the.com/particle
the universe's smallest gossip, impossible to pin down and place at once
means A particle is a tiny, often indivisible piece of matter or energy — anything from a speck of dust to a subatomic entity like an electron.
from From Latin 'particula,' a diminutive of 'pars' (part) — literally 'a little part.' That same 'pars' fathered a whole family: 'partial,' 'partition,' 'party,' and 'parcel.' English borrowed 'particle' in the 14th century, first for any small fragment; physics only later shrank the word down to the realm of the impossibly small.
- no size
- electrons act like dimensionless points with no width
- ghost crowd
- trillions of neutrinos pass through you every second
- two faces
- behaves as wave or particle depending on watching
- speed king
- some cosmic rays carry the punch of a fastball
- never touch
- atoms repel; nothing physically makes contact
higgs boson — discovered at cern in 2012, gives other particles mass
electron — fundamental particle orbiting atomic nuclei, charge -1.602×10⁻¹⁹ coulombs
photon — light particle, massless, travels at 299,792,458 m/s in vacuum
muon — unstable particle created by cosmic rays, decays in 2.2 microseconds