| Summary: | A single event is not sufficient, to identify a structure. Only the
repetition of similar events can lead to an understanding of the underlying structure. A
historical event can never be fully explained by its supposed structure, conversely a
structure cannot only be explained by events. In physics, explanation is a necessary condition
to understand an event. In this essay, I give examples of structures on various natural
scales: In the world around us, we experience matter in solid, liquid or gaseous states, which
mirror their structure. At the level of individual atoms, we encounter the slow-down of the
thermal dance of the molecules at very low temperature. The elementary particles have
intricate family structures that are just as complicated as family structures in anthropology.
The universe presents events that can illuminate the long dark night from 1 million years to 1
billion years after the big bang. I show how the researcher inductively derives physical
structures from events, but I will also indicate that there are metastructures found by
mathematical deduction.
|
|---|
