What Is Everything Made Of?

Put your hand flat on a wooden kitchen table.

Now zoom in. Past the grain, into the wood itself: long thin cells packed side by side, each one a hollow tube. Zoom into a cell wall and there are molecules, mostly long chains of sugar. Zoom into a molecule and there are atoms. An atom is a tiny core of protons and neutrons inside a cloud of electrons. And protons and neutrons are made of quarks.

Then you reach the bottom of the textbook: electrons and quarks. Nobody has found a part inside an electron. Nobody has found one inside a quark. The textbook's answer to "what is it made of?" runs out at things with no parts to name.

That's an odd place for the question to stop. What is an electron? Not what it does. What is it?

Here's a way in. Light a candle and watch the flame for a minute. It holds one shape: the same teardrop, the same height, the same steady glow, for as long as the candle lasts. On a good candle that's hours.

Now ask what the flame is made of. Burning wax vapor. And that vapor doesn't stay. It rises, burns and leaves as hot gas out the top, all in a fraction of a second. None of the vapor in the flame now was in it a second ago.

So what is the flame? It isn't the material, because the material is replaced every second. The flame is the shape the material keeps making on its way through. It's a pattern that holds.

The flame is a drawing of what a table is, and what an electron is, and what you are. The rest of this post is about the real thing it draws.

The short answer

Everything is made of events. At the bottom there's no stuff and there are no tiny balls. There's one permanent record, and everything in the world is a pattern of entries in it.

Two reasons carry the weight, and the post gives both. Every measurement and every perception already tells one thing from another, and that takes two things and one yes or no. And physics already agrees that nothing is ever erased, because its basic laws never destroy information.

Here's the whole answer in six steps. The rest of the post takes them one at a time and gives the reason for each.

1. Everything is made of events. An event is one difference registered: one thing told apart from another. Every event is written into one permanent record as one entry, and nothing in it is ever erased.
2. One process writes the record. The smallest event is one thing told apart from another, which takes two things and one yes or no. Two units pass a bit (a single yes-or-no mark) back and forth, and each pass is one entry. A pass is one step in the writing of the record. That's the bottom layer of physics.
3. What lasts is rhythm. The process can start 64 ways. Within three steps, 60 of them fall into coin-flip randomness. Exactly 4 keep an unbroken rhythm forever. All 64 starts have been checked, so the split is exact.
4. A thing is the pattern of entries it keeps writing. Every entry is new, and the pattern is what stays. That's what a flame is, and a table, and a tree, and you: not material that lasts, a pattern that holds.
5. The record has one shape, and nobody picked it. One price for being different. Levels that step by 1.618. Three dimensions. A shortest full pass of eight steps. Each one is what's left when you ask what the record requires.
6. Mass is the price of holding a pattern. A pattern costs something to hold, and that cost is its mass. The last section says exactly where our work stops.

Why this matters: "what is it made of?" sits underneath every other question about the world. If the bottom is stuff, a table is a heap of stuff, and so are you, arranged cleverly. If the bottom is a record of events, a table is a pattern that holds, and so are you, and the record that writes the table writes you too. The material of your body is replaced continually and you remain you, so what you are was never the material. What You Are, Part 1 of the series The Universe Writes in Pen, asked what you are, and the answer was a rhythm in the record. This post asks the same question about everything else, and the answer has the same shape.

That changes what "made of" means and what "the same thing" means. It also explains why your atoms can be swapped out one by one and you stay you.

Here's the route. I'll stop after each step to zoom out, so you always know where we are, what we've got, and why the next step comes next.

Step 1: Everything is made of events

The bottom layer is events: differences, registered and written into one permanent record. Here's the reason, starting with a scratch on your table.

Run a key along the edge of the table. (Don't. Just imagine it.) Now there's a scratch.

That one sentence leans on three plain facts. Every observation does.

1. Things can be told apart. Scratched wood isn't smooth wood.
2. Comparing two things needs information about both. "Scratched" means "different from before." Something has to hold the before while you look at the after. With no before on hand, you don't have a scratch. You have wood.
3. Looking is a new event. You checking the scratch doesn't change the scratch. It adds a new moment after it.

Look at what's missing from that list. None of the three facts mentions stuff. All of them are about differences and about registering them. You're using all three right now: reading this tells one letter from another.

Every registered difference goes into one shared record of every event, and the record is permanent: nothing in it is ever erased. The past still exists: every event that has happened is still in the record, written down.

