Most of us don’t suppose a lot about electrical cost, other than in these annoying moments when our telephones run out of it. But for physicists, it’s a large deal. In each atom, negatively charged electrons orbit a nucleus containing positively charged protons, with the entire dance sustained by their mutual attraction. It would be truthful to say, then, that cost is about as elementary because it will get.
This explains why physicists have lengthy been at such pains to perceive its nature, and for the most half they’ve been profitable. But there’s one query that has at all times hung in the air, unanswered. It appears that the smallest doable unit of cost is that of an electron – all different naturally occurring particles solely have multiples of this. In nature, you will discover expenses of -1 or +3 or -2, however by no means 0.25. Why is that this?
You would possibly shrug and say that’s simply how the universe is. But in reality, there have at all times been good causes to suspect that fractional expenses do exist, even when we haven’t caught one but. And it’s a significantly reside subject right this moment thanks to recent insights from string principle, one candidate for a principle of every thing.
Now, experiments are starting at the CERN particle physics lab close to Geneva, Switzerland, to hunt for particles that might have expenses simply thousandths that of an electron. If they’ll discover them, it could…