Introduction to The Structure Of Matter

STRUCTURE OF MATTER

MATTER| ANTIMATTER| ATOMS

            

        Introduction. Structure of Matter at Different Scales

In the Mikolajus Ciurlionis Art Museum in the city of Kaunas in Lituania one may see a famous  picture from this well known east European artist – Triptych REX (Power, 1909).

It consists of  three pictures, looking very differently from the first sight and showing quite different objects: the boat, near the high embankment, the pediment of a temple and, finally, a tremendous monument erected on a pedestal amidst a sea.

But if you look more attentively one may notice, that the first (far left) part of the picture presents actually a small fragment of the middle part (see the red square, added by the author of this lecture), but in enlarged scale. The same with the middle part – it is an enlarged fragment of the last part of the triptych (look at the yellow square, added by the author of this lecture).

Mikalojus Ciurlionis, Triptych REX (1904–1905)  

This triptych by Michael Ciurlionis (1875–1911) may serve as a wonderful illustration of the fact well known to contemporary Physics: our World, the complete nature surrounding us, may look very different at different scales and the Laws governing nature at different scales may be also quite different from each other.

The micro-world of atoms and molecules is very different from the world of macroscopic objects, which are comparable in scale to human beings and which we can perceive with our senses. And the world of Mega-Objects, like stars and galaxies look very different from both micro- and macro- worlds.

 Though some basic laws governing the nature at any scale, are practically the same. And the science which studies those most general laws of nature is physics.

Let us look at the next picture showing the objects inhabiting and persisting in our World at different scales. The mankind has invented plenty of different sciences studying those objects.

Mostly those sciences are concentrated on certain types of objects at certain more or less widely spread scale. Chemistry is busy with atoms and molecules, biology – with mostly macroscopic living beings, etc.

 The only field of knowledge which pretends to cover practically all the scale ranges from elementary particles up to complete universe taken as a whole is physics.

The principle difference of physics from all other fields of knowledge usually called sciences lies in the fact that it is based not only on the collection and analysis of the observational and experimental data,

but also on some fundamental general statements related to the most general properties of our space, time and matter, and on mathematics allowing logical derivation from those general statements certain more particular quantitative knowledge about motion and properties of matter at different scales, which can be independently compared to experimental and observational data.

The course will consist of two parts. In the first one we will trace the evolution of physical knowledge about the deep structure of matter from macroscopic scale down to atoms and elementary particle. In the second part we will undertake a journey in opposite direction and discuss the structure of our universe at the Mega-scale.

The author clearly understands that within the frameworks of this short course due to evident limitations of the proposed format it is impossible to cover the whole range of modern physics. The main purpose of the course is just to give a general overview ant to awake your interest towards the discussed issues.