Are Particles Theoretically Tangible?

[JairCrawford]

Tangibility is really more of a theoretical question, since we can’t actually shrink ourselves at all to find out, let alone to quantum levels.

I think essentially what I’m trying to grasp is… at the quantum level are particles that are responsible for matter, in and of themselves material in nature? Is, say, a proton an actual physical object? Or is it better understood as three quarks all more energy-like and fuzzy spinning around so fast that once you zoom out, we get the illusion of a material nature? (Again… not trying to delve into any pseudoscience here. Just trying to wrap my head around this.)

The answer to that is "Yes". It's a matter of perspective. Think of it this way, is a chair a single solid object? Or a collection of wood fibers? Or a grouping of organic molecules? If you're sitting on it it's one thing, if you're doing biochemical analysis it's another. It's both at the same time, we just have different ways of looking at it.

That's what makes the quantum realm so counterintuitive, We live on a scale where waves are waves and particles are particles and never the twain shall meet. At our scale air pressure is constant across our bodies because the enormous number of atoms pushing on us averages out all variability. Look through even a modest optical microscope though and you can start to see that variability. Small objects get nudged about by Brownian motion as molecules smack into them at different rates, Not something that we typically sense but you can see it with any old high school microscope. Go even smaller and the rules get even less like what we're used to. Harder to comprehend by brains trained to obey walk lights and treat vehicles as discreet particles. Go small enough and particles are also waves and fields. You can look at them and describe them in any of those terms and they'll act that way too. But our common sense gets in the way of thinking that way.

Ok, I think I’m starting to track a little bit with this explanation. Still confused as to how something can be a particle and a wave at the same time but the chair analogy is a good one.

I remember when I was first told that an atom is mostly comprised of empty space, because of how far the electrons orbit the nucleus. I wondered how something made mostly of empty space could produce solid objects. But then I pictured a fan, with fan blades. There is more space between the blades than there are blades, but once you turn that thing on high speed you’re not going to be able to poke it fast enough to only hit the empty space. Do electrons and their ridiculously fast orbits work similarly?

As for fields… I don’t know how to conceptualise that. I’ve read some people say that vibrations between fields cause quarks and electrons and other particles to ‘be’, or that they are nothing else but simply vibrations. I don’t know how much of this is established or still theoretical, but it’s very hard to conceptualise.