Originally Posted by
Phil_gretz
Of course, you can't know that. And I really like your posts (99.9995% of the time). Of course, I estimated that figure, because I haven't seen enough of your posts to calculate.
EDIT: I expected the OP to have been asking about Di2 or some electronic gizmo.
Again, yes we can. “Matter” is the material substance of the observable universe. Another way of describing it is that it is a substance which has mass and volume. Everywhere you look, there is matter and all of it is composed of the elements of the periodic table. If you know of some material that
isn’t on the periodic table, please present evidence of it and how it fits in the current table. There may be some elements off the end of that table but they are going to be rare enough to ignore. They are likely too unstable
to exist outside of a very brief period of time.
Even subatomic particles are part of the periodic table since protons, neutrons, and electrons are taken into account. Protons are the atomic number, neutrons (along with protons) are responsible for the atomic weight, and electrons (equals to protons) are responsible for the atom’s interaction with other atoms.
But, outside of a few ephemeral heavy elements, all matter in the Universe is contained within that table. All kinds of combinations of those elements can result in some very strange bits of matter but that doesn’t invalidate the elements in the periodic table. The weird bits are still made of the known bits.