Quote Originally Posted by Polymirize
I have a legitimate question at this time, and hopefully you'll have good answers since you claim to work in this field. How do you know quarks and leptons are the smallest thing? Can you explain more about plancks constant? what's limiting the size? And how did the constant get derived? I keep hearing about quantum particles violating the laws of physics lately, appearing and disappeaing aparently at random. Possibly something about multiple dimensions? But are you saying we've actually reached a limit? We've hit a boundary?

I have this huge suspicion that time will reveal that you're calling the world flat, or declaring that the sun rotates around the earth.
You are asking good questions but they are big ones and I dont know how to do this succinctly.

We dont know that they are the smallest things in existence - in fact we suspect that there are indeed smaller components and String Theory is the main hope right now. But they are the smallest things that can be experimentally verified with the tools the we have at this time. Mainly thats the big supercolliders - like the one at Fermi Lab or Cern. Unfortunately what we do know is that if we tried to build a super collider large enough and fast enough to produce something smaller than a quark, the collider would be so large it couldnt fit on the planet or even within the solar system. This means that, at present time we have no experimental way to look for things like strings. And when you cant test your theories with an experiment you are no longer doing science - its philosophy or something else - actually its called "bullshit".

The atomic structure of matter was really discovered at the end of the 19th century and into the first part of the 20th. This was really the first confrontation with the granularity of nature. Suddenly water was no longer continously divisible. Further investigations, Bohr, Einstein, began to show that energy itself is lumpy and the size of the smallest lumps are related to Plancks Constant. http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000...electric2.html

These ideas, and their implications are the foundations of the Quantum theory of physics and they were considered difficult and surprising at the time and are still considered very difficult today despite the drivel that one hears from Star Trek and solemnly recanted from the mouths of moronic stoners on this site. (I have no real problem with people who are ignorant - every one is ignorant about lots stuff - what bothers me are ignorant people who dont know they are ignorant and make pompous statements like "if you know anything about physics" when they know nothng themselves - nuff ranting . ) Glibly the theory says that energy is granular and its behaviour is always to some extent random. It turns out that if matter is lumpy then so is space because they are intertwined and in consequence space itself is lumpy and again plancks constant is the measure of its granularity.

Because of the uncertainty principle you can never have a clean vacuum. If you did you would know for sure that there are no particles in that region of space and quantum theory says you cant know that much - so it must be that particles are randomly appearing and dissappearing in you "vacuum". On the average you have a vacuum but at any particular time you are likely to have an evanescent matter anti matter pair or two in your vacuum flask. This really bizarre consquence of quantum theory can be experimantaly verified by an effect known as the Casimir effect. The quantum version of the conservation laws says they only apply on the average. IMO soaking up this idea is better than smoking weed

You have more questions but I think I have gone on long enough