Having taken plenty of physics classes, read some books, and watching shows on the Science channel, I know quite a bit more than the average person about physics. And I'm pretty interested in it because I think that knowing how the world and the universe works is pretty darn cool!
And over the past couple of years, I've developed a thought that just won't go away. That thought is that Physicists are making things too complicated. It's not their fault though, they are doing the best they can to make sense out of things we don't fully understand yet. I'm talking specifically about the small stuff... the really small stuff.
Most people think that the smallest things in existence which everything else is made out of are atoms. And how atoms work is pretty well understood and accepted as true around the world. But then these brainiacs called theoretical physicists started trying to break down the atom even more. They determined that atoms are made up of even smaller things called neutrons, protons, and electrons. But that wasn't even good enough for them.
I'll spare you all of the details (mostly because I don't know all of them), but basically they now think there are even smaller fundamental particles called quarks, bosons, gluons, and some other ones - twelve of them in all. And one of them the so-called Higgs boson is only a guess, they haven't been able to detect it's existence yet but they think it has to anyway.
And not only that, but there are also a bunch of different forces too - strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational. And each of these act differently.
These are all parts of the Standard Model.
Then there are people talking about string theory, M-theory, and dark matter which is something that supposedly is what most of the universe is made of, but we can't see, touch, or otherwise prove it directly. Uh huh...
Is it just me or does all of this seem a little too complicated? You know what I think? I like Einstein's theory that everything is made up of energy. And I think there is some type of fundamental unit of energy that isn't a particle, and isn't a wave, it's something different but can' look like either one or neither of them based on the circumstances. Those circumstances are based on a set of rules that we just don't completely understand yet.
So there is one type of thing - energy. And with the rules (who knows how many - but probably not more than a dozen) that control how energy acts it could explain everything. It could explain why gravity is so weak for small things but strong for big things, compared to say the electromagnetic force. It could explain why some matter is visible and some is dark. It could explain why sometimes things act like particles and sometimes they act like waves.
I have no idea what these fundamental units of energy are or what the rules would be that govern them, but I bet that's how everything really works.
