Quantum Fields are More Fundamental than Particles
What it says, actually, is that particles themselves are not truly fundamental. They are manifestations of something deeper and more basic: quantum fields...A particle you can picture as a little ball; a field is harder to visualize. It’s not a perfect analogy, but you might think of it as something like an invisible fluid...These fields permeate the entire universe. They are everywhere, though invisible. And what particle physics tells us is that for every particle we know—an electron, a quark, a Higgs boson—there is a corresponding quantum field. Each particle is a small vibration in its field.
- Harry Cliff, University of Cambridge particle physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider, interview on New Books Network (see below) on Space Oddities
Solidity is an Illusion and We are One with all of Creation
The ingredients that we’re now left with are about as far from tangible as you can get—invisible, ethereal, omnipresent quantum fields. All objects—apple pies, humans, stars—are agglomerations of vast multitudes of these vibrations, moving together in a way that creates the illusion of solidity, of permanence. What’s more, since there is only one electron field, only one up quark field, and only one down quark field, you and I, dear reader, are connected to each other. Each of our atoms is a ripple in the same cosmic ocean. We are one with each other, and with all of creation.
- Harry Cliff, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, from the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang
As I write this, I sit at a desk, facing a window through which I see an oak tree, glancing down at a dog asleep beside me, typing with my hands. I have been reading a book by Harry Cliff on how physicists have been searching for the most basic building blocks of the universe and found that they are not "blocks" at all but rather quantum fields and that allegedly solid matter is a perterbation of such fields. Cliff is a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge and a researcher at CERN who studies the fundamental building blocks of the universe. He is also an excellent writer. His book was named Best Science Book of 2021 by Kirkus.
For my part, as I sit at my desk, I am in a world of solid objects. Each has its own energy, its own modality. And some—at least my dog and I—have interior lives of our own. We are solid objects filled with subjectivity. We have feelings and aims and purposes. It is possible that the oak tree has subjectivity, too. Perhaps (who knows) even my desk. I am a Whiteheadian. I think that something like subjectivity is everywhere. In solid matter, in liquid matter, in gases, and in plasmas. "Apart from the experience of subjects," writes Whitehead, "there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness."
I learn from Harry Cliff that, from the vantage point of contemporary physics, solid matter is an illusion. Each atom in our bodies is part of a vast cosmic ocean, suggesting that we ourselves are part of that ocean, and that, truth be told, we are all one, or at least together, even as we feel separate. Harry Cliff puts it this way:
"You and I, dear reader, are connected to each other. Each of our atoms is a ripple in the same cosmic ocean. We are one with each other, and with all of creation."
But I want to be honest about the implications of this. Are we "one with each other" even as we use weapons with solid bullets that penetrate solid skin and kill other people with solid bodies. I would like to think that we are "all one" in the depths of our lives; and I believe that if we all believed we are "all one" in some way that preserves our differences, we might treat one another more kindly. But I am quite hesitant to tell the person killed by the bullet that he was already "at one" with the bullet or the person who shot it.
The world of solid objects is a world of impact, resistance, suffering, and beauty. Matter takes many forms—solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasmatic—but solidity plays a distinctive role in ordinary life, both positively and negatively. Many people casually speak of "the real world." I think they mean the world of solid matter.
Back to Harry Cliff. As he explains in his excellent book, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch, modern physics invites us to question whether this world of solid objects—so immediate, so vivid—is truly as solid as it seems. Many readers, I am sure, have imagined that even the smallest of entities in the universe - the subatomic particles - are very small solid objects, like marbles. But Cliff tells us that they are not what is truly fundamental. What is fundamental are quantum fields - somewhat like fields made of liquid - and subatomic particles - electrons, protons, and neutrons, for example - are ripples in those fields. Moreover they are ripples connected to all the other ripples in quantum entanglements. When one ripple is moved, they are all moved.
For some this vision is understandably liberating. It loosens the grip of rigid boundaries and suggests that separateness, itself a characteristics of solid objects, is not ultimate. The world becomes more fluid, more relational, more open to transformation. If what we take to be fixed is, in fact, dynamic, then perhaps divisions—between self and other, subject and object, life and death—are less absolute than they seem. The idea that solidity is an illusion can thus function as a kind of spiritual and philosophical release.
But others this vision is itself naive, disengaged from lived experience, and specious, insofar as it denies what it inescably obvious to lived experience: namely that we live in a world of solid objects.
On the one hand, the so-called “solid objects” of our experience are often strikingly beautiful—faces, trees, bodies in motion, the contours of a landscape at dusk. They are not easily dismissed as mere illusion. Solidity itself seems woven into the beauty of life. Liquids, gases, and plasmas have their beauty, but so do solid objects, however evanescent. Witness the fractal beauty of a snowflake.
