I’ve often claimed that more particular, more concrete forms of being are shaped from more abstract forms of being, themselves tracing back after some number of stages to the truths God manifested as the raw stuff of Creation. In the spirit of meta-physics as properly conceived, in my opinion, by Aristotle and some of his predecessors, my claim is based upon an abstraction from the best physics of my day, supplemented by some general concepts from other fields, such as the understanding of this world as one of evolution and development which has come from Darwin and his successors.
The specific claim in this essay comes from my understanding of the discovery of modern cosmology and particle physics that forces and particles melt into more general forms at extremely high temperatures or, equivalently, extremely high densities. There’s more to it than that, but I wanted to bring up the subject because I noticed two articles about states of matter which are difficult to reach, difficult but not impossible, to explore empirically.
First, there’s an article about trying to explore a state of matter which exists at temperatures or densities whose existence would have been denied by Einstein, let alone Newton or Aristotle. In a very short review, Synopsis: Deconstructing the Quark Gluon Plasma, we can read:
Understanding steam would be really difficult if one only had access to cubes of ice, yet this is exactly the challenge confronting researchers studying the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a liquidlike state of matter obtained from colliding atomic nuclei at relativistic energies. The constituents of the plasma are quarks and gluons that are momentarily liberated from the colliding nucleons, but the strong nuclear force freezes these particles so rapidly into protons, neutrons, and other stable hadrons that it is difficult to measure them directly. To understand the microscopic constituents of the plasma (quarks and gluons), experimentalists need to know how to interpret what they can actually measure (the relic hadrons).
The article goes on to talk about a proposed theory which might be testable with current particle physics facilities.
The second article, Exotic Particles, Chilled and Trapped, Form Giant Matter Wave, tells us:
Physicists have trapped and cooled exotic particles called excitons so effectively that they condensed and cohered to form a giant matter wave.
… Excitons are composite particles made up of an electron and a “hole” left by a missing electron in a semiconductor. Created by light, these coupled pairs exist in nature. The formation and dynamics of excitons play a critical role in photosynthesis, for example.
Like other matter, excitons have a dual nature of both particle and wave, in a quantum mechanical view. The waves are usually unsynchronized, but when particles are cooled enough to condense, their waves synchronize and combine to form a giant matter wave, a state that others have observed for atoms.
There are different sorts of steam in the physical world and the scientists doing the work discussed in the above article managed to separate an exotic sort of steam playing a major role in at least one important process, photosynthesis, and then they froze that steam to study further the properties of the colder, liquid form of the stuff.
The principle I’m claiming to be true is one of the most important in my worldview. It is not just an add-on but is necessary to my way of seeing the world as unified, coherent, and complete, combining the revealed truths of Christianity as well as the empirical knowledge built up over the course of human history by various sorts of scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, historians, and so forth. In a word, I seek to reunify human knowledge of our one Creation so we can understand it as such. Having a richer and unified understanding of being, which is the primary work of metaphysics, is a necessary part of this effort.
Again, the claim is:
Being lies on a spectrum going from the abstract (very hot) to the concrete (frozen). The more concrete forms of being are shaped from the more abstract.
I’ve developed parts of this viewpoint in various writings. Many of those writings can be found in the large collection of most of the essays I’ve published since 2006 on my two weblogs: Acts of Being and To See a World in a Grain of Sand. This collection of essays can be downloaded for free: Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2011. I plan on releasing a smaller sample of ten or so essays which concentrate on this issue of the spectrum of being, abstract to concrete or hot and dense to cold and thin.