What are the constituents of matter?: an essay concerning the ontological side of science

This essay seeks to understand just what it is that modern science tells us about nature. For the longest time the story told by science appeared to be fully reflective of our common experience: nature was discovered as a collection of reciprocally influencing objects governed by laws which were consistent with that experience. And then, about a hundred years ago, the story suddenly became obscure. Science introduced into nature quantum objects which were supposed to look nothing like anything we had ever seen before and the laws governing them no longer appeared to make much sense to us. Thereafter, what science told us about nature was no longer quite as clear. This shift in the story is conspicuous and bespeaks of an earlier moment in the development of science when the project might have inadvertently taken a step which would eventually make her strange. The essay suggests that the scientific community had in fact made a fateful decision which inevitably led it to the strangeness of quantum mechanics and specifically identifies it as the decision to experimentally observe the constituents of matter as if they were real objects. It then proceeds to determine just what those constituents are if not objectively real and to specify the unique manner in which such objects are what they are. This focus on what constituents of matter are, rather than on how they constitute the inside of natural objects, classifies the essay as an investigation of the ontological side of modern science. Finally, the essay considers the alternative ontologies which could have been entertained for these objects at the time the decision was made to experimentally observe them and shows how 'skipping over' such alternatives generated the specific ways in which quantum mechanics, the theory describing the results of such experiments, had to be strange.