On the other hand, and more poignantly, it is obvious that solid objects collide with one another, and sometimes in painful ways. A body struck, a fall onto hard ground, the impact of force—these are not abstractions. They are lived realities, often accompanied by pain, sometimes by profound suffering. It can seem deluded—if not also morally insensitive—to suggest otherwise. Tell the small child struck by shrapnel, losing a leg, that the shrapnel was an illusion, and so was the leg. Such a claim does not deepen understanding; it risks trivializing suffering.
Any adequate account of reality must make sense not only of what physics discloses, but also of the undeniable weight of lived experience, and the role that solid objects play in such experience. Can we affirm these three claims?
For my part, as I sit at my desk, I am in a world of solid objects. Each has its own energy, its own modality. And some—at least my dog and I—have interior lives of our own. We are solid objects filled with subjectivity. We have feelings and aims and purposes. It is possible that the oak tree has subjectivity, too. Perhaps (who knows) even my desk. I am a Whiteheadian. I think that something like subjectivity is everywhere. In solid matter, in liquid matter, in gases, and in plasmas. "Apart from the experience of subjects," writes Whitehead, "there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness."
I learn from Harry Cliff that, from the vantage point of contemporary physics, solid matter is an illusion. Each atom in our bodies is part of a vast cosmic ocean, suggesting that we ourselves are part of that ocean, and that, truth be told, we are all one, or at least together, even as we feel separate. Harry Cliff puts it this way:
"You and I, dear reader, are connected to each other. Each of our atoms is a ripple in the same cosmic ocean. We are one with each other, and with all of creation."
But I want to be honest about the implications of this. Are we "one with each other" even as we use weapons with solid bullets that penetrate solid skin and kill other people with solid bodies. I would like to think that we are "all one" in the depths of our lives; and I believe that if we all believed we are "all one" in some way that preserves our differences, we might treat one another more kindly. But I am quite hesitant to tell the person killed by the bullet that he was already "at one" with the bullet or the person who shot it.
The world of solid objects is a world of impact, resistance, suffering, and beauty. Matter takes many forms—solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasmatic—but solidity plays a distinctive role in ordinary life, both positively and negatively. Many people casually speak of "the real world." I think they mean the world of solid matter.
Back to Harry Cliff. As he explains in his excellent book, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch, modern physics invites us to question whether this world of solid objects—so immediate, so vivid—is truly as solid as it seems. Many readers, I am sure, have imagined that even the smallest of entities in the universe - the subatomic particles - are very small solid objects, like marbles. But Cliff tells us that they are not what is truly fundamental. What is fundamental are quantum fields - somewhat like fields made of liquid - and subatomic particles - electrons, protons, and neutrons, for example - are ripples in those fields. Moreover they are ripples connected to all the other ripples in quantum entanglements. When one ripple is moved, they are all moved.
For some this vision is understandably liberating. It loosens the grip of rigid boundaries and suggests that separateness, itself a characteristics of solid objects, is not ultimate. The world becomes more fluid, more relational, more open to transformation. If what we take to be fixed is, in fact, dynamic, then perhaps divisions—between self and other, subject and object, life and death—are less absolute than they seem. The idea that solidity is an illusion can thus function as a kind of spiritual and philosophical release.
But others this vision is itself naive, disengaged from lived experience, and specious, insofar as it denies what it inescably obvious to lived experience: namely that we live in a world of solid objects.
On the one hand, the so-called “solid objects” of our experience are often strikingly beautiful—faces, trees, bodies in motion, the contours of a landscape at dusk. They are not easily dismissed as mere illusion. Solidity itself seems woven into the beauty of life. Liquids, gases, and plasmas have their beauty, but so do solid objects, however evanescent. Witness the fractal beauty of a snowflake.
On the other hand, and more poignantly, it is obvious that solid objects collide with one another, and sometimes in painful ways. A body struck, a fall onto hard ground, the impact of force—these are not abstractions. They are lived realities, often accompanied by pain, sometimes by profound suffering. It can seem deluded—if not also morally insensitive—to suggest otherwise. Tell the small child struck by shrapnel, losing a leg, that the shrapnel was an illusion, and so was the leg. Such a claim does not deepen understanding; it risks trivializing suffering.
Any adequate account of reality must make sense not only of what physics discloses, but also of the undeniable weight of lived experience, and the role that solid objects play in such experience. Can we affirm these three claims?
