The Macroscopic World

When glancing out at the world, there is not any sort of epistemological hint of bacterial life, chemical structures and their covalent or ionic bonds, atoms, including ions and isotopes, or subatomic particles like electrons and quarks.  You could never tell from basic sensory experiences that quarks seem to comprise protons and neutrons, or that many natural surfaces, such as the human body, teem with microbes.  The macroscopic world is all that we can perceive unaided as far as the external world is concerned.  We can look up to the sky and see distant celestial bodies like the moon and stars, and we can see all sorts of creatures and environments around us, yet only microscope technology allows people to see certain things invisible to the mere eye, and even then, there are supposed to be particles smaller than this.

Upon watching a stick burn, one can observe the macroscopic physical transformation of the wood to ashes, but one cannot see the chemical transformation at a molecular level, only the consequential macroscopic events that correspond to them.  One can see a topical abrasion on one's skin and notice that it and the surrounding area have become red.  Still, one cannot naturally see the bacteria on one's skin that can enter the internal body through a cut and bring about infection.  A smartphone screen or light switch is visible macroscopically, not the virus that might be resting on it.  It is not that nothing smaller than what can be ordinarily seen cannot ever be perceived when microscope technology is utilized; it is that there are additional epistemological uncertainties with this over regular sensory experience (for not even seeing something as large as oneself proves it exists physically beyond the conscious mind).

Limitations of observational technology, along with the already present limitations of the senses, mean that even on the level of unverifiable perceptions, it is up in the air as to whether a specific evidentially-fortified or strictly hypothetical particle (not that being evidentially supported is the same as being logically proven) is at the end of the chain.  Perhaps an otherwise fundamental particle could be artificially divided, making something even smaller though it is not naturally occuring.  Even so, one could never know if something like the electron is truly fundamental or if there is an even smaller unit.  Democritus proposed atoms themselves as indivisible, fundamental (in the sense of contemporary physics) units of matter.  However, aside from the seeming existence of subatomic particles like electrons, protons, and neutrons, it is splitting an atom that releases the energy for the atomic bomb or subsequent nuclear weaponry--the division of the nucleus being referred to as nuclear fission.

Unlike the atomic nucleus, the macroscopic world is before our eyes.  While it alone cannot provide any sort of direct evidence for cells, atoms, quantum energy, and so on, what we do experience is consistent with the notion of many microscopic or smaller phenomena, and technological advancements on the visible level can provide more and more fallible evidences of certain structures and events at smaller scales of matter.  What is macroscopic would be ultimately comprised on current paradigms of units too small to see left to ourselves, and this is taken for granted by non-rationalists who either assume the likes of subatomic particles exist and do not contemplate the nature and ramifications of them or who, maybe more prone to thought on the subject but still slaves to assumptions, sincerely take the hearsay claims of scientists on faith, the only basis for epistemological belief in matter smaller than the senses can see with or without technological assistance.