Fumfer Physics 30: Particles as Baked Bread

Scott Douglas Jacobsen likens particles to baked bread, emergent from interacting fields. Rick Rosner stresses Heisenberg uncertainty. Context, decoherence, and speculative topological knots frame a 13.8-billion-year interaction braid.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: All right, let’s do a quick one on math. I think analogies help convey ideas really nicely. I’m looking at limitations, of course, but the usual transition in physics education seems to be that undergrads learn about particles, and then in grad school they’re told everything’s actually fields, not particles. You have to unlearn to relearn.

So, could we think of particles as baked bread or a cake? You’ve got all these ingredients—fields—interacting, and the result is the “baked” product, the particle that emerges. Is that one way to frame it? The idea is that the particle is like the baked bread, and the fields are like the ingredients and the recipe—the interactions among them create the final form. The particle emerges as a result of the interactions within those fields.

Rick Rosner: All right, I didn’t get deep enough into quantum mechanics to see how it all works mathematically, but under quantum field theory—and in the universe at large—everything that exists and the way it exists is part of a grand interaction with everything else. The only reason we can say a proton is a proton, in a given place with a certain momentum and velocity, is because of its interactions with other particles and fields in the universe.

Not literally every particle, of course, but its state depends on a finite set of significant interactions. Because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—arising from non-commuting observables— the properties of the particle, like its position and momentum, are always a little uncertain. Everything about a particle is, at some level, slightly undefined.

But only slightly—so slightly that, because the universe contains an unfathomable number of particles and an immense history of interactions, most things are, for all practical purposes, well-defined. But it’s defined contextually. What you were saying about the bread fits: particles have no independent existence. They only exist and take on meaning as part of the entire “baked” history of the universe. Some researchers in mathematical physics have explored the idea that physical systems or spacetime can exhibit topological “knottedness.” Every interaction between particles that leaves a record could be thought of as a knot in spacetime.

Knots are special topological entities—structures that can’t be reduced to a simple line because of their self-interference. One can construct speculative models in which every particle interaction—the scattering, the exchange—creates a knot, and the entire universe becomes a 13.8-billion-year braid of those knots.

Mathematically, someone could probably make that model work. Would it yield new physics? Hard to say. But the idea captures something true: everything in the universe is entangled through about 13.8 billion years of “baking”—of particle exchanges, interactions, and evolution.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.