Seminar on Reductionism

Reductionism means explaining complicated things in terms of smaller parts. For thousands of years, scientists have used this approach for most research. We considered atoms to be the building blocks of the Universe, then subatomic particles, then quarks + gluons + force-carrying mesons, then possibly strings. At each layer of smaller and smaller structure, it has been more and more expensive to get data and the results are less and less impressive. Geoffrey Chew drew the cartoon in 1970 to make fun of the ultimate reductionist quest. Today we appear to be at the end of an era, so it's time to look elsewhere for physics research topics.