We understand many things about particles and their interactions, but this and other mysteries make it very clear that we are nowhere close to a full understanding.
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Martinus Veltman (2003). Facts and mysteries in elementary particle physics. World Scientific. p. 3. ISBN 981238149X.Martinus J. G. Veltman
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The current worldview has it that everything is made of matter, and everything can be reduced to the elementary particles of matter, the basic constituents — building blocks — of matter. And cause arises from the interactions of these basic building blocks or elementary particles; elementary particles make atoms, atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, and cells make brain. But all the way, the ultimate cause is always the interactions between the elementary particles. This is the belief — all cause moves from the elementary particles. This is what we call "upward causation." So in this view, what human beings — you and I think of as our free will does not really exist. It is only an epiphenomenon or secondary phenomenon, secondary to the causal power of matter. And any causal power that we seem to be able to exert on matter is just an illusion. This is the current paradigm.
Amit Goswami
"I believe that there are things which humanity will never fully understand, for in the understanding of them, we will no longer be "human." One of these things is the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. I don't know how it works, and I don't want to know. It's a big universe and even with our limited understanding of it, it's pretty clear that the universe is in no way equipped to keep up with the bureaucracy of its particles and/or strings. There are things lurking in the dark, unwatched, unguarded recesses of reality. Things as beyond you or I as we are beyond an amoeba. It is quite obvious that Mr. Clean Magic Erasers draw their power from these unknowable horrors. They probably found it in the core of a meteor still half buried in the Earth, hideously pulsing with a light not unlike the color of blood and hate. So use your Magic Erasers while you still can, before they run out of meteor or they discover it causes cervical cancer or testicular cancer in men and women respectively."
Brian Clevinger
I am saying to modern scientists and theologians: don't imagine that our latest ideas about the Big Bang or the human genome have solved the mysteries of the universe or the mysteries of life. Here are Bacon's words again: "The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding". In the last four hundred years, science has fulfilled many of Bacon's dreams, but it still does not come close to capturing the full subtlety of nature.
Freeman Dyson
It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Is the purpose of theoretical physics to be no more than a cataloging of all the things that can happen when particles interact with each other and seperate? Or is it to be an understanding at a deeper level in which there are things that are not directly observable (as the underlying quantized fields are) but in terms of which we shall have a more fundamental understanding?
Julian Schwinger
Veltman, Martinus J. G.
Venizelos, Eleftherios
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