Long, long ago, physicists stopped asking the question ‘What is matter?’ They began that way. They wanted to know, what is the fundamental substance of the world? And the more they asked that question, the more they realized the couldn’t answer it, because if you’re going to say what matter is, you’ve got to describe it in terms of behavior.
You describe the smallest shapes of it which you can see. Do you see what happens?
Electrons, protons, mesons, all sorts of sub-nuclear particles.
When you get your eyes into focus, you see a form, you see a pattern.
So all that we can talk about is patterns.
So the picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of today is not formed stuff, potted clay, but pattern.
