ABSTRACT
Much of the remainder of this book will concern itself with those aspects of theoretical physics which seek to understand the nature of matter. Such understanding as we have has mainly been achieved by probing the structure of successively smaller constituents and, at least on the face of things, the regions of space and time we need to consider are far too small for spacetime curvature to be of any significance. Many of our considerations will therefore be restricted to Minkowski or, as in the present chapter, Galilean spacetime. Paradoxically, however, it seems that gravity and the structure of space and time may have a vital role to play in our understanding of matter on the very smallest scales, and we shall see something of the ways in which this comes about in later chapters.
