Let's say the tiniest, most elementary types of particles were discovered. Inside, they would be solid matter. What exactly would prevent us from cutting off a piece from the particle?

edit: more accurately, why couldn't these particles be broken down again and again indefinitely provided we had the means to do it.

I think the uncertainty relation wood be good enough to prevent this.

Matter is undefined

_________________
Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Hi RB, I read this somewhere and I like it: mass is the property that prevents something from traveling at the speed of light.
Perhaps related to your reply.A few questions arise:

• What do you mean by "the most elementary" ?
• What do you mean by "the tiniest" — do you mean the Plank length ?
• What do you mean by "solid matter" ? (Related to RB's reply.)
• What do you mean by "inside" ?
• What do you mean by "cutting off" ?

( One possible area of confusion, I'm guessing from your wording,
such as "inside," is you are using "macro," normal human-scale
objects and dimensions to talk about something that is
much, much, much, much smaller where these "macro" ideas break down.
For example, "inside" and "outside", both macro concepts,
take on entirely different meanings once we reach certain scales. )

To answer the question of your thread title,
I'm guessing yes. I'm guessing we have at least a few physicists here.
And many people are "good at science" but who are not physicists.

What I'm asking is why matter can not be shattered indefinitely.

This is actually a two-part question:
(a) matter cannot be "shattered" indefinitely.
(b) why is (a) true ?

First, do we know if (a) is true or false ?
Then, we can ask the why.

What tool would you use to cut off a piece? Normally that would have to be finer than the thing you want to cut.
Perhaps you can shoot some other particles on it and see what happens. But as we wouldn't know the behavior it's really hard to speculate about that or if that would work at all

Hi TeaNCoffee, this has some relevance to your question:

Plank length

Related question: why do you ask ? Is it for your personal curiosity ?
To start an interesting thread ? To help with some homework assignment ?

The way I understand it, everything is made up of particles and at some point, if you break those particles down into smaller particles you reach a limit where no smaller particles exist. Am I wrong?

Possibly.

"Particles" is one possible area of confusion.
"Everything is made up of particles" — this is potentially a huge are of confusion.

If you take a look at the above link on Plank length,
my understanding is that our current theory says that
we simply cannot measure distances smaller than Plank length.
More knowledgeable physicists please correct me.

Yup, it is related to my answer. You can't really say "a particle is matter, and thus unbreakable" since, after all, all particles are just forms of energy with specific properties (the particle-wave duality.) Eventually you'll get to something small enough that can't be broken any further, because (at least with current theories) there is no real continuum of energy levels/mass levels, i.e. you jump from 1 to 2 without passing for 1.5 (more or less.) Supposedly Planck length & energy are the first "quantum" of energy/length available

In the current (standard model) knowledge of particles, there's been some minor interest in components of quarks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preon) but since no experimental/theoretical advance have shown it, it was dumped

_________________
Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

I can't wrap my head around this, that's why.

I'm no physicist and so cannot really comment on the above discussion. But I will say one thing.

All comments are based on current knowledge. So are any conclusions we can draw. But we have no idea what future knowledge will reveal. Everyone though that Newtonian physics was the answer - until relativity came along. Everyone thought that relativity was the answer - until quantum physics came along. Everyone thought that quantum physics was the answer - until what?

_________________
Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

There is a quote, frequently attributed to Richard Feynman (although a quick
search will reveal there may be uncertainties about the attribution),
which goes something like "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand it."

According to quantum mechanics, reality is discrete rather than continuous. That is to say, energy comes in small chunks (quanta) that can be combined but not further divided. For example, a single photon of light is a quantum. As matter is nothing but condensed energy (a photon can be interpreted as a wave or a particle depending on the nature of the interaction with an observer), this leads to particles of some minimum mass--apparently, electrons are minimal and perhaps other fundamental entities, known as quarks, are combined in fixed ways to form protons and neutrons. The non-fundamental particles, such as protons, can be broken apart by bludgeoning them with other particles moving at high velocities, however, the resulting observed pieces are never quarks but more composite particles (lighter or heavier than the original depending on the interaction). If you ask why the universe seems to be discrete rather than continuous, no one knows.

I'm sorry but my understanding is anybody who knew anything knew we don't know jack.

My understanding is it's almost universally acknowledged by physicists that
our current model, the so-called Standard Model, is vastly incomplete.

Hi TeaNcoffee, YouTube has some wonderful, fun, resources:

MinutePhysics -- Theory of Everything, Part 3

SixtySymbols -- Plank length

SixtySymbols channel

Indeed!

We may not rule out yet that, in fact, it's turtles all the way down

_________________
Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

No one has ever understood infinity, or infinitely dividing something. The hand waving that went on to justify Newton/Leibniz use of infinity (fluxions/infinitesimals to avoid explicitly infinite division) for the calculus was the impetus to develop the rigorous notion of limits by Bolzano/Cauchy/Weierstrass.

Among the non-technical introductions, you might enjoy reading N. Ya. Vilenkin, in search of infinity. (Yeah, I don't know why the title on my copy is not capitalized.) Also, for an interesting extension of Shannon's ideas on information theory (a subject that may eventually subsume everything--please, I'm exaggerating here!), I can recommend Gregory Chaitin, The Limits of Mathematics, as an introduction to algorithmic information theory.

One last thought. Any model of reality is just that, a model. It is never True, but it may be useful. The Standard Model of physics is quite useful, as is Newton's model, sometimes. There are conditions for which the Standard Model is not currently useful, and these anomalous cases are what lead to modifications to existing models (e.g., addition of cosmological constants, or "fudge factors") or to entirely new models.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$W Turtle ponnuki
$$ . . . . . . . . . . .
$$ . . . . . . . . . . .
$$ . . . . O . . . . . .
$$ . . O . O . O . . . .
$$ . . . O . O . . . . .
$$ . . . O . O . . . . .
$$ . . O . O . O . . . .
$$ . . . . O . . . . . .
$$ . . . . . . . . . . .[/go]