ABSTRACT
The particle physicists were following the arrow of reductionism, attempting to account for the complex nuclei from the bottom up, considering all conceivable kinematical conditions and interactions among their parts. In the search to simplify Nature, to account for small discrepancies from theory in the data, particle physicists have produced a catalog of entities. Particle physicists drew inspiration from their solid-state colleagues, experts at working with effective fields and quasiparticles. A physical world described entirely by effective fields, mathematical spaces, and quasiparticles can only be a quasireality. The history of physics has included a grand, sweeping commitment to the idea of physical reductionism, the philosophy that all the stuff of Nature finds ultimate causal explanation at lower and lower levels of physical scale. The philosophy of physical reductionism insists that whatever is found at the bottom will provide adequate causal explanation for all that lies in the various macroscopic scales of matter.
