Tonight, I'd like to tell you about one of the big questions in science.

What are we made of?

What are the fundamental building blocks of nature that you and me

and everything else in the universe are constructed of?

So we have three particles of which everything we know is made.

And it's worth stressing it. That's kind of a astonishment.

You know, we sort of take it for granted.

We learn this in school. We don't really think about it deeply.

Everything we see in the world, all the diversity in the natural world, you, me, everything around us.

Just the same three particles with slightly different rearrangements repeated over and over and over again.

It's a very nice picture. It's a very comforting picture.

It's a picture we teach kids at school.

It's the picture we even teach our students in undergraduate university.

And there's a problem with it.

It's a lie. It's a lie. It's a lie.

So there is spread everywhere throughout this room, something that we call the electron field.

It's like a fluid that fills this room and in fact fills the entire universe.

And the ripples of this electron fluid, the ripples of the waves of this fluid,

get tied into little bundles of energy by the rules of quantum mechanics

and those bundles of energy are what we call the particle, the electron.

All the electrons that are in your body are not fundamental.

All the electrons that exist in your body are waves of the same underlying feet.

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