If you search the internet you won’t find anything called a sub-quark. There is lots of information to be found about quarks – “an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter”. There are suggestions here and there about the existence of sub-quarks that might make up quarks but there is no scientific experimental confirmation of this.
However, if you keep digging you will find that there is information out there about the smaller particle, the sub-quarks that make up the quarks. These particles were identified using extrasensory perception by three amazing people who were trained in the late 1800’s to observe the process of the creation of physical atoms by an Indian Yogi. It could all be dismissed as so much metaphysical hyperbole except for the fact that many, many of their observations have actually been proven to be scientifically accurate. Among their achievements – they described the existence of periodic table elements with their correct atomic weights years before they were discovered by science. However, what is most interesting to me is that the human mind can be trained to observe realms of reality that are normally the exclusive territory of particle physicists!
The term ‘the fifth force’ sounds like something out of Star Wars but interestingly enough the idea has been around for a long time. In Plato’s time they called it the fifth element, aether, or quintessence (the Latin word for fifth element). What these words actually referred to was the concept of an invisible immeasurable substance that occupies every point in Space, including within material bodies.
Today there is a body of scientific evidence accumulating that is motivating scientists to bring these old terms out of the closet, dust them off and polish them up for future use. The discovery of dark energy, in the late 1990’s, threw a huge monkey wrench into the gears of what we thought we knew about just about everything. Suddenly these old ideas are taking on a new life. There are scientists who think that the fifth force, though not directly measurable with modern scientific equipment will prove to be another fundamental force along with the other four fundamental forces currently known to modern science: the strong, the weak, the electromagnetic and the gravitational forces. This could help make sense of some of the big questions that have been raised by the discovery of dark energy.
Things like dark matter and dark energy are not much of a concern to most of us living our lives here on Earth. What does it have to do with us?
According to Wikipedia: “Dark matter was postulated by Fritz Zwicky in 1934 to account for evidence of “missing mass” in the orbital velocities of galaxies in clusters. Subsequently, other observations have indicated the presence of dark matter in the universe. … As important as dark matter is believed to be in the cosmos, direct evidence of its existence and a concrete understanding of its nature have remained elusive”.
That’s why they call it dark…seriously.
The funny thing is that whenever scientists talk about dark matter and dark energy they forget to note one very important thing – at least where it concerns you and me. Dark matter and dark energy are not just something OUT THERE, in the universe…they also are RIGHT HERE…in us and all around us! That brings things a little closer to home. So what is it? We are talking about something that exists but cannot be measured…yet. But when you think about it there are a lot of things that fall into this category.
Since the dawn of mankind, human beings looking up into the immensity of the universe have been moved to ask all the big questions – who are we… how did we get here… what is the meaning of life… and what happens next? And down through the ages they have come up with a lot of different answers to these questions that have formed the basis of all the religions and philosophies there are on earth.
There is also a scientific side to this inquiry about the structure of the universe – with all kinds of theories and some facts about what is out there in the universe and what it means to us. Since the invention of the Hubble Telescope we have made huge strides in understanding the nature of this vast space in which our whirling planet is an almost infinitesimally small speck. But even with all our modern scientific measuring equipment brought to bear on this job, it is a fact that all we can account for so far explains only 4% of the whole! It all seems to get more mysterious the more we realize what we don’t yet know.
The field of quantum physics may soon see an extreme makeover. Not that anything changes very fast when you are talking about scientific theories. But there’s nothing like new discoveries to make everyone sit up and take notice! The confirmation of the existence of dark energy in the late 1990’s means that a whole new theory is going to have to be developed to explain what is going on. Evidence is coming in from all branches of science declaring that the old paradigms just don’t fit the facts anymore.
For most of us, quantum physics theories explain phenomena we can hardly grasp with the mind. Quantum physicists have been talking about superstring theories and a universe with ten dimensions for a long time already and most of us are none the wiser! Now, things are about to get a whole lot more complicated. So what does this mean for our lives? Actually it means a lot but not in the language of modern quantum physics. The more we can understand the nature of our reality the better – but we need to look in other directions to find it in a language we can understand.
“The Universe around us is not what it appears to be. The stars make up less than 1 percent of its mass; all the loose gas and other forms of ordinary matter, less than 5 percent. The motions of this visible material reveal that it is mere flotsam on an unseen sea of unknown material. We know little about that sea. The terms we use to describe its components, “dark matter” and “dark energy,” serve mainly as expressions of our ignorance.” These are the words of David B. Kline in his article for the magazine Scientific American in March of 2003.
This is a big problem! We are currently spending large fortunes trying to shed light on the nature of this mysterious “dark energy“. Strange we haven’t been paying more attention all along to perspectives from the past. In the words of Lao Tzu, a giant of ancient Chinese philosophy and science, written 500 years B.C. “There are numberless energy rays in the Universe…All rays … come from the subtle nature of the Universe”. Maybe he was on to something!
The recent discovery of the strange subatomic particles called neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light is big news around the world. The scientific community is in shock. Scientists are having a hard time believing that it can even be true. Independent verification is being called for by researchers around the world.
It is curious, given the pretty much irrefutable and generally accepted evidence for the existence of dark energy (though as yet scientists have no idea what it is), that this new discovery is not viewed as possibly another piece in that particular puzzle.
You would think that the fact that it is now widely acknowledged among physicists and astrophysicists that we can only measure a small percent of all there is, would make such discoveries as subatomic particles that move faster than light, seem a little less astonishing.
