Nature gives me a materialistic joy. When I pick a white
pebble on the shore, or look at the bright transparency of a wave
which falls, or at the bark of a tree, or at an apple or a sweet
pepper, or wet moss after the rain -when I look at them closely and
attentively, I feel that the matter of these objects is incessantly
active and living and fresh and new. And I have in mind this idea :
there is no old matter. Matter doesn't grow old. Physicists say the
electron is almost eternal, but are there ageing and worn electrons ?
My hypothesis is that billions and billions years after their
creation, longlife particles are as active and as new as in the
beginning. I would like to put this question to a physicist : are
particles subject to ageing, to gradual physical degradation, like
living beings or like a pan or a car or a house ? Are there rusty
electrons ?
Huxley, in Calcutta, visited Bose's laboratory and wrote
: ''I love matter, I find it miraculous''. (Jesting Pilate,
1926). For me, the miracle is that matter renews itself incessantly.
Material things are always new. We see old things because we are
imprisoned in the practical perception -in what French philosopher
Bergson called ''practical simplification'' (in the famous digression
of Laughter's third chapter : What is the object of art
). This practical perception is related to our needs. To survive, we
have to perceive useful and harmful things. We need what we call
clean and fresh food, and we throw away whatever we perceive as dirty
or rotten. But in nature all is fresh and clean, and for some animals
mud is a sweet and lovely home. We have to perceive the
useful/harmful aspects of physical reality, and we may be blind to
all the rest.
''Miraculous'' : one reads the same word in
Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World :
''Reviewing their properties one by one, there
seems to be nothing to choose between the two tables for ordinary
purposes ; but when abnormal circumstances befall, my scientific
table shows to advantage. If the house catches fire my scientific
table will dissolve quite naturally into scientific smoke, whereas my
ordinary table undergoes a metamorphosis of its substantial nature
which I can only regard as miraculous.''
And is it not a miracle that an inert log in the basket
becomes in the hearth light and heat and smoke and a few grams of ash
? What are the true properties of matter if wood can become light and
heat ? Matter is not a living being in the proper sense of living,
but it is an incessantly active being*, and all around us this active
being renews itself at every moment. In the world of matter, the
concept of ageing seems meaningless. Matter is energy, and in
physical processes there is no loss of energy -no loss of youth :
something new happens at every moment. Is not this continuous
refreshing physical newness the most striking feature in nature ?
Every step I take in any place, quiet streets and
parks, or a village with small gardens, or a grassy path in the
countryside -all the more so if the sun pours its incessant flux of
sparkling photons, is a material enchantment (in Emerson's words :
''a perennial festival''). The more one's perception sharpens, the more one becomes
an eager and nature-loving materialist.
*
I like this sentence (on particleadventure.org) : Electrons
are in constant motion around the nucleus, protons and neutrons
jiggle within the nucleus, and quarks jiggle within the protons and
neutrons.
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