There was a time in the history of modern science when atom was assumed to be the subtlest unit of matter

- the basic, smallest fragment of the material world, and the nineteenth and early twentieth century physicists searched for tiny, isolable building blocks with mass, which comprise all material things. They were in for a big surprise when they discovered that atom was divisible into subatomic particles and that these subatomic particles were not material bits of mass but energy with electrical charges. As a further surprise, these particles were discovered to have a wave-like aspect, sometimes appearing only as waves and not as particles at all. Particle physics, since then, has discovered hundreds of subatomic particles which are short-lived and swiftly decay into other particles, and it has been found that any type of subatomic particle can be transformed into any other type. Thus the word particletakes on a new meaning. It is no longer a distinct, indestructible unit with a constant identity but a dynamic pattern with a certain amount of energy that can be modified into other particles. These extremely dynamic packets of energy form relatively stable atomic and molecular structures which look like substance built up into things. But at the subatomic level there is nothing substantial. Thus Physics has shown us that the reality behind the physical world is a ceaseless flow of energy and our senses show as only a dream-like imagery resting on a quite different foundation. What is this foundation or the substratum behind the physical world? Physics has probed further and come out with the revelation that there exists a non-material constant behind the transient physical world, which is called as Field. This Field Theory arose in Physics to explain action at a distance. Thus particles are but fleeting conditions in the abiding field, concentrations of energy, which arise from the field and dissolve back. In other words, the field generates matter, brings it into being from itself, and draws it back into nothing. According to Fritjof Capra, the field (or the void) is not a state of mere nothingness but contains the potentiality for all forms of the particle world. In this context of field theory, the colourful, varied world we perceive, which seems so real, solid and immediate, becomes a passing manifestation of an underlying non-material continuum, the field. The seemingly solid, separate things we experience through our senses or not solid or separate at base but emerge from the same unitary background, which is the primary reality. Has not the same Truth been enshrined in the Advait (non-dual) philosophy of Vedanta? Vedanta has established that the world of sense-experience is merely an appearance and arises from an underlying and unchanging substratum known as Brahman. Swami Vivekananda has rightly observed that some of the conclusions of modern science sound like echoes of Vedanta. Another truth which is brought out by the Field Theory of Physics is that the primary truth is much vaster than the world of our experience. This truth finds a mention in the Gita (10:42) when Lord Krishna declares: I exist, and support the whole world by a part of Myself.