Hello mortals. This screen is made up of many
atoms. And so are your eyes. And so is your
brain. In fact, we are just a bunch of atoms
that are trying to understand themselves.
Here’s a funny way to think about the history
of these particles. In Ancient Greece, some
Pre-Socratic clumps of atoms asked themselves
– “What will we see if we zoom really
really deep onto ourselves?”. Because of
their lack of technology, they could only
make philosophical guesses about it. And so,
they came up with the idea that everything
is made up of indivisible particles – called
atoms. So that’s the first instance that
a bunch of atoms acknowledged their own existence.
During the Middle Ages, atoms forgot about
themselves because of the church, and only
in the 19th century the theory became main-stream.
By now, you might think that everything around
you is made up of atoms – but you’ll soon
see why this is not correct. Thanks to Manscape
for sponsoring this video.
During the last 2 centuries, the so-thought
indivisible atoms were discovered to be made
up of protons and neutrons at the nucleus,
and electrons orbiting them. And nope, that’s
not how an atom looks like. This is more like
it. The electrons don’t orbit them in the
usual way of thinking along circular orbits.
Instead, they exist inside these probability
clouds. Because of weird quantum physics,
we can’t really pinpoint their location
in one place, instead we can only approximate
– they are most likely to be in the darker
regions, and less likely to be outside of
them.
But aside from them, there are many more particles
in physics that have been discovered. Luckily
for us, scientists have arranged them into
a table called the Standard Model. But if
you take a look, there are no atoms, no protons
and no neutrons. The reason is that the Standard
Model only contains elementary particles,
that is, particles that are not made up of
anything else, or at least that’s what we
think at the moment. Atoms are composite particles,
as previously shown. And so are protons and
neutrons, they are actually a combination
of 3 particles called quarks, which can be
found in the Standard Model. Quarks come in
6 flavors – up, top, bottom, down – which
are not the same – you can thank the very
creative scientists as always. And there are
also the charm and strange quarks. The up
and down quarks make up almost all the atoms
that you can see. With their charge of +2/3
and -1/3, they make up all the protons and
the neutrons and are held together by gluons
– the mediators of the strong nuclear force
– basically flex-tape. The rest of the quarks
can only be observed in particle accelerators.
With the exception of the strange ones. They
could hypothetically clump up into bits of
strange matter, and destroy and convert anything
they touch. Here’s our video about it. Fun
fact, quarks never like to be alone. If you
try to pull 2 of them apart with a lot of
force, they will use that force to generate
2 more quarks.
Next up are the leptons. First the good-old
electron. It orbits the atoms as you already
know. It also makes a zzzz sound when you
put a fork in the socket. Electrons aren’t
made of anything smaller. However, at temperatures
close to absolute zero, and extremely tightly
confined, they divide in 3 quasiparticles
- spinons, orbitons and holons – as if they
existed independently.
Next the muon – the big brother of the electron.
It is 200 times heavier and lives quite a
long and boring life. You could replace orbiting
electrons with muons to create, say – muonic
hydrogen. Muons could also be of help in developing
cold fusion – that is, thermonuclear reactions
at room temperature.
Next up are the tau particles. If muons were
the big brothers of electrons, tauons are
the ultra-mega big brothers. They live for
a lot less than the latter though, therefore
they aren’t really observed in the real
world.
We have 3 more particles left of the leptons
– and they’re all neutrinos. Each corresponding
to the particle above. They are created from
the decay of other particles. Because neutrinos
are electrically neutral, they don’t interact
with the electromagnetic waves, and can pass
through a lot of matter before hitting an
atomic nucleus. That’s why they require
some very huge underground detectors. There
are trillions of them passing through you
right now, and they might be coming from billions
of light years away produced by very energetic
processes. They’re also the smallest elementary
particles known to date.
Alright, so we’re done with the fermions
now. Oh god what the heck is this. Oh right.
Every fermion has an anti-particle counterpart.
The only difference is that they have opposite
electric charge. That way you can create an
anti-hydrogen atom from a positron and an
anti-proton. Make a lot of them and you’ve
made an anti-matter bomb – the most devastating
explosive possible. But making anti-particles
is really expensive - $62 trillion per gram.
And that’s not including shipping costs.
And what the hell scientists – why isn’t
an anti-bottom quark the same as a top quark?
Or this – anticharm – is this a quark
name or an insult towards me?
Moving on. Bosons – particles that carry
a force. And as we know, there are 4 fundamental
forces in the universe – air, water NO – gravity,
electromagnetism, the weak and the strong
nuclear force. As previously mentioned, the
gluon acts as glue between quarks, and as
a carrier for the strong force. Photons are
the carriers of the electromagnetic force,
and are the reason you can see this video
right now – apologies to my blind viewers.
The Z and W bosons are carriers of the weak
nuclear force, responsible for the decay of
particles. So what about gravity? Sadly, we
don’t know. We hypothesize that there should
be a particle called the “graviton”, which
mediates the gravitational force. But until
now, scientists haven’t been able to integrate
it into the Standard Model. Thank quantum
physics for that.
But what’s up with this yellow fellow? You
probably heard the name – the Higgs Boson.
It was discovered a few years ago. It is the
reason particles have mass. Think of the higgs
field as an ocean, and everything passes it
has to push through the water to move. Some
may have to push harder, that’s why different
particles have different masses.
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