Physics already agrees on the part it covers. Its basic laws never destroy information about the past. In quantum mechanics that is unitarity: the present fixes the past exactly, and running the laws backward recovers every earlier state. That's why physicists treat the black hole information problem as a real problem: Hawking's 1976 calculation said a black hole destroys the information that falls into it, which clashed with unitarity, and most physicists now expect the information to come back out in the radiation. The open question is how.¹ Textbook quantum mechanics sets measurement aside as an exception. In the record, a measurement is one more entry, and it erases nothing.

Our claim goes further: the record this post describes is reality's own, and it keeps every entry. Every new entry is a comparison, and a comparison needs information about both sides, so every entry is written against what came before. That says what an entry is. What keeps every entry is one thing: the record only grows, and each new entry is added with every earlier entry kept. We prove it: writing a new entry never alters an earlier one.² The Universe Has No Delete Key is a whole post on it.

Here's what matters for this post. The record isn't a description of things. It's what things are made of. When two things bump into each other, the bump is the entry.

Nobody keeps the record from outside. Telling two things apart takes the two things and one yes or no, and that act is the entry. A keeper looking in from outside would add an entry of its own, because looking is an event, and every event goes into the record. So the keeper would be inside the record, not outside it.

So there's no page under the entries, and no ink. The entries are all there is. The scratch on your table isn't a lump of stuff with a difference added to it. It's differences, registered. So is the grain, and so is the knock when you rap on the wood. A scratch from last Tuesday is still in the record.

Zoom out. Step 1 is done. The bottom layer is events, written into one permanent record in which nothing is ever erased. The table, the scratch and the knock are all made of them. Next, and why: something writes that record. If we can watch the thing that does the writing, we can see which patterns it keeps and which it loses.

Step 2: One process writes the record

One simple process, repeated everywhere below the level of atoms, writes the whole record. It is the smallest event that can happen: one thing told apart from another. That takes two things and one yes or no, and every measurement and every perception already does it. The two things are the two units. They sit side by side and pass one bit, the yes or no, back and forth, and each pass is one entry. That's the bottom layer of physics: the step every larger event is built from.

Part 1 watches the process run, step by step. Here's all this post needs from it.

I'll draw the two units as two little clocks joined by a loop of wire. The clocks are a drawing of the real process, and what they do is what the real process does. A clock is full if it holds a token and empty if it doesn't, which is its one yes or no. At every step, each clock passes what it holds to the other, and the record gets an entry for what happened.

Watch the simplest rhythm, the swing. Set both clocks to keep whatever they receive, and put a token in the left clock. On the first step the token hops to the right clock. On the second it hops back. On the third it's right again. The record reads right, left, right, left, for as long as the process runs.

Two things about that page. Every line on it is new. The third step's entry isn't the first step's entry coming around again. It's a fresh entry, written once and kept. And the pattern repeats: right, left, right, left. The entries are all new, and the pattern is what stays.

Keep hold of that. It's the answer to this post's question in miniature, and Step 4 puts it to work.

Zoom out. Step 2 is done. One process writes the record: two units passing a bit, one entry per step. The swing writes new entries every time, in the same pattern. Next, and why: the swing is one way the process can run. It can start 64 ways. Which of them hold a pattern, and which don't?

Step 3: What lasts is rhythm

Of the 64 ways the process can start, exactly 4 keep an unbroken rhythm forever. The other 60 fall into coin-flip randomness within three steps. Here's how the count comes out.

Each clock is full or empty, and has one of four settings, so it has 2 × 4 = 8 ways to be. A setting is two choices: whether the clock keeps or flips what it receives, and which kind of step it's tuned for: one that sends flow round the loop, or one that sends nothing round. That's 2 × 2 = 4 settings. Two clocks make 8 × 8 = 64 ways to start.

Run all 64. A step either sends one unit of flow round the loop or, when both clocks are full or both are empty, sends nothing round. A setting is tuned for one of those two kinds of step, and on the other kind the clock is out of its depth, so it tosses a coin to decide. Once a coin is deciding, the rhythm is gone. The process stutters, goes quiet and starts again, with a coin choosing every step. Counting the starts one by one, 48 have a coin in the loop by the first step, 56 by the second and 60 by the third. A coin erases nothing: every entry already written stays in the record. It ends the rhythm, never the record.

Randomness at the bottom is nothing new to physics. In quantum physics the state evolves exactly, but the answer a measurement records isn't fixed in advance, and Bell tests rule out answers set beforehand and carried along by the particles.³

Four starts never toss a coin: the swing you watched in Step 2, and its cousin the spin, where the token stays put and the flow circles the loop the same way every step. Each comes with the token starting on the left or on the right. Nothing ever puts a coin in their loop, so every move they make is certain, forever.

