‘Matter’ Review: The Nothing at the Heart of Everything

Table of Contents

November 8, 2011, was a special day for Italian physicist Guido Tonelli. It was his 61st birthday, and he was also about to announce a significant finding made at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. What he and his team of around 3,000 researchers discovered was potential proof of a new particle, the Higgs boson. The particles' existence was confirmed the following year and captured headlines as the "god particle." How could something as small as this particle have such a big impact? As Mr. Tonelli notes in the subtitle to his book, matter is essentially a "magnificent illusion."

Mr. Tonelli concludes his book "Matter" with personal anecdotes and etymological digressions that give a historical perspective and a personal touch to his explanations of modern physics. We discover that "matter" comes from the Latin word "materia", or "wood", which originated from the Latin word "mater", meaning "mother". The author's thoughtful reflections on these primitive associations, drawing on literary references, eventually lead to a discussion of ancient Greek ideas about the atom.

The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus envisioned all matter as composed of tiny, indivisible particles called atoms that were solid and unbreakable. He believed that as these atoms flew through the emptiness of space, they combined into various substances in different ways. In contrast, Aristotle disagreed with this theory, pointing out some obvious inconsistencies, such as why an atom couldn't be split in two, or why atoms of water didn't accumulate together like grains of sand.

Mr. Tonelli explains how science found a middle ground between Democritus and Aristotle. By modern standards, atoms are broken down into even smaller parts called quarks and leptons, which are considered the fundamental building blocks of matter. Unlike Democritus' notion that they stick together, quarks and leptons actually attract or repel each other due to other particles called bosons that pass between them. “Matter,” Mr. Tonelli simply puts it, “is made up of particles that interact by exchanging other particles. That's it.”

When the quarks are tabulated according to their amounts of energy and electrical charge, they make a pattern of three pairs. The same goes for the leptons. It’s not known why they have this neat arrangement or whether it’s part of a bigger scheme involving particles still to be discovered. In fact, from Mr. Tonelli’s account, translated from the Italian by Edward Williams, it’s clear that our understanding of matter is still very far from complete. The quantity of matter that stars, planets and we ourselves are made of, held together by electrical attraction, is dwarfed by the amount of matter of another kind—dark matter—which does not respond to electromagnetic radiation such as light and is therefore totally invisible. Its presence is revealed by its gravitational pull on galaxies but its nature remains a mystery.

All matter shares a common trait - mass. Albert Einstein demonstrated that mass and energy are interchangeable, with the electron volt being the preferred measurement unit for elementary particles. The Large Hadron Collider accelerates particles to a mind-boggling several trillion electron volts, although Dr. Tonelli points out that this is roughly equivalent to the energy of "an annoying mosquito that's chosen to bite us on the neck on a sweltering summer evening: barely detectable." What sets the LHC apart is its ability to focus this enormous energy on individual particles, causing them to break apart into new ones. While nature sends particles from space every day with energies far exceeding anything a machine can produce, these particles are random and uncontrollable - although, they're also relatively inexpensive.

The Higgs boson was portrayed in many media reports as the key to understanding why matter has mass—but that was a misleading perception. In reality, it has helped explain why many elementary particles have the masses they do, except for a lepton called the neutrino. Stars such as our sun release neutrinos in huge quantities—most likely, many trillions are passing through your body right now—and their lack of interaction with ordinary matter causes them to be classified as dark particles. However, neutrinos only account for a small portion of the universe's total mass. A remaining mystery is why they possess any mass at all.

The biggest question remains: why does matter even exist? What's the source of its energy, and where did everything come from? Aristotle thought that matter has always existed because you can't create something out of nothing. Mr. Tonelli suggests picturing a huge steel container from which all air has been removed – a traditional vacuum. Even if we took out every single atom, there would still be many things left behind, including vast swarms of neutrinos that pass by. Blocking out all those particles wouldn't be enough; quantum mechanics dictates that there would still be particles present, however brief. What we think of as empty space isn't truly empty – it's a quantum vacuum with its own energy.

Mr. Tonelli describes another form of energy that comes from the force of gravity holding us to the earth. An apple hanging on a tree has what's known as potential energy in high school physics. This is often thought of as a positive quantity, but technically, it's negative. Adding a minus sign back in leads to a thought-provoking idea. What if the total energy of all particles in the universe exactly balanced their negative potential energy? If so, the total would be zero. We could imagine that the universe began as a random variation in a quantum vacuum, one type of nothing turning into another.

This is what Mr. Tonelli means by a truly remarkable illusion. Considering the numerous uncertainties present in the calculation, it remains unclear whether the magic trick actually achieves its goal. However, what his engaging and informative book clearly shows is just how much we have learned about the basic building blocks of our world, and how little we understand about the vast majority of the universe that is made up of something else.

The most recent novel written by Mr. Crumey is "Beethoven's Assassins."