The child as physicist, the oldster as psychologist (a recurring post)

Let’s say there is actually a smallest particle or component of nature – maybe the “string” of string theory. Let’s assume this even though the human mind would have to be especially stubborn not to imagine that any physical existent could be halved, quartered, etc., to infinity. We have this basic particle. What is it made of?

What is its ingredient?

This obviously is an absurd question. But we are compelled to ask it. One moment our mind says: This particle is not made of anything; it is only itself. Being is just being, whatever that means. The next moment we say: But it’s got to be something.

I recently wrote to an “Ask a physicist” online column. My question had to do with the strange (seeming) fact that everything is composed of the exact same-sized, same-natured particles. In my got-a-D-in-high-school-geometry mind, this seems the height of absurdity. Either the Big Bang produced nothing but countless one-sized smithereens (very suspicious), or all these identical twins were already immanent in the First Moment. In other words, existence was predetermined. Unfortu­nately, I didn’t save the physicist’s response. But that was because she didn’t answer my ques­tion. I even doubt she grasped what I was asking. So I still wander the world wondering: What is, whence comes, the quiddity?

What is time without a beginning or an end? Or with a beginning and an end? What is space without a limit, or with one? What is matter that keeps regressing to tinier pin­points, or that stops at a certain point? Why is there something rather than nothing? And why is something inexorably everything? And what is our plight that we must always live on the surface of our ever-deepening knowledge and never grasp what’s underneath, what’s the real nature of things? What makes us even suspect or wish that there is a real nature beneath phenom­ena? Why must the universe be limited to its eyes? What if everything is eyes?

And why would anyone think our life is in the present (the here and now) when Every­thing else is the past merely aged, the Bang still reverberating in the darkness?