The process is small enough to run every case, and all 64 starts have been checked, so the split into 60 and 4 is exact.⁴

Look at what the count says about lasting. Most ways of running the process leave no steady pattern at all. A pattern that holds is rare, and when it holds it holds exactly: it never misses a beat. At the bottom level, these four are the only patterns that persist. And look at what the four are made of. Entries, new every step. What lasts in the record isn't stuff. It's rhythm.

Part 1 follows these four rhythms into what you are. This post asks what lasting means for a table.

Zoom out. Step 3 is done. Of 64 ways to start, 60 fall into coin flips within three steps and exactly 4 keep an unbroken rhythm forever. What lasts is rhythm, not stuff. Next, and why: if what lasts is a pattern of new entries, then a thing, anything that lasts, is a pattern. Step 4 says what that does to a table.

Step 4: A thing is its pattern

A thing is the pattern of entries it keeps writing, and nothing else.

Here's the reason. Ask what else a thing has. Suppose your table had a secret ingredient, something that took part in no event at all. It never changed how light bounced off the table, how the wood felt under a hand, or what a scale read, and nothing ever recorded it. An ingredient like that would make no difference to anything, anywhere. It wouldn't be part of the table. It wouldn't be a property of anything. So a thing has nothing beyond what it writes, and its pattern of entries is all of it.

Physics has dropped hidden ingredients for this reason before. The ether, the medium nineteenth-century physicists thought carried light, was dropped because no experiment ever registered it and the physics worked without it.⁵

That's the candle flame again. The flame's material is new every second, and the flame stays the flame, because the flame was never the material. It's the shape the material keeps making. In the record every entry is new, and a thing is the rhythm they keep.

Now run it down your table, one zoom at a time. The table is a pattern of cells. The cells are a pattern of molecules, the molecules a pattern of atoms, and the atoms a pattern of electrons and quarks. And an electron or a quark, the bottom of the textbook, is a pattern of entries in the record.

Under the entries there's nothing else: no smaller bits, no stuff for the pattern to be made of. The entries are the bottom.

That's the surprise at the end of the zoom. The bottom isn't a smaller kind of stuff. It isn't stuff at all. It's things happening, written down.

A flame holds its pattern for hours and a table for decades. That's a difference of degree, not of kind. Both are patterns that hold. The material of your body is replaced continually: much of it turns over within months to years, and you remain you. What remains is a pattern, not material. A tree takes in air and water, drops its leaves, grows new ones and stays that tree. Same answer every time: the material was never the thing. The pattern is.

If everything is a pattern, is anything real? A flame is a pattern, and it still burns your finger. A pattern isn't a lesser thing than stuff. It's the thing. What goes away is only the idea that something solid sits underneath it.

Zoom out. Step 4 is done. A thing is the pattern of entries it keeps writing. A flame, a table, a tree and you are patterns that hold, and so is the electron at the bottom of the textbook. Next, and why: patterns hold inside a record, and the record has a shape nobody picked. Once we have it, we can put a price on holding a pattern.

Step 5: The record has one shape

The record isn't arbitrary. It has one shape, and nobody picked it: one price for being different, levels that step by 1.618, three dimensions, and a shortest full pass of eight steps. Each result has the same form: say what the record requires, and exactly one possibility is left. Each has its own post with the conditions spelled out, and here's the short version of all four.

One price for being different. When two things differ by a ratio x (one is x times the other), the price of the difference is

J(x) = (x + 1/x) / 2 - 1

J measures imbalance, not a payment to anyone: it's zero only when the two things match, and it grows the further apart they are. Try x = 2, one thing twice the other: (2 + 1/2) / 2 - 1 = 1/4. Equal things, x = 1, cost nothing. Swap the two and the price doesn't change: x = 1/2 costs 1/4 as well.

Here's what pins the formula. Ask for a price with five properties: no jumps, the same either way around, zero at a perfect match, one rule for combining prices, and one calibration. The rule says the prices of xy and x/y together are fixed by the prices of x and y alone: J(xy) + J(x/y) = 2J(x) + 2J(y) + 2J(x)J(y). Check it at x = y = 2: J(4) = (4 + 1/4) / 2 - 1 = 9/8 and J(1) = 0, so the left side is 9/8, and the right side is 1/2 + 1/2 + 1/8 = 9/8. The calibration sets how sharply the price rises near a match. Exactly one function has all five. In fact, two of the five are already enough to pin it: the rule for combining prices, plus the calibration, leaves exactly one price.⁶ A price like (ln x)² is zero at a match, the same either way around and free of jumps, but it fails the rule, so it's out. Step 3 of Is Your Coffee Mug Conscious? has the full price list.

