What is the real composition of matter?
The idea of an illusory universe may sound hard to believe at first. We tend to see things around us as tangible objects composed of solid matter. But what matter really is?
« Making Sense of the Vedic Universe, a Higher-Dimensional Reality
What is the real composition of matter?
The idea of an illusory universe composed of multiple dimensions may sound hard to believe at first. We tend to see things around us as tangible objects composed of solid matter. When we see in this way, they appear to be very real, and we may question how other levels of reality can exist at all. We may be able to accept the difference between matter and spirit, accepting that the soul is something else entirely, but accepting that someone can have a material body that is invisible to us may sound too hard to believe. However, this is supported by material science itself.
We learn in school that atoms are mostly empty space, electrons circling a nucleus, like a mini-solar system. However, even this picture is outdated. The nucleus is not a solid core, and the electrons are not really particles circling it. The current view is that electrons are not like tiny balls, but more like waves of electric charge (quantum objects that appear in certain regions around the nucleus), and the nucleus itself is also not solid matter, but composed of smaller components held together by powerful interactions. In other words, an atom is not a little mechanical solar system, but mostly empty space structured by fields and interactions. It feels solid when we touch things, but in reality that solidity is mostly the result of electromagnetic forces and quantum effects acting within atoms that are almost entirely empty space. That’s the perfect description of an illusory reality.
When I hold a metal ball in my hand, it feels solid, but it feels that way only because my hand is made of matter with a similar basic atomic structure. The atoms in the ball resist being compressed by the atoms in my hand, and mere muscular strength is not sufficient to overcome it. If my hand were made of the same ultra-dense matter that physicists believe exists inside black holes, the ball of metal would not feel solid at all. It would simply collapse and almost disappear before I even touched it, like a ball of styrofoam in contact with fire. If my hand were made of neutrinos or gamma rays, it would pass through the ball without affecting it much, just like a ghost’s hand, and these are just two examples based on types of matter that are studied in modern physics. If we accept the Vedic version of different types of matter that have entirely different structures and do not interact at all, the idea of demigods with bodies that are invisible to us sounds even more natural. We think of matter around us as something solid and real, but in reality, it is nothing like this.
Modern physics also explains that a vacuum is not simply nothing. That’s another idea we learn in school that is outdated. What we call a vacuum may contain no ordinary matter, but the underlying fields of nature are still present. Even in their lowest state, these fields can fluctuate and produce measurable effects. So, what appears as empty space can still have physical properties: it is not a solid substance, but it is not mere nothingness either. It is the structured background in which particles, forces, and interactions appear, like a stage with no actors currently standing on it. The stage may be empty, but it still has structure, rules, and possibilities, and it can influence how the actors move and interact. If we think about it, it sounds a lot like the explanation of the ether element given in the Vedas.
In this way, modern physics explains that matter is not really solid, and space is not really empty. That sounds quite similar to what we study in Vedic metaphysics, as explained by Lord Kapila in the Third Canto of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam.
But it gets better. Imagine a second kind of matter that does not use the same forces that ordinary atoms use to resist contact. Not like antimatter, which destroys ordinary matter, but something neutral that does not directly interact with it. This type of matter would not push back against the atoms in a wall because there would be almost no interaction between them. As a result, it would pass through ordinary matter like a ghost. Still, it would not be unreal: its particles could still interact strongly with one another through a different set of forces, allowing it to form solid objects of its own kind. People living in a world composed of this different type of matter would touch things and interact with other people; their reality would feel solid to them, just as our reality feels solid to us, but we would not be able to see them at all.
Now, imagine several other kinds of matter, some that do not interact at all with matter in our plane, others that interact weakly, some that interact with others but not with us, and so on. It starts getting quite close to the concept of the different planetary systems as different levels of reality, which I have been describing here.
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« Making Sense of the Vedic Universe, a Higher-Dimensional Reality
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Very educative and interesting post. Thank you Prabhu 🙏
So, now we know that physics is just a language and numerical model that describes the behaviour of what is out there. It does not tell us what it is in and of itself.
We use words such as “Physical world”, “matter” etc… even within our Vedantic philosophical discussions to refer to a phenomenon that we can only known through seeing, smelling, etc..( it seems to be a world of qualities rather than quantities )
The question remains… it’s our mind or brain creating this experiences, or do the qualities actually exist out there as we experience them ?
When we say Matter, what are we actually referring to ?
What is the intrinsic constitutional nature of what we refer to as the physical world, within a Vaishnav philosophical framework ?
Is the full moon white ? Or the sky blue even if we ( leaving entities ) were not there to experience it ?
When we say forms of subtle matter to describe the constitution of other planetary dimensions, what are we actually referring to by matter ?
Hare Krishna 🙏