In our environment, our senses can detect two kinds of physical manifestations. One of them is matter that is present in different states as solids, liquids and gases, and the other are energy manifestations as light or heat.
While superstitions has been replaced by science, our knowledge of the environment increased by experiments made to confirm mathematical formulas, called laws that allow us anticipate physical events before they occur.
So, after Sir Isaac Newton developed his universal gravitation law, we were capable of calculating and predicting the position of the celestial bodies of our solar system, and even more, detecting slightly anomalies between the calculated and the observed position, we were capable of suspecting and finally confirming the existence of previous unknown bodies such as Pluto.
One of the most fascinating branches of physics was developed at the beginning of the XX century when we began to understand how our universe is made, going deeper and deeper into the structure of matter. The discovery of the atoms that were divided into smaller particles as the protons, neutrons and electrons, and then into even smaller unities as the quarks and the leptons and the laws that control their interactions, have been a challenge for the brightest minds of the scientific community.
Newton explained how gravitational force works, Maxwell equations related electricity and magnetism and Albert Einstein discovered that matter is just a manifestation of energy. the investigations continue, but still today there are many aspects of the particle physics that we don't comprehend.
Discoveries like the anti-matter, which consist of anti-particles, particles with the same mass but opposite electric charge, that when combined with their related particles are both annihilated and converted into pure energy puzzled the scientific community, because... if at the beginning of the Universe, matter and anti-matter were created at the same time, why does our Universe seem to be made exclusively of matter? Where if it still exists is the antimatter ?
Also, measurements of the velocity of stars in the galaxies reveal that more mass must be present than is visible in the form of stars because generate the gravitational attraction necessary to hold the galaxy together. this missed mass is called dark matter. even more bizarre there is something called dark energy which is causing the universe to expand in an unexplained way. Little is known about dark matter, and even less about dark energy. but, the two together contain over 90% of the mass and the energy of the universe.
Finally, time is another interesting concept. My theory is that the physical world could be explained as the result of interactions of tiny particles or elementary units, (the quarks and the leptons), all these interactions take place in a single moment and the particles involved could be considered in two states, one before the interaction and other after the interaction, but every interaction induces another one. So we are living in a continuous space-time that is the result of all the previous sub-atomic interactions from the Big Bang.
For many years, philosophers and scientists have been wondering about the structure of the world in where we are living. Our senses permit us to observe and analyze our environment just in part, but until recently in our written history, we have not developed the appropriate tools that allowed us to realize of the existence of an incredible universe of sub-atomic particles as well as the immensity of the cosmos.
