Why You Can Only See Three Things

by Chelsea Liu

All you see around you are three things. 

Is this true?

Some people would instantly say no, of course not! Everyone sees many objects every day: from the ceiling you wake up looking at, to the dog staring out of a window on your way to school, the cookies you have at break, the teacher you see whist walking out of school and finally the pillow you sleep on at night. Indeed, there are an infinite number of things in the world. Others will relate back to chemistry and therefore conclude the answer is protons, neutrons and electrons, the sub-particles that make up the elements which constitute the daily objects we see.

When in a chemistry lesson and the teacher is talking about the structure of atoms in, say, paper we intuitively decide to believe that what they tell us, that it is made of protons, neutrons and electrons, is true even if it blows our mind first time round. But how do we know? It isn’t reliable to just listen to what they say as they may accidentally say the wrong information without realising and no-one correcting, ending that we conceive the wrong knowledge, like atoms are made up of protons, neutrons and argons. Other times, what they’ve said may be correct but the meaning would have been manipulated simply by thinking about how they would express it in their own words to the class, dragging in subjectivity. But even when they read off the textbook, it still wouldn’t be true as the textbook would have been written by someone else and the same problem applies: how do we know that what they have said is reliable? 

So maybe the only way to confirm this fact would be to see the sub-particles yourself. Ok, so here’s a microscope borrowed from the biology department, and we have a piece of paper secured on the stage by the stage clips. We look down and what we probably will see are long fibres. This gives us two conclusions, either paper is not made of the sub-particles, but of these fibres; or that we haven’t looked small enough and that these fibres could be made up of the sub-particles. But here already, our eyes have been manipulated. The lens of the microscope had the chance to manoeuvre our sense perception since the lens are made up of (or at least we are on the way on proving they are of) protons, neutrons and electrons. Say we had a very high resolution microscope and looked through there and saw the structures. Will the greyscale affect this, will it affect the characteristics of them. The proposal of the existence of protons, neutrons and electrons by scientists has a possibility of being a tool that they use to justify their experimental data or to describe the world around us. Even this method has is. Put into the contexts of history, this is similar to reaching and determining a conclusion, then only afterwards going out to specifically search for and refine information to fit this criteria that you have made.

Overall, we cannot know whether protons, neutrons or electrons are a true representation of reality as they can just be an experimental, qualitative measure. But they do, to an extent, provide knowledge for understanding in a simpler context.