According to quantum physics, everything that exists is made of particles. Matter, light, things seen and unseen. These are all particles, and they govern how the entire universe works. Some of them are common and familiar to most of us, like electrons. Others are a little more unusual, like quarks. But the basic idea of any particle is that it is an elementary thing made of nothing else. You can break an atom down into protons, neutrons, and electrons. But you can’t break a particle down into anything else. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the most amazing things science has discovered, or at least thinks it has discovered.
10. God Particle
When scientists call something the God particle, they actually think it's something bigger than just big. To be fair, the particle's proper name is the Higgs boson, but physicist Leon Lederman came up with a more colorful moniker because it's hard to get the media to care about particles.
The existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed back in 2013. However, it was theorized back in the 1960s, so the hunt for it has been going on for a long time. Stephen Hawking once bet $100 that it would never be discovered, and got burned. He has also gone on record as saying that the Higgs boson will one day destroy the universe, so mark that on your calendars.
With all this buildup, you might imagine that the Higgs boson is pretty amazing, and the truth is, yes, the Higgs boson is amazing. It does take a little time to understand, though, so let's give it a try.
A boson is a fundamental particle. Bosons are responsible for all the fundamental forces of the universe, things like electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force.
The Higgs field is an energy field that gives mass to other particles, such as electrons. Simply put, Higgs bosons are partly responsible for creating the mass of particles in the universe. The boson itself has a large mass, but is short-lived, making it difficult to find in nature. But its existence confirms much of what we know about the Standard Model of physics and helps explain why any particle exists at all. It may also help explain dark matter and reveal even more particles that we don’t know or understand.
Funny thing is, Lederman didn't technically call it the God particle. He called it the damn particle because he was frustrated with how hard it was to detect. His publisher changed the name.
9. Tetraquark
Quarks are most easily understood as the smallest bits of matter. A lump of iron is made up of iron atoms. Those atoms are made up of things like electrons and protons. But if you took those apart, you'd still be left with quarks. They have mass and spin, and they come in six types, funnily called "flavors." These flavors are grouped into pairs called up and down, up and down, charm and strange. Weird, huh? Well, it gets weirder.
In 2021, scientists discovered a tetraquark, an exotic hadron made up of two quarks and two antiquarks. Before its discovery, it was thought to be impossible. The idea that particles could ever bind to each other was not considered an option, but data from the Large Hadron Collider proved otherwise.
The discovery of the tetraquark will give researchers several new tools to better understand the strong force that binds quarks together to form neutrons and protons.
8. Neutrino
If you've watched any science fiction in the last few decades, you've heard the word "neutrino" mentioned more than a few times. It's popular, and even if the science is lost on most of us, it still sounds interesting.
In real life, neutrinos have a much more intense existence than most of us can imagine. They are subatomic particles born from galactic cataclysms, like exploding stars. They travel at nearly the speed of light, and good luck stopping one, because they can pass through something like lead as easily as you can walk through an open door.
Neutrinos have surprisingly small masses. The numbers used to describe them mean nothing unless you already have a solid foundation in physics. However, they are about 500,000 times smaller than an electron. But unlike an electron, they also have no electrical charge. So, with no mass and no charge, neutrinos barely exist at all. But they are also everywhere. The sun bombards you with about a billion of them every second.
The fact that neutrinos have some mass, although it may be microscopic, could explain all the mass in the universe and why there is matter all around us rather than antimatter.
7. Muons
Like quarks, muons are one of the fundamental particles of existence. They are similar to electrons, but larger and weigh 207 times more. They are extremely short-lived, decaying into electrons and neutrinos within 2.2 microseconds of being formed. They are created when cosmic rays collide with particles in our atmosphere, and in those 2.2 microseconds they manage to bombard the earth and penetrate about a mile beneath the surface, thanks to the fact that they are moving at nearly the speed of light.
Research at the Large Hadron Collider has shown that muons don't always do what science says they should. In plain English, they wobble. They shouldn't. And the fact that they wobble suggests that there may be another particle out there that no one thought was there that affects how they function.
6. Quarks
We've already mentioned the tetraquark, so it makes sense to break it down into a simple quark. If you break things like protons and neutrons down, you get quarks and gluons. There are six types of quarks, and they always come in pairs. In fact, scientists have tried to separate one quark from its other half before, and it just doesn't work. They're either bound together, or they're not there at all.
