Physical composition

Atomistic metaphysics motivated an explanatory strategy which science has pursued with great success since the scientific revolution. By decomposing matter into its atomic and subatomic parts physics gave us powerful explanations and accurate predictions as well as providing a unifying framework for the rest of science. The success of the decompositional strategy has encouraged a widespread conviction that the physical world forms a compositional hierarchy that physics and other sciences are progressively articulating. But this conviction does not stand up to a closer examination of how physics has treated composition, as a variety of case studies will show.

► Physics does not support the view that the world is a compositional hierarchy. ► Whether light is best thought of as composed of photons or fields depends on context. ► The quest for smaller parts of matter seems to have run its course. ► The subsystem relation does not define a standard part/whole relation. ► Condensed matter physicists creatively use a variety of different compositional relations.