The historic Greeks speculated that it may be air, fireplace or water. A century in the past, physicists felt certain it was the atom. Today, we consider that the deepest layer of reality is populated by a various solid of elementary particles, all ruled by quantum idea. From this invisible, infinitesimal realm, every thing we see and expertise emerges. It is a world filled with marvel, but it may be mystifying in its weirdness. Or not less than it might probably usually really feel that approach.
What you’ll discover under is a concise, clear-eyed guide to the recognized particles and forces – from electrons, quarks, and neutrinos to photons and the Higgs boson – in addition to the quantum legal guidelines and phenomena that give quantum physics its fame for strangeness, together with wave-particle duality, entanglement, and the uncertainty precept. You can even uncover the hypothetical particles that may make sense of cosmological conundrums resembling darkish matter and darkish power, and the stranger issues that would possibly lurk beneath the quantum realm. Finally, you’ll have a lot of your questions answered, not least what’s a idea of every thing anyway?
Navigate our stock of the quantum realm
MATTER
We begin with what we just about know for certain. Visible matter consists of atoms, and at the centre of atoms are protons and neutrons. But even these aren’t elementary particles, as detailed by the present “standard model” of particle physics, our main description of reality on the tiniest scales. So we start, deep down, with what matter is absolutely made from.
Electrons …