On Becoming - The Two Forces at the Heart of the Matter

Almost none of a body's weight comes from the rest-masses of its quarks; roughly ninety-nine percent is the energy of the strong force holding them together. And every heavier atom in a hand was made by transformation in a star, by the weak force, the only one of the four that changes what a thing is. This essay reads those two forces as binding and becoming — that a self cannot be alone and cannot stay the same, and is exactly the standing negotiation of the two. It closes the sequence on the four fundamental forces, and closes it by keeping the seam honest: that most of one's mass is binding energy is measured physics, that this means one is mostly relationship is a reading, and the rhymes are as good as they are partly because the author went looking for exactly this pair. The essay says so, and counts that admission as the only thing it is entitled to claim.