that's a particle". It is whatever one says it is. They're not exactly discovered, they're invented. Fundamental in this context is not so much a word as it is an analogy.

And, don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean particles don't exist. They do. But, a particle is whatever we say it is.

[ithkuil]

"Things are named before they are understood." -- Matt Strassler

[heresie-dabord]

Further: Things are named, then the linguistic burden actually comes to limit understanding.

[prng2021]

We're not asking questions about human constructs like what is moral or what is the ideal form of government. We're trying to understand what the most fundamental building block of reality is, which is something objective. Something independent of whether of not people ever existed.

So no, countless people around the world aren't wasting their lives researching particles when the answer is simply, it's whatever we say it is.

[woopsn]

What can we see? Vapor trails, patterns burned into a plate, etc. The evidence of some "thing" slowing down, perhaps, but really the environment that slowed it down necessarily changing irreversibly. Irreversible effects cannot be arbitrarily small (apparently). We never see a particle, only effects such as these -- if we did see anything else, well, we couldn't possibly remember. Particles are an attempt to explain/theorize evidence that is fundamentally observational.

[kayo_20211030]

Did you take the time to read the original piece? Even the smart people can't agree.

What gives you the faith that a "particle" is not a human construct? What on earth does "fundamental" even mean except being the bottom turtle we can see on the particular mountain of turtles at which we're looking.

"Countless"(?) people around the world are not researching particles. They're doing particle physics as they understand "particles". That's how it should be and particles are whatever they say they are. In that field, no measure means no reality. *Unless*, of course, you have faith in some platonic reality.

Positive materialists will disagree.

[prng2021]

When you say particles are whatever we say they are, I assume you believe particles are subjective. I'm saying particles are objective, like a "wavelength" as opposed to subjective, like "morals".

If you are saying even objective things are whatever we say they are, then this is a useless discussion. Obviously every word is defined with other words and all words are human creations. So yea in that sense, literally everything we know of is whatever we say it is. That's a pointless statement to make in response to this article or really ever.

[kayo_20211030]

I was saying that I don't know what a particle is, and neither does anyone else, but subjective isn't quite the correct word.

What I am sayings is that there are many useful interpretations of what a particle "is" that allows science to progress. The theoreticians and the experimentalists use, sometimes even form, those interpretations to help them along in their work. I'm saying that they yet remain interpretations, even analogies; and it really doesn't matter whether those folks believe in an objective reality or not, good work still gets done. Maybe it's subjective in that sense, but a particle is whatever they say it is; and nothing more can be said with certainty unless you dive into philosophy.

You can measure a perturbation in a field, or a track in a bubble chamber, and call it a particle. Then you can work backwards to an "objective" representation, and a particle still becomes whatever you say it is. It's still scientific, consistent, mathematically rigorous, and in line with theory and observation, but it remains a human construct. You can't escape that. Ultimately, one is free to believe that there is some fundamental thing; and, maybe there is and maybe there isn't.

> literally everything we know of is whatever we say it is

Of course "literally everything we know of is whatever we say it is". That, precisely, is my point. It most certainly does not mean that we can just state anything as true unless it is sensible, consistent, observable and verifiable; and expect not to be challenged.

[prng2021]

Is the first law of thermodynamics whatever we say it is? If that's how you want to phrase it, then again, this is a useless discussion. All you're really saying is that the literal English words and sentences we use to define something are human constructs. That's so obviously true.

[khazhoux]

I'll go even further and point out that in 2003, it was proven that particles are not, in fact, the friends we made along the way.

[kayo_20211030]

Do expand. What happened in 2023?

[sfink]

Yeah, I don't get that, because it seems to me that the friends you make along the way are mathematically indistinguishable from particles being real and having properties. It's a distinction without a difference.

Or at least, I'm interpreting "the friends you make along the way" as the sum total of the effects of a particle on the surrounding world. Saying "the particle doesn't exist, but it has effects X, Y, and Z" is the same as "the particle exists and has effects X, Y, and Z". If a distinction is not observable, then it's meaningless to quibble over whether it's "real" or not.

(Which all just proves that my interpretation isn't the one you were using....)

[fragmede]

discovery vs invention is a question in mathematics as well. trying to say they're invented isn't clever, it's just a trick of language, like how gravity is merely a theory. particles are theorized to exist via theoretical physics and math, and then tested for experimentally. or as the saying goes, all models are wrong, some are useful.

[kayo_20211030]

I can't find the reference at the moment. But, I think it was about the "creation" of the quark. (I'll find it eventually). Either way, a search for reality, no matter how far we've progressed thus far, is either a search for a platonic reality, or an experimental reality. The former is "discovery" and the latter is "invention". It really doesn't matter. I don't think, right now, we're quite smart enough to pry into the mind of the universe, so we'll keep "inventing" things until we actually approach "discovery" asymptotically. Maybe we'll get there, but we've never been closer :-)

[geye1234]

It's both discovery and experiment (but not invention). Forms are real, but not in the way Plato thought. He thought they existed in some empyrean realm. In reality, they exist in objects themselves. We discover what a thing's form is by experimenting with (or on) it. Aristotle was largely right.

The big philosophical problem with much of this is that people assume that the smallest things are the most fundamental. So people think that stuff, whatever that stuff is, is fundamentally made up of much smaller stuff, and that stuff is fundamentally made of yet smaller stuff, and so the smaller you get, the more fundamental you get. And so (they think) if you want to work out what is really going on at any layer of reality, you need to figure out what the smallest possible things are.

Yet this is ultimately a philosophical posit -- it's not empirically-informed. There's no good reason for thinking it.

To be clear, none of this is about physicists doing physics. It's about the philosophy that many people bring into, and therefore take away from, these kinds of discussions.

[kayo_20211030]

I found the reference. It was an interview with Freeman Dyson where he said "quarks were invented", and I don't think it's a slip of the tongue.

It's at 3:17 in this video of an interview with him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV41QEKiMlM

It's representative of a view that there's a thing (a particle) that explains another thing (a force) that was consistent with both theory and experiment. Thus, a quark could be a particle, and it was whatever the experimentalists and theorists said it was, however it was measured or contemplated.

For a deeper meaning it becomes an exercise in hermeneutics i.e what does it mean when we say "particle"? That was the point of the original piece - there is no uncontested view of a particle's form, should one even exist. Each field, in order to advance, finds it useful to interpret it, or think about it, in different ways.