Building blocks
It took me a while to understand the importance of building blocks. During the life, most People will likely seldom meet People who talk about building blocks. 99.9% of the conversations People are having are not about the building blocks.
As i ventured into different topics along my life and worked really hard to get a vision of these topics i was working on i started to analyze the structure of topics. I then created frameworks for multiple topics. It’s a bit like if you were to look at a building and you ripe the building off its layers. You start with external walls then the steel structure, the pipes, electric cables, the content of materials, … At the end you end up with a lots of elements. But what matter? Which element(s) matters from the fundamental viewpoint of constructing buildings? Not all actually. It’s where i got interested in the building blocks of a field. If we were to master the construction of buildings what are the fundamental things that we need to understand? Is it the color of electric cables? Unlikely. Is it how molecules inside building materials behave? Maybe.
Take this pyramid above for instance. It is a phenomenal achievement. What knowledge about building blocks is required to build such buildings?
Knowing what are the building blocks of a field help you to master this field. Why? Because if you understand the building blocks then you can create, build, assemble anything from there. The researchers working on synthetic life for instance had to understand the building blocks of their field, organic life, to be able to create synthetic life.
Common mistakes
Identifying the building blocks can be an extremely difficult task depending on the field. Sometimes, you need to research in the extremely small world (electrons for instance) or in the extremely far away (space telescope for instance). And so, your research depends on tools available, be it computer processing power or magnification of glass. It’s no surprise that historically researchers thought they identified the building blocks of a field when a few decades later other scientists, using more advanced tools, realize that previous findings were not building blocks. There was a smaller level than the nucleus for instance, it’s the protons and the neutrons.
It also happens that the reasoning it biased.
Microscopic level
Building blocks seem to be found in the microscopic world. In this regard i would like to point you to chapter 15 of Arthur C. Aho’s book Tomorrow’s energy … need not be fuel. Here is the book.