• Question: what do you think the smallest thing in the world is after whatever makes up the protons,electrons and nucleus?

    Asked by Cleona to Craig, Flavia, Giuditta, Jack, Sheona on 10 Nov 2015. This question was also asked by DONUTS ARE AWESOME.
    • Photo: Giuditta Perversi

      Giuditta Perversi answered on 10 Nov 2015:

      Well, it’s not exactly a business of what I think, considering that there are scientists other than me (they are called “particle physicists” in that specific field) that already asked themselves the same interesting question and spent decades to get an answer!

      There are components even smaller than electrons, protons and neutrons. Atomic nuclei are made of protons+neutrons, with the electrons around them to create a whole atom.
      If you “break” them, they will split in “subatomic particles”: proton and neutron will split in three “quarks”, the electron is not “splittable” so you can consider it among the basis of our world.
      There are a lot of other subatomic particles, even more weird and obscure!

      The Large Hardon Collider at CERN is basically there to perform this business of splitting particles and see if you can break them into something smaller, since it requires really high energy that are not so easy to approach! It’s the reason they are always upgrading it and it’s a huge work in progress!

    • Photo: Jack Carlyle

      Jack Carlyle answered on 10 Nov 2015:

      It seems to me that there’s no limit… Some people think that even electrons might be made of teeny tiny strings! Yeah, I know, I don’t really get it, either…

      Also, recent research suggests that electrons can separate into two smaller particles, named spinons and holons, under very special conditions. And apparently, when they’re inside conducting solids at temperatures close to absolute zero, they behave as if they had split into three other quasiparticles: spinons, Orbitons and holons.

      This is the great thing about science… every time we think we know something for definite (like “the electron can’d be broken down further”), sooner or later, we usually find out we were wrong! Just ask the people who said the world was flat.

    • Photo: Flavia de Almeida Dias

      Flavia de Almeida Dias answered on 11 Nov 2015:

      The particle physicist here is late, Giuditta and Jack had a great job of explaining it all 🙂

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