History Of Particle Theory: Between Darwin And Shakespeare. Paul H Frampton
Prologue
Tens of thousand years ago, fears felt in dark nights led our ancestors to develop various religions. Still, in the modern scientific society, God from this origin is the revered one and the phrase God’s design is used in the most advanced atomic theory. Atomic theory and God clash, which we narrate with the sentiment of Shakespearean phrases.
The size of a religion depends on the communal size having a mutually shared visible thing. Villagers with an impressive tree believed that tree to be a god. People of several villages around a memorable mountain believed that mountain to be a mountain god. A big society with a common historical background believed in the same things.
In Korea, there used to be a Sunghwangdang (or Seo-nang Dang) at the mouth of the village or the ridge of the head, and there is a tree, or trees, that is usually believed to be a guardian god. It is a pile of stones piled up in a conical shape. The people who came to this place passed by with stones, trees, and five-coloured cloths. The villagers believed that the god Seo-nang would protect their village.
Around the Mediterranean, ancient people believed in multiple gods, as noticed from the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman gods. These multiple gods are the remnants of their environment and/or their previous history. The Mediternanean is sometimes rough and sometimes calm, which is believed to be the act of Poseidon. Wine is favoured there and they needed the wine god Dyonisus. Volcanos, in Sinai and Vesevius, lightening, and thunder are believed to be the acts of Jupiter.
According to Singmund Freud’s book Totem and Taboo, many gods in the ancient Egypt are the evolution from the time of apes.1 A group of monkeys or apes had an alpha male whose gene is transmitted to its offsprings. The juvenile male kids dreamed of being an alpha male in a group in the future. Reaching adolescence and becoming strong, the son ape kills its father and takes the seat of an alpha male. Early humans had this earlier memory and felt sorry for their fathers, and had an annual ceremony to worship their fathers, sacrificing an animal, mostly a sacred sheep, which is kept clean for a year. In fact, this carnivalism ceremony had been transmitted to Moses’ era and still remaines as communion in the Catholic Church. Animal gods in the ancient Egyptian polytheism must have arisen from this early human history with more animals added for their roles.
One god Aten was introduced by Paraoh Akhenaten (1354 BC–1336 BC) in the 18th Kingdom of Egypt. His original name was Amenhotep IV and he changed his name after introducing Aten. The bust of Akhenaten’s wife Nefertiti is displayed in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin.
Moses’ Jehovah is the unique God in the universe, presumably affected by Akhenaten’s Aten. But, it differs from Aten in His most important role. Jehovah created the universe in 6 days as depicted in the first chapter of Genesis. The Christian idea of creation is eloquently depicted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel at Vatican, Fig. 1. Creation of the universe is a very strong argument for the god Jehovah. A Christian asks the following, looking at a table:
Christian: Who made this table?
Spectator: A carpenter.
Christian: Can the table exist without the carpenter?
Spectator: No.
Christian: Who made you?
Spectator: I don’t know.
Christian: As the table, you are made by a creator.
This is one theme of this book: God’s design of the universe.
Figure 1: Michelangelo’s Adam created by God at the Sistine Chapel, Vatican.
The beginning of the universe is a mystery in a few religions and in the atomic theory. Here, the difference is that religion is in the realm of belief and the modern atomic theory is constructed on evidence. Not all scientific disciplines and religions question the beginning. There is one such scientific theory under the name of static state of the universe. An oriental religion Buddhism does not admit the creation of the universe. Islam and Christianity, after passing through the Dark Ages, talk about the afterlife, but the Greek and Roman gods did not talk if it. Religion is based on beliefs and a requirement that its followers observe the most effective way to fulfil their beliefs.
In the ancient Greek and Roman times, natural philosophy was studied to look for the way in which Nature works. Our atomic theory has roots in the natural philosophy of the classical Greek period and possibly Buddhism since there were East–West exchanges, most notably at the time of Alexander. The Buddhism philosophy sounds similar to the Greek atomic theory, but it is not the same on the issue of creation of the universe.
As a natural philosophy but not as a religion, we cite God’s design as one dogma for scientific theories. There is a very different dogma for creation. It is the natural selection theory of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
In our field, in the physical sciences, the evolution theory is strongly believed by scientifically dating the extinction time of dinosaurs based on the event of the big meteorite collision 65 million years ago. It was originally proposed in 1980 by a team of scientists led by Luis Alvarez and his son Walter Alvarez. Geologist Walter Alvarez was doing geological research at Gubbio in central Italy. There, he had located an outcrop on the walls of a gorge whose limestone layers included strata both above and below the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary. Exactly at the boundary was a thin layer of clay, which turned out to contain more Iridium than normal. Thus, he with the help of his father, nuclear physicist Luis Alvarez, he hypothesised that the layer is from the dust of a meteorite. A crater was found in the Gulf of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The extinction of dinosaurs was the beginning of the booming mammal era, finally resulting in humans.
Figure 2: An evolution cartoon.
Particle physics, a grandson of atomic theory aims at finding the ultimate laws of the universe. But, after decades of research, a satisfactory route has not yet been found. As such, many famous and leading physicists resort to the anthropic principle, the view that out of almost infinite possibilities in the beginning of the universe, we live in the one that fits to the evolution to us here and now. It belongs to the evolution dogma. A cartoon of human evolution from apes to the current atomists, even questioning the very beginning of the universe, is shown in Fig. 2.
In the Dark Ages, i.e. before the Renaissance, Plato and Aristotle were embraced by Christianity and Epicurus was abandoned. Christianity has its origin in Moses who adopted the monotheism from Pharaoh Akhenaton in the 18th Kingdom (13–14 BCE) of Egypt. We attribute the deterministic principle to this monotheism, and to Shakespeare because his plays have a deterministic plot from the first line.
1S. Freud, Totem and Taboo, reprint edition (Dover Publications, 2018).
Chapter 1
Ancient Greeks
The beginning of The Feynman Lectures on Physics states the following:
“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.”
The great American physicist Richard Feynman considered atomic theory to be the most important scientific achievement of human intelligence (see Fig. 1).
Modern physical science is an offspring of atomic theory, as noticed from Mendeleev’s periodic table from 150 years ago in 1869, culminating in current particle physics. We