Jim Holt

I mean, it's a pipe dream.

But this is what science has increasingly led us to.

You know, even in ancient times, the atomists, Democritus and Leucippus, thought that if you keep cutting up the stuff of reality that we see around us, tables and chairs and rocks and so forth, eventually you cut them up into such itty-bitty pieces that you can't cut any further.

And then you've got atoms.

So there you've clearly got a fundamental stuff.

Yeah, that sounds very pleasing.

But even going back to Newton, there were reasons to suspect that there was something a little funny about reality.

It wasn't quite as substantial as we believed.

Newton, of course, came up with the theory of gravity.

And the theory of gravity says if you've got the sun and a planet,

The Sun exerts a gravitational force on the planet.

And Newton's contemporaries wanted to know, well, how does it do that?

What is the mechanism by which gravity is mediated?

How does the Sun, as it were, reach out to the Earth and force it to move around in this orbit?

Yeah, yeah.

But the problem is it looks like there's nothing between the Earth and the Sun except a void.

Because at that time, everybody thought that nature has to be made out of hard, durable stuff.

You know, gears, sprockets, pushing and pulling.

That's the essence of reality.

Then in the 20th century, of course, it got much, much worse.