And the Masons

...On the other hand, matter. It is clear that Newton was right only in the “local” world, where it was something that had mass, and in our, to put it mildly, moral weightlessness, this is not an argument. And yet, even though we no longer consider mass as a fundamental property of matter, it remains an important aspect of reality. Unless, of course, you perceive it in an altered state. So, “Subtle Physics. Mass, Ether and the Unification of Universal Forces" by Frank Wilczek will help us in our desire not to change.

This book explores, so to speak, the background to the latest physics ideas about mass, energy and the nature of the vacuum. And rest assured, the old school will not let you down. Perhaps sometimes it is very old, but in the final we will still win. It’s not for nothing that Newton himself called mass “the amount of matter,” and nothing. Previously, everything was better, we ate it with bread, but now? Yes, just recently everyone got by with only Newton’s three laws, thinking that the physics exam was in their pocket, but it turned out that for the scientist himself it was so, a warm-up with a little red face, like Chapaev’s. Our Isaac did not even call his main law - Newton's zero law - the law governing the movement of matter, but the very definition of matter.

And what happened next? They say that the C students won in science, that is, the champions of Newton’s three laws, because the main thing for them was to create progress throughout the world. “Newton’s zeroth law was a profound error,” writes the book’s author. “It was the central dogma of the Old Order, which dominated physics, chemistry and astronomy for more than two centuries. It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that the work of Planck, Einstein and other scientists began to challenge the Old Order. By the middle of the century, under the onslaught of new experimental discoveries, the Old Order collapsed.”

By the way, this oldest order collapsed not only in science, and in a separate chapter, “God and the Zeroth Law,” the author explains in detail why exactly it was worth destroying “to the ground, and then.” No, nothing personal, no underground International (only legal - in the very title of the book about the unification of world forces), no Freemasons. Even Newton was allowed to speak, recalling his later work “Optics” of 1704, which dealt with a more specific vision of the nature of matter. The young atheists, of course, attributed everything to the religious insanity of our elder, so that they would have something to attack at the next academic council, but it’s still interesting. “It seems probable to me,” declared Newton, “that God first gave to matter the form of solid, massive, impenetrable, mobile particles of such sizes and figures, and with such properties and proportions in relation to space, as would best suit the purpose for which he created them. These original particles, being hard, are incomparably harder than any porous body composed of them, so much harder that they never wear out or break into pieces. No ordinary force is capable of dividing what God himself created at the first creation.”

And in this way, each time “returning to reality,” the author of the book, “arguing with God,” moves toward the “subtle physics” of modern times. “Now we must leave these intoxicating philosophical and theological ideas,” he warns every now and then, well, shall we move on?