The way quarks and gluons interact is the source of mass in atoms. This basically means that all the mass of matter as we understand it comes from quarks and gluons. Unlike most particles, which are described as having a positive, negative, or neutral charge, quarks go further. They are also described as having a color charge, which is related to something called quantum chromodynamics. This uses the theoretical colors of red, blue, or green (they are not actually these colors) to describe their unique quantum properties.
5. Gravitons
Science recognizes four fundamental forces at work in the universe. The weak and strong nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity. We can more or less deal with the first three most of the time. Gravity, however, is a bit of a wild card.
We understand how photons interact with electromagnetism, how quarks and gluons interact with the strong nuclear force, and how bosons interact with the weak nuclear force. What we don’t know is what mediates gravity. That’s where gravitons come in, theoretical particles that allow gravity to be a force acting on things in the real world. The problem with gravitons is that we don’t actually know if they exist. They’re theoretical. Science can’t explain gravity.
Surprisingly, although we don't know for sure that gravitons exist, we do know a lot about them. We know that they have zero or close to zero mass, and they travel at the speed of light. So why can't we find them?
Gravity is the weakest of the four forces, making it difficult to detect. It has been calculated that a Jupiter-mass gravity detector placed near a supermassive object such as a neutron star would still have trouble detecting anything.
4. Tachyons
Thank you Star Trek for popularizing tachyons, at least in some circles. These theoretical particles would likely remain obscure and unknown if science fiction hadn't seized on them due to their downright bizarre nature. Just remember that they technically don't exist, but some physicists think they do.
The tachyons' biggest claim to fame is their speed. They travel faster than light. This alone is the reason many believe that the tachyon cannot exist, because nothing travels faster than light. But theoretical physics is willing to give way to anything if there is evidence, so why not?
If a tachyon moves faster than light, then based on what we know about time, a tachyon can move backwards in time. We usually assume that nothing can move faster than light, because its mass would increase, as would the energy required to move it. At the speed of light, you would basically be stuck. But tachyons speed up as they lose energy, which means they can break through that barrier. This also creates all those time paradoxes we know from the movies. And that's a good reason why they might not exist at all.
Of course, if they exist but are moving faster than the speed of light, it is not surprising that we have yet to detect them, and in fact, we may never detect them for this very reason.
3. Dark matter
You've probably heard the term "dark matter" before, but if you're not sure what that means, welcome to the club. Science has a hard time with it, too, but it answers a lot of questions about how the universe works, so it's kind of a placeholder for explaining a lot of cosmic phenomena right now.
The way galaxies move doesn't make sense based on our observations. Galaxies move as if they were much more massive than they appear. There must be a secret source of mass holding any given galaxy together, and that source is dark matter.
Dark matter does not reflect, absorb or emit electromagnetism, which is where it gets its name. It is essentially invisible, so it is just theoretical. But what it does do is emit gravity, and that is what holds the universe together. And there is a lot of it. About 80% of the entire mass of the universe, in fact.
2. Particles
Sparticle is a great word that brings to mind Spartacus and particles, but only half of it is true. The "s" actually stands for "supersymmetric." For example, particles are supersymmetric particles, and their existence could unlock the mysteries of physics, like a coconut.
As useful as the standard model of particle physics is, as we've seen, it has a lot of holes. What is dark matter? How does gravity work? What makes muons oscillate? There are questions about where the mass comes from and all that jazz. There are enough questions that might call into question the value of the standard model or the need for an entirely new model. Unless, of course, you can squeeze in some matches.
Many of the problems we face in particle physics can be explained by a theory called supersymmetry. According to this, every particle should have a supersymmetric partner. In theory, these partner particles can fill in all sorts of gaps in our understanding of the universe. They even built the Large Hadron Collider just to find these things. And it didn’t work. This doesn’t necessarily mean the theory is wrong, it just means that physics is hard, and understanding the fundamentals of reality takes time.
1. Photons
Ah, the humble photon. Everyone knows photons. Photons make up light as we understand it, tiny bits of electromagnetic energy that allow light to function as both a particle and a wave. Of course, photons are more than just the light from your phone screen that hits your eyes so you can see it. They’re also the Wi-Fi that gives you access to the internet, not to mention radio waves, microwaves, x-rays, gamma rays, and more.
Everything we see happens because there are photons that allow us to see it. This means that when we look out into the universe and see a star that exploded a billion years ago, those photons have traveled that long to get here, making them serious workhorses of the particle world.
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