Exploring the Particle "Zoo"
The particle "zoo" is what scientists are fond of calling the collection of the smallest bits of matter and energy that exist. This collection is truly a menagerie of alien creature 14214s1824o s. They have bizarre and bewildering names: hadrons and leptons, baryons and mesons, muons, gluons, and quarks. They have puzzling qualities, such as "strangeness," "flavor," and "color." And they populate a world that is impossibly small:
A nanometer is a billionth (10-9) of a meter.
An atom, including its electrons, is 10 times smaller than that (10-10 m).
An atomic nucleus is 10,000 times smaller still (10-14 m).
And the inhabitants of the particle zoo are smallest of all (10-15 and below).
You will learn about the particles themselves, the visionary scientists, the new branches of physics including quantum mechanics, and the powerful technology that made their discoveries possible.
Remarkably, this is a story that is little more than 100 years old. Until almost the 20th century, no one knew for certain that particles smaller than an atom existed. The first elemental particle, the electron, was discovered in 1897. During the 1900s, scientists managed to discover essentially all of the particles believed to exist. (Although a few surprises may arise, and one crucially important particle, the Higgs, has yet to be verified).
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