#TACHYON PARTICLES HOW TO#

That energy turns out to be proportional to the frequency of the light, so that blue light (higher frequency) carries more energy per photon than red light (lower frequency). Unlike electrons and quarks (see below), photons have no “rest mass”-that is, they don’t weigh anything, in the everyday sense of the word. In the early 20th century, Albert Einstein showed that Newton was on the right track, discovering that light is “quantized,” that is, made of discrete particles (even though it can behave like a wave, too). Some thinkers insisted that light behaved like a wave others (most famously Isaac Newton) said light was made up of particles.

The nature of light puzzled scientists and philosophers since ancient times. PHOTON: ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION CARRIER

#TACHYON PARTICLES HOW TO#

In the late 19th century, we learned to control the flow of electrons in wires-electricity! (Oddly, while electricity travels at light speed, the electrons themselves are only moving a couple of feet an hour.) A few decades later, we figured out how to fire a stream of electrons at a phosphorescent screen inside a vacuum tube-voila, television. (Think of a water molecule as two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom that have worked out a joint custody agreement for their 10 electron children.) Learning to manipulate electrons has been one of the greatest scientific triumphs in history. While protons and neutrons (and their constituent quarks) give atoms their heft, it’s their entourage of much lighter electrons that determines how atoms come together to form molecules-in a word, it’s electrons that give us chemistry. ELECTRON: GIVER OF CHEMISTRY AND ELECTRICITY The list runs roughly in order from particles you learned about in high school physics class to more exotic entities that are, for now, little more than twinkles in theoretical physicists’ eyes.

The following list isn’t a complete catalogue of what’s out there rather, it’s a kind of starter kit, a combination of the more important-and the more bizarre-particles that make up our universe. Image credit: Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Imagesīosons, leptons, hadrons, gluons-it seems like there’s a veritable zoo of subatomic particles, and you can be forgiven for occasionally mixing up your quarks and your squarks (yes, squarks are an actual thing, or at least an actual possible thing). A blackboard at CERN covered with theoretical physics equations by CERN theoretical physics fellow Alberto Ramos and physicist Antonio Gonzalez-Arroyo of the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, photographed on April 19, 2016.

Tachyon particles