section_path: Historical and philosophical study/19th and 20th centuries
section_name: 19th and 20th centuries
paragraph_text: 19th and 20th centuries
  
  Since Priestley's time, there has been a massive expansion in knowledge of the constituents of the material world (viz., molecules, atoms, subatomic particles). In the 19th century, following the development of the periodic table, and of atomic theory, atoms were seen as being the fundamental constituents of matter; atoms formed molecules and compounds.
  
  The common definition in terms of occupying space and having mass is in contrast with most physical and chemical definitions of matter, which rely instead upon its structure and upon attributes not necessarily related to volume and mass. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the knowledge of matter began a rapid evolution.
  
  Aspects of the Newtonian view still held sway. James Clerk Maxwell discussed matter in his work Matter and Motion. He carefully separates "matter" from space and time, and defines it in terms of the object referred to in Newton's first law of motion.
  
  However, the Newtonian picture was not the whole story. In the 19th century, the term "matter" was actively discussed by a host of scientists and philosophers, and a brief outline can be found in Levere. A textbook discussion from 1870 suggests matter is what is made up of atoms:
  
  Three divisions of matter are recognized in science: masses, molecules and atoms. A Mass of matter is any portion of matter appreciable by the senses. A Molecule is the smallest particle of matter into which a body can be divided without losing its identity. An Atom is a still smaller particle produced by division of a molecule.
  
  Rather than simply having the attributes of mass and occupying space, matter was held to have chemical and electrical properties. In 1909 the famous physicist J. J. Thomson (1856–1940) wrote about the "constitution of matter" and was concerned with the possible connection between matter and electrical charge.
  
  In the late 19th century with the discovery of the electron, and in the early 20th century, with the Geiger–Marsden experiment discovery of the atomic nucleus, and the birth of particle physics, matter was seen as made up of electrons, protons and neutrons interacting to form atoms. There then developed an entire literature concerning the "structure of matter", ranging from the "electrical structure" in the early 20th century, to the more recent "quark structure of matter", introduced as early as 1992 by Jacob with the remark: "Understanding the quark structure of matter has been one of the most important advances in contemporary physics." In this connection, physicists speak of matter fields, and speak of particles as "quantum excitations of a mode of the matter field". And here is a quote from de Sabbata and Gasperini: "With the word "matter" we denote, in this context, the sources of the interactions, that is spinor fields (like quarks and leptons), which are believed to be the fundamental components of matter, or scalar fields, like the Higgs particles, which are used to introduced mass in a gauge theory (and that, however, could be composed of more fundamental fermion fields)."
  
  Protons and neutrons however are not indivisible: they can be divided into quarks. And electrons are part of a particle family called leptons. Both quarks and leptons are elementary particles, and were in 2004 seen by authors of an undergraduate text as being the fundamental constituents of matter.
  
  These quarks and leptons interact through four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, weak interactions, and strong interactions. The Standard Model of particle physics is currently the best explanation for all of physics, but despite decades of efforts, gravity cannot yet be accounted for at the quantum level; it is only described by classical physics (see quantum gravity and graviton) to the frustration of theoreticians like Stephen Hawking. Interactions between quarks and leptons are the result of an exchange of force-carrying particles such as photons between quarks and leptons. The force-carrying particles are not themselves building blocks. As one consequence, mass and energy (which to our present knowledge cannot be created or destroyed) cannot always be related to matter (which can be created out of non-matter particles such as photons, or even out of pure energy, such as kinetic energy). Force mediators are usually not considered matter: the mediators of the electric force (photons) possess energy (see Planck relation) and the mediators of the weak force (W and Z bosons) have mass, but neither are considered matter either. However, while these quanta are not considered matter, they do contribute to the total mass of atoms, subatomic particles, and all systems that contain them.