**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[wufwugy]

Well my original point was an extension of the fact that the smaller things we find, the more smaller things we need to find. It's possible we could just reach a point of no capability to find that smaller thing, or that the smaller thing is no thing at all. It's not intuitive, but if I had to guess at what the foundation of all things is, it's nothing

[MadMojoMonkey]

Well my original point was an extension of the fact that the smaller things we find, the more smaller things we need to find.

Yep. It goes both ways. The bigger things we find, the bigger things we need to find. This goes back to describing the outside of the universe from the inside. (That sentence presupposes an outside to the universe, of which there is no physical evidence.)

One of the troubles with the Standard Model as pertains to the laws of physics being 'the same everywhere in the universe' is that these laws were based on the assumption that the universe is 'essentially homogeneous from some scale'. There is data which suggests that this is not the case, though.

A 10 minute vid about the Largest Structure in the Universe, which explains this a bit better than I do.

It's possible we could just reach a point of no capability to find that smaller thing, or that the smaller thing is no thing at all.

This is exactly where particle physics is limited in some ways. In order to probe something very small, you need a particle with very high energy. The LHC at CERN does exactly that. It accelerates protons so they have incredible amounts of kinetic energy, then slam that proton into something... probing it.

I've heard, but I don't recall where, that a bigger particle accelerator that is a significant step above the one at CERN, would need to be the size of Pluto's orbit. So, even though it's theoretically possible, there may be practical limits to creating a controlled environment.

It's not intuitive, but if I had to guess at what the foundation of all things is, it's nothing

Write that paper, do the experiments and prove your hypothesis. Instant Nobel Prize in Physics!