... deepens.¹

For those who can't wait or find this statement mysterious - consider a baseball, which might be a typical ``particle'' that we study. On the one hand, it behaves a lot like a single entity. On the other hand, if we take it apart or look at it under stress, we see that it is made of lots of parts stuck together. If we keep breaking it apart (or looking at it on smaller and smaller length scales) we eventually find that it is made of fibers, and the fibers are made of molecules, and the molecules are made of atoms, and the atoms are made of electrons, protons and neutrons, and the protons and neutrons are made of quarks (presumably) and ...maybe the sequence stops there, and although quarks, electrons, and neutrinos may indeed be elementary, indivisible ``particles'' we left the usefulness of classical mechanics behind several length scales ago! So, the ``mystery'' that we will explain is how a baseball can be treated perfectly well like a particle and still be made up of a huge number of structures, each with its own internal dynamics, on different length scales. The baseball, of course, is a very small component of the earth (which behaves like a particle in some ways) in the solar system (ditto) in our galaxy (ditto) so the scaling works both ways.

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... listen^1.1

Students who like to read historical fiction will doubtless enjoy Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a set of novels that spans the Enlightenment and in which Newton, Liebnitz, Hooke and other luminaries to whom we owe our modern conceptualization of physics all play active parts.

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... things^1.2

This is not the last chore, by the way. Physicists have long since turned time into a coordinate just like space so that how long things take depends on one's point of view, eliminated the assumption that one can measure any set of measureable quantities to arbitrary precision in an arbitrary order, replaced the determinism of mathematically precise trajectories with a funny kind of stochastic quasi-determinism, made (some) forces into just an aspect of geometry, and demonstrated a degree of mathematical structure (still incomplete, we're working on it) beyond the wildest dreams of Aristotle or his mathematical-mystic buddies, the Pythagoreans.

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