The pursuit of individual components is fraught with peril in physics. It's an endless turtles-all-the-way-down problem with no real termination. I must be able to decompose any component into constituent components and, of course, each of those components must be decomposable as well. This is an interesting pastime but not always helpful.
A different approach might be the black-box definition of a component. A black-box component has the following attributes…
- It has a boundary.
- It has a state that is detectable by adjacent components.
- It's state may be modified by changes in the state of adjacent components.
- It has zero or more additional attributes where an attribute is an expression of state.
By this definition the internal workings and structure of a component are arbitrarily complex, ranging from a unitary particle to complex systems. The internal workings and structure of a component may also be considered to be irrelevant for certain explorations. It's a non-recursive description.
Questions to Ponder
• Is the universe a component? If not, why not?
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