From atoms to Higgs bosons: voyages in quasi space-time

For millennia, natural philosophers and scientists have been actively engaged in the reductionist quest to specify the fundamental building blocks of matter and discern the dynamics of physical reality.

During the last hundred years, physicists have intensified this search, probing the deep interior of atoms, nuclei, and the entities of which these are composed.

Their progress in this endeavor was highlighted by the announced discovery of the Higgs boson, a watershed moment for particle physics.

All of this, however, has come at a cost: an increasingly abstract, inherently mathematical description of nature at its most basic level.

This text is an assessment of this cost and critiques the modern orthodoxy that the ever-evolving models of particle physics are leading us towards a truer understanding of the real world.