Levels that step by 1.618. The record is built in levels. Ask that every level be the one beneath it times the same number r, and that the first new level join the two levels below it. With levels 1, r and r × r, the third is the first two joined, so r × r = r + 1, and exactly one positive number works: 1.618..., the golden ratio.⁷ Why the golden ratio keeps showing up works it through with a ladder and some addition.

Three dimensions. A mark is an entry that has to hold, and its reader is whatever reads it back. For the mark to hold, the pair needs a connection no smooth motion can undo, and linking is that connection: a mark and its reader are two loops hooked through each other, like two links of a chain, and neither can be pulled free without cutting one. Two loops can hook in exactly three dimensions. In two they can't wind around each other at all, and in four or more any two loops slide apart. So space has three dimensions.⁸ Why space has three dimensions has the whole argument.

A shortest full pass of eight steps. Give each of the three directions one yes-or-no and you get 2 × 2 × 2 = 8 combinations, the eight corners of a cube. A cycle that changes one yes-or-no per step needs at least 8 steps to touch every corner and come home, and 8 is enough.⁹ The same three directions also set the eight in chemistry's octet rule. In quantum mechanics an outer shell has one round orbital and one orbital along each of the three directions, and an orbital holds two electrons: 2 × (3 + 1) = 8. That's why chemistry runs on eight.

Zoom out. Step 5 is done. The record has a shape nobody picked: one price list J, levels that step by 1.618, three dimensions, and a shortest full pass of eight steps. Next, and why: the price list is the one that prices holding a pattern, and holding a pattern is what mass is.

Step 6: Mass is the price of holding a pattern

Holding a pattern costs something, and that cost is the pattern's mass.

In ordinary physics a particle's mass is the energy it holds at rest, in different units: that's what E = mc² says. Here that energy is the price of holding the pattern. Mass isn't a number stamped on a particle. It's what the pattern costs to keep.

The price list from Step 5 does the pricing, the same J that prices every difference. There isn't a second price list for particles. A pattern is held at some ratio x against its reference level, the base it's measured from, and holding it is a comparison with ratio x, so it has the one price J. If it holds balance, x = 1, it costs nothing. If it holds any other ratio, it costs a fixed unit times J(x). That shape is forced: measured in a fixed unit, a price that follows the combining rule and the calibration from Step 5 is exactly J, so a pattern's price is that unit times J(x) and can take no other form. A pattern's mass is then fixed by two numbers: the ratio it's held at and the size of the unit.

Worked out: ratio 2 costs 1/4 of a unit. Ratio 4 costs (4 + 1/4) / 2 - 1 = 9/8 of a unit. Ratio 1/4 costs the same 9/8, because J(x) = J(1/x). The further a pattern is held from balance, the more it costs. These ratios are examples. None of them is a particle's.

Zoom out. Step 6 is done. A pattern that holds has a price, one unit times J of the ratio it's held at, and that price is its mass. Next, and why: one piece of the picture isn't finished yet, and you should know exactly which.

Where this stops

One question is left, and it's the obvious one: which pattern is the electron?

Here's the edge, plainly. We haven't yet worked out which patterns are the electron, the quarks and the rest, what ratio each one is held at, or how big one unit of price is. Until we do, we can't say what any of them weighs. None of the fourteen particle numbers we're working toward is derived yet: twelve masses (the electron, muon and tau, the six quarks, and the W, Z and Higgs) and two mass ratios (the ratio of the neutrino mass splittings, and the proton-to-electron ratio). The masses page shows where each one stands.

What's in place is the kind of thing an electron is, and what its mass means: a pattern that holds, and the price of holding it. What's missing is the lookup: which pattern, at which price. The four rhythms from Step 3 show what lasting looks like, and nothing yet matches any of them to a particle.

The whole trip, in one breath

Everything is made of events: differences, registered and written into one permanent record that never erases anything. One tiny process writes it, two units passing a bit, one entry per pass. Of the 64 ways that process can start, 60 fall into coin flips within three steps and exactly 4 keep an unbroken rhythm forever, so what lasts in the record is rhythm, not stuff. A thing is the pattern of entries it keeps writing, which is why a flame stays a flame while all its material changes, and why you stay you. The record has a shape nobody picked: one price for being different, levels that step by 1.618, three dimensions, a shortest full pass of eight steps. Mass is the price of holding a pattern. Which pattern is the electron is where our work stops.

Next time you put your hand flat on a table, here's what you're touching: a rhythm that holds, written one new entry at a time. Everything you've ever touched is one.

And if a table is entries, what about the entries in a coffee mug? Are they felt? That's Is Your Coffee Mug Conscious?