- Solidity as Emergent Appearance
What we take to be solid objects are not ultimately solid at all, but patterns of activity—strange, dynamic excitations within quantum fields. Solidity, in this sense, is not fundamentally real but an emergent appearance. - Experience as Irreducibly Real
Lived human experience—with its suffering and joy—is undeniably real in its own right, as real as the quantum fields themselves, and not reducible to the submicroscopic processes that underlie it. - Solid Objects as Emergent Realities with Their Own Powers
Solid objects are real in their own way: as aggregates of quantum excitations that, in their organized forms, possess powers of their own—including the power to exhibit beauty and to collide, resist, and affect one another in consequential ways.
This, in large part, is the aim of Whitehead.
His proposal in Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality, is that the quantum events occurring in the depths of matter and the moments of experience in human life are equally real, not reducible to one another. He proposes that they belong to the same ontological type. They are what he calls actual occasions (or, equivalently, actual entities), both understood as events or happenings, not solid things. each with its own mode of feeling. And he adds that these occasions do not exist in isolation. They aggregate and organize themselves into enduring patterns—what Whitehead calls “societies.”
In highly stabilized and condensed forms, these societies give rise to what we experience as solid objects: faces, trees, bodies in motion, the contours of lanscapes, arms, legs, and shrapnel. Solidity, then, is an aggregate expression of event-like actualities - and some of these solidities are objects of a particular kind of actuality, a single moment of human experience.
In this way, Whitehead allows us to affirm tha the world is not, at its base, composed of solid things. And yet the world we live in—the world of impact, resistance, beauty, and suffering—is not thereby diminished or explained away. Our experience of it is real, and the objects we experience, including the solid objects, are real as 'societies' of actual occasions.
Seen in this light, the reflections of Harry Cliff on quantum fields need not lead us to dismiss the world of solidity, but to deepen our understanding of it. What physics reveals as vibrations in invisible fields and what we experience as resistance, beauty, and pain are not competing realities, but different expressions of an event-based universe. Whitehead’s philosophy invites us to hold these perspectives together: to see through solidity without denying it, and to recognize that even in a universe of fields and evanescence, the lived world remains fully, and irreducibly, real.
One and Not-One
Might it be possible, then, to say that we are “all one” in our relational belonging, and “not one” in our individuality—and that this oneness and not-oneness, this connectedness and distinctness, are equally real and mutually constitutive? On such a view, unity does not erase difference, and difference does not negate unity. Rather, each moment of existence arises out of relations with others and contributes something irreducibly its own. The many are woven into one, and the one is expressed through the many.
What, then, is the status of solid objects—the shrapnel, the body, the ground? They are not unreal, but neither are they ultimate. They are societies of events, stabilized aggregates of energy within a deeper field of becoming. Their solidity is an achievement: the result of countless momentary occasions coordinating into enduring forms.
And yet, precisely because they are real as such patterns, their effects are real. The shrapnel wounds, the body suffers, the ground resists. These are not illusions. They are the lived consequences of interactions among structured processes—real at the level of experience, even if not fundamental at the level of ultimate explanation.
In this way, Whitehead allows us to affirm both sides of the tension. The world is not, at a subatomic level, composed of solid things. And yet the world we live in—the world of impact, resistance, beauty, and suffering—is not thereby diminished or explained away. It is real as experience, real as event, real as part of the very fabric of what is. And some of it is immensely beautiful. If solid matter- the dogs, the desks, the oak trees, the human faces and the feelings behind them - were merely an illusion, the universe itself would be diminished, as would that deeper unity, namely the non-solid God, in whose life it all unfolds.
I mention God with hesitation. I realize that not all readers will find the idea helpful. Still, it is the case that, for Whitehead, there is indeed a non-solid event, timeless in some ways and everlasting in others, which is, like me and my dog, a "who" and not simply a "what." A "who" is a subject in its own right, with feeling and agency, with subjectivity. God can be imagined on the analogy of a quantum field who is everywhere at once, luring but not controlling the univers into whatever forms and states are possible for it. It is the non-solidity of God that makes God so important, so field-like. God is indeed one with the universe and also, in a divine way, not-one. This non-oneness is what gives us the space to be human, to be ourselves, to be finite and, in our very finitude, glorious.
- Jay McDaniel
Interview with Harry Cliff
NAMED A BEST SCIENCE BOOK OF 2021 BY KIRKUS * An acclaimed experimental physicist at CERN takes you on an exhilarating search for the most basic building blocks of our universe, and the dramatic quest to unlock their cosmic origins. "A fascinating exploration of how we learned what matter really is, and the journey matter takes from the Big Bang, through exploding stars, ultimately to you and me." (Sean Carroll)
Carl Sagan once quipped, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” But finding the ultimate recipe for apple pie means answering some big questions: What is matter really made of? How did it escape annihilation in the fearsome heat of the Big Bang? And will we ever be able to understand the very first moments of our universe?
