os @mauro, @paulo e as @Alice.V pira
When our physicists started to find out what stuff was, they went into it, and into it, and examined it with ever more minute instruments.
They first started cutting up things with knives, and cutting them smaller and smaller and smaller until the particle they wanted to dissect was exactly the same width as the edge of the knife.
And so they got an atom, and that word in Greek—átomos (ατομος)—means “the non-cuttable.” Á: “non,” tomos: “cuttable.” That’s the basic atom: what you can’t cut anymore, because you got down to the end.
Well, they weren’t satisfied with that. So they got an átomos—in other words, a particle of something or other that was just the same width as the blade of the knife edge—and they looked at it under a microscope.
And they saw that it was—[it] seemed to be composed of more, small particles. So they found out means of working those out, and then they found out extraordinary means of investigating the properties of matter.
Then they reached a point where they couldn’t decide whether it was particles or whether it was waves. So they called them wavicles.
They thought they had come to certain ultimate wavicles, called electrons. But then, unfortunately, everything fell apart and they found protons, mesons, and many other extraordinary things.
Because, of course, what they didn’t realize, was that as you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation.Just as when the telescopes become more and more powerful, the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes.
Because what is happening in all these investigations is: through us, and through our eyes and senses,
the universe is looking at itself.
And when you try to turn around to see your own head, what happens? You see? It runs away. You never get at it. You can’t bite your own teeth. You can’t touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger. This is the principle.
