According to quantum physics, everything that is is made up of particles. Matter, light, things seen and unseen. It’s all particles and they control the function of the entire universe. Some are common and well known to most of us, like electrons. Others are a little more unusual, like quarks. But the basic idea of any particle is that it’s an elementary thing made up 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. And with that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the most amazing ones science has discovered, or at least thinks it’s discovered.
10. The God Particle
When scientists call something the God Particle, they’re really setting it up to be something bigger than big. In fairness, the proper name for the particle is the Higgs boson, but physicist Leon Lederman came up with the flashier moniker because getting the media to care about particles isn’t exactly easy.
The Higgs boson was confirmed to exist back in 2013. However, it was theorized back in the 1960s, so the hunt for it was a long time coming. Stephen Hawking once bet $100 that it would never be discovered, so he got burned there. He’s also on record saying that the Higgs boson will one day destroy the universe, so mark that on your calendars.
With all this buildup, you have to imagine the Higgs boson is pretty amazing, and the truth is that yes, the Higgs boson is remarkable. It does take a bit to understand, though, so let’s try.
A boson is a fundamental particle. Bosons are responsible for all the basic forces of the universe, things like electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear force.
The Higgs field is an energy field that gives mass to other particles like electrons. So in very simple terms, Higgs bosons are partially responsible for generating particle mass in the universe. The boson itself has a lot of mass but is short-lived, so it’s hard to find in nature.But its existence confirms much of what we know of the Standard Model of Physics and helps explain why any particle actually exists at all. It may also help explain dark matter and reveal even more particles we don’t know or understand.
As a fun aside, Lederman didn’t technically call it the God Particle. He called it the Goddamn Particle, because he was frustrated by how hard it was to detect. His publisher changed the name.
9. Tetraquark
Quarks are most easily understood as the smallest possible parts of matter. A piece of iron is made of iron atoms. Those atoms are made of things like electrons and protons. But if you were to break even those down, you’d be left with quarks. They have mass and exhibit a spin and they come in six types, which are amusingly called “flavors.” These flavors are grouped in pairs called up and down, top and bottom, and charm and strange. Weird, right? Well, it gets weirder.
In 2021, scientists uncovered the tetraquark, an exotic hadron made of two quarks and two antiquarks. This was, until its discovery, generally thought to be impossible. The idea that the particles could ever bond together was not considered an option, but evidence from the Large Hadron Collider proved differently.
The discovery of the tetraquark will give researchers some new tools to help better understand the strong force, which binds quarks together to make neutrons and protons.
8. Neutrinos
If you’ve watched any science fiction in the last few decades, you’ve heard the word “neutrino” tossed out more than a few times. It’s a popular one and, even if the science is lost on most of us, it still sounds interesting.
In real life, neutrinos have a far more intense existence than most of us ever realize. They are subatomic particles born from galactic cataclysms, like exploding stars. They travel at almost the speed of light and good luck stopping one because they can travel through something like lead as easily as you go through an open door.
The mass of a neutrino is remarkably small. The numbers used to describe it will mean nothing if you don’t have a solid base in physics already. That said, they’re around 500,000 times less than an electron. But, unlike an electron, they have no electrical charge, either. So with no mass and no charge, a neutrino is barely a thing at all. But they’re also everywhere. The sun bombards you with about a billion of them every second.
The fact a neutrino has some mass, microscopic though it may be, might explain the entire mass of the universe and why matter and not antimatter is all around us.
7. Muons
Like quarks, muons are some of the fundamental particles of existence. They’re similar to electrons but bigger, weighing 207 times as much. They are very short-lived, decaying into electrons and neutrinos in a matter of 2.2 microseconds after they form in the first place. They form when cosmic rays hit particles in our atmosphere and in that 2.2 microseconds, they manage to bombard the earth and penetrate about a mile below the surface thanks to the fact they travel 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 do. In simple terms, they wobble. But they shouldn’t. And the fact that they do wobble indicates there may be yet another particle out there which no one even theorized yet that is affecting how they function.
6. Quarks
We mentioned the tetraquark before, so it makes sense to break that down to the simple quark. If you break down things like protons and neutrons, you’ll get quarks and gluons. There are six types of quarks and they always exist in pairs. In fact, scientists have tried to remove one quark from its other half before and it just doesn’t work. They are either bonded or they don’t exist at all.