In How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch, Harry Cliff—a University of Cambridge particle physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider—sets out in pursuit of answers. He ventures to the largest underground research facility in the world, deep beneath Italy's Gran Sasso mountains, where scientists gaze into the heart of the Sun using the most elusive of particles, the ghostly neutrino. He visits CERN in Switzerland to explore the "Antimatter Factory," where the stuff of science fiction is manufactured daily (and we're close to knowing whether it falls up). And he reveals what the latest data from the Large Hadron Collider may be telling us about the fundamental nature of matter.
Along the way, Cliff illuminates the history of physics, chemistry, and astronomy that brought us to our present understanding—and misunderstandings—of the world, while offering readers a front-row seat to one of the most dramatic intellectual journeys human beings have ever embarked on.
A transfixing deep dive into the origins of our world, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch examines not just the makeup of our universe, but the awe-inspiring, improbable fact that it exists at all.
Carl Sagan once quipped, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” But finding the ultimate recipe for apple pie means answering some big questions: What is matter really made of? How did it escape annihilation in the fearsome heat of the Big Bang? And will we ever be able to understand the very first moments of our universe?
In How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch, Harry Cliff—a University of Cambridge particle physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider—sets out in pursuit of answers. He ventures to the largest underground research facility in the world, deep beneath Italy's Gran Sasso mountains, where scientists gaze into the heart of the Sun using the most elusive of particles, the ghostly neutrino. He visits CERN in Switzerland to explore the "Antimatter Factory," where the stuff of science fiction is manufactured daily (and we're close to knowing whether it falls up). And he reveals what the latest data from the Large Hadron Collider may be telling us about the fundamental nature of matter.
Along the way, Cliff illuminates the history of physics, chemistry, and astronomy that brought us to our present understanding—and misunderstandings—of the world, while offering readers a front-row seat to one of the most dramatic intellectual journeys human beings have ever embarked on.
A transfixing deep dive into the origins of our world, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch examines not just the makeup of our universe, but the awe-inspiring, improbable fact that it exists at all.
Experimental physicist at CERN and acclaimed science presenter Harry Cliff offers an eye-opening account of the inexplicable phenomena that science has only recently glimpsed, and that could transform our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality.
Something strange is going on in the cosmos. Scientists are uncovering a catalogue of weird phenomena that simply can’t be explained by our long-established theories of the universe. Particles with unbelievable energies are bursting from beneath the Antarctic ice. Unknown forces seem to be tugging on the basic building blocks of matter. Stars are flying away from us far faster than anyone can explain.
After decades of fruitless searching, could we finally be catching glimpses of a profound new view of our physical world? Or are we being fooled by cruel tricks of the data?
In Space Oddities, Harry Cliff, a physicist who does cutting-edge work on the Large Hadron Collider, provides a riveting look at the universe’s most confounding puzzles. In a journey that spans continents, from telescopes perched high above the Atacama Desert to the subterranean caverns of state-of-the-art particle colliders to balloons hovering over the frozen icesheets of the South Pole, he meets the men and women hunting for answers—who have staked their careers and reputations on the uncertain promise of new physics.
The result is a mind-expanding, of-the-moment look at the fields of physics and cosmology as they transform before us. With wonder, clarity, and a dose of humor, Cliff investigates the question: Are these anomalies accidents of nature, or could they be pointing us toward vast, hidden worlds?
Something strange is going on in the cosmos. Scientists are uncovering a catalogue of weird phenomena that simply can’t be explained by our long-established theories of the universe. Particles with unbelievable energies are bursting from beneath the Antarctic ice. Unknown forces seem to be tugging on the basic building blocks of matter. Stars are flying away from us far faster than anyone can explain.
After decades of fruitless searching, could we finally be catching glimpses of a profound new view of our physical world? Or are we being fooled by cruel tricks of the data?
In Space Oddities, Harry Cliff, a physicist who does cutting-edge work on the Large Hadron Collider, provides a riveting look at the universe’s most confounding puzzles. In a journey that spans continents, from telescopes perched high above the Atacama Desert to the subterranean caverns of state-of-the-art particle colliders to balloons hovering over the frozen icesheets of the South Pole, he meets the men and women hunting for answers—who have staked their careers and reputations on the uncertain promise of new physics.
The result is a mind-expanding, of-the-moment look at the fields of physics and cosmology as they transform before us. With wonder, clarity, and a dose of humor, Cliff investigates the question: Are these anomalies accidents of nature, or could they be pointing us toward vast, hidden worlds?