The way quarks and gluons interact is where mass in atoms comes from. That basically means all 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 a step beyond. They’re also described as having color charge, which relates to something called quantum chromodynamics. This applies theoretical colors of red, blue or green (they aren’t really these colors) to describe their unique quantum properties.
5. Gravitons
Science recognizes four fundamental forces at work in the universe. Weak and strong nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. The first three we have more or less a handle on in most cases. Gravity, however, is a bit of a wild card.
We understand how photons work with electromagnetism, how quarks and gluons work with strong nuclear force, and how bosons work with weak nuclear force. What we don’t know is what conveys gravity. That’s where gravitons come in, the theoretical particles that allow gravity to be a force that acts on things in the real world. The problem with gravitons is we don’t actually know if they exist. They’re still theoretical. Science can’t really explain gravity.
Surprisingly enough, even though we don’t know for sure gravitons exist, we still know a lot about them. We know they have zero mass or close to it and they travel at the speed of light. So why can’t we find them?
Gravity is the weakest of the four forces and that makes it hard to track. It’s been estimated that a gravity detector with the mass of Jupiter placed near a super massive object like a neutron star would still have trouble detecting anything.
4. Tachyons
Thank Star Trek for making tachyons popular, at least in some circles. These theoretical particles would likely be obscure and unknown if science fiction hadn’t latched onto them thanks to their entirely weird nature. Just remember, they don’t technically exist, but some physicists think they do.
A tachyon’s biggest claim to fame would be its speed. They travel faster than light. That itself is cause for a lot of belief that a tachyon can’t exist because nothing travels faster than light. But theoretical physics is willing to make room for anything if there’s evidence, so why not?
If a tachyon travels faster than light, then, based on what we know about time, a tachyon could move backwards through time. Normally we accept that nothing can move faster than light because its mass would increase as it did so, as would the energy to move it. At the speed of light, you’d basically be stuck. But tachyons speed up as they lose energy, which means they could break that barrier. It also gives rise to all those time paradoxes we know from movies. And that’s a good reason why they may not exist at all.
Of course, if they do exist but travel faster than light, it’s no wonder we have yet to detect them and, in fact, we may never detect them for just that reason.
3. Dark Matter
You’ve probably heard the term “dark matter” before, but if you aren’t sure what that means, welcome to the club. Science has a hard time with it as well, but it answers a lot of questions about how the universe works, so it’s a bit of a placeholder right now to account for a lot of cosmic phenomena.
The way galaxies move, based on our observations, doesn’t make sense. Galaxies move like they’re much more massive than they appear to be. There has to be a secret source of mass holding any given galaxy together, and that source is dark matter.
Dark matter doesn’t reflect, absorb, or emit electromagnetism, which is what gives it its name. It is essentially invisible and so it is just theoretical. But what it does do is emit gravity, and that holds the universe together. And there’s a lot of it. About 80% of all the mass in the universe, in fact.
2. Sparticles
Sparticle is a great word that brings to mind Spartacus and particles, but only half of that is correct. The “s” part is actually for “supersymmetric.” As in, sparticles are supersymmetric particles and their existence could crack open the mysteries of physics like a coconut.
As helpful as the standard model of particle physics is, it has a lot of gaps as we’ve seen. What is dark matter? How does gravity work? What makes muons wobble? There are questions about where mass comes from and all kinds of stuff. There are enough questions that you could cast doubt over the standard model being worth pursuing any further or if a whole new model needs to be devised. Unless, of course, you can fit sparticles in somewhere.
A lot of issues we have with particle physics can be explained with a supersymmetry theory. According to this, every particle should have a supersymmetrical partner. These partner particles could theoretically fill in all kinds 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. That doesn’t necessarily mean the theory is wrong, it just means physics is hard and understanding the fundamentals of reality does take some time.
1. Photons
Ahh, the humble photon. Everyone knows photons. Photons make up light as we understand it, little particles of electromagnetic energy that allow light to function as both a particle and a wave. Of course, photons are more than just your phone screen’s light traveling to your eyes to allow you to see this. They are also the wifi that gives you access to the internet, not to mention radio waves and microwaves and x-rays and gamma rays and more.
Everything we see is because photons exist to allow us to see it. Which means when we look across the universe and see a star that exploded a billion years ago, those photons traveled that long to get here, making them serious work horses of the particle world.