Higgs theorised that a vast field stretching to infinity runs through everything; when certain kinds of particles interact with the field that interaction is what gives those particles mass. If Higgs’ theory becomes fact we may finally understand what gives things mass. ibid.
In the past century physicists have worked out that all matter is built from about twenty sub-atomic particles ... But they also suspect other more exotic particles exist. Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman s1e8: Beyond the Darkness
Scientists have another name for the dark matter particles: weakly interacting massive particles, WIMPS for short. ibid.
Particles are constantly popping in and out of existence. They erupt out of nothingness, quickly annihilate each other and disappear. Brian Greene, Beyond the Cosmos, National Geographic 2012
A whole zoo of strange and exotic particles. ibid.
The tiny strings of string theory vibrate and dance in different patterns creating all the fundamental particles of Nature. Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe III, PBS 2003
I suspect that at the very beginning of the Big Bang nature was quite simple; and it was only then as the incredible temperature began to cool off that all the rich variety of forces and particles that we know about to today began to appear. Professor Steven Weinberg
Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we’re so interested in them. Professor Steven Weinberg
Neutrinos are ghost-like particles. Literally trillions of them are going through my body even as we speak. Professor Michio Kaku
We were expecting to find a gas when we slammed gold nuclei into each other. The shock was it wasn’t a gas at all – it was a liquid ... like a soup. Professor Michio Kaku
Each vibration of the string corresponds to a particle. Therefore string theory is a quantum theory. The jumble of particles we see is nothing but the jumble of notes vibrating on the string. Professor Michio Kaku
The Higgs mechanism works by filling the universe with a field – a Higgs field ... Particles acquire mass by interacting with the Higgs field. Professor Brian Cox, The Big Bang Machine, BBC 2008
It’s a law of quantum physics that all fields must have an associated particle. ibid.
String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string. Edward Witten
Technically you need the extra dimensions. At first people didn't like them too much, but they’ve got a big benefit, which is that the ability of string theory to describe all the elementary particles and their forces along with gravity depends on using the extra dimensions. Edward Witten
Where did all the matter and radiation in the universe come from in the first place? Recent intriguing theoretical research by physicists such as Steven Weinberg of Harvard and Ya B Zel’dovich in Moscow suggest that the universe began as a perfect vacuum and that all the particles of the material world were created from the expansion of space ...
Think about the universe immediately after the Big Bang. Space is violently expanding with explosive vigour. Yet, as we have seen, all space is seething with virtual pairs of particles and antiparticles. Normally, a particle and anti-particle have no trouble getting back together in a time interval ... short enough so that the conservation of mass is satisfied under the uncertainty principle. During the Big Bang, however, space was expanding so fast that particles were rapidly pulled away from their corresponding antiparticles. Deprived of the opportunity to recombine, these virtual particles had to become real particles in the real world. Where did the energy come from to achieve this materialization?
Recall that the Big Bang was like the center of a black hole. A vast supply of gravitational energy was therefore associated with the intense gravity of this cosmic singularity. This resource provided ample energy to completely fill the universe with all conceivable kinds of particles and antiparticles. Thus, immediately after the Planck time, the universe was flooded with particles and antiparticles created by the violent expansion of space. William J Kaufmann, Universe pp529-532
It’s becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics. Martin Rees, cited Wolpert & Richards, ‘A Passion for Science’, 1988
Particles can travel faster than light and can escape from a black hole. Other people call this Hawking Radiation. Stephen Hawking’s Universe s1e5: Black Holes & Beyond, BBC 1997
At the atomic level, particles are almost not there. They’re less like solid lumps of matter and more like tiny empty force-fields, and as force-fields they shimmer. Physicists often describe them as waves ... They can spread out to be in more than one place at a time. Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe, Channel 4 2008
Hawking asked, What would happen if this pair of particles bumped up against a black hole? Hawking realised that the positive particle would have just enough energy to escape the black hole, but the particle with negative mass would fall in ... They decrease the mass of the black hole. ibid.
We must understand as it affects individual particles. ibid.
The pure energy of the cosmos began to cool and create matter in the form of countless trillions of sub-atomic particles. The first stuff there ever was. Half these particles were made of matter, the same kind of stuff which makes us. The rest were made of the opposite matter. Stuff called anti-matter. When the two meet they destroy each other in a flash of energy. It seems as if building the universe is a pretty wasteful process. Fortunately, there was just a bit more matter than anti-matter. Just one in a billion particles of stuff survived. Which was lucky for us. Stephen Hawking’s Universe: Into the Universe: The Story of Everything, Discovery 2010
The negative particle is pulled into the black hole. But the positive particle has just enough energy to avoid getting sucked in. It is released as a particle of radiation. Stephen Hawking
Sub-atomic level and you enter a world where conjuring something out of nothing is possible at least for a short while. That’s because at this scale particles such as protons behave according to the laws of Nature we call Quantum Mechanics. And they really can appear at random. Professor Stephen Hawking, Did God Create the Universe?
The more accurately you try to measure the position of the particle, the less accurately you can measure its speed, and visa versa ... Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time p61
Everything in the universe, including light and gravity, can be described in terms of particles. There particles have a property called spin. One way of thinking of spin is to imagine the particles as little tops spinning about an axis. ibid. p73
We now know that every particle has an antiparticle, with which it can annihilate. ibid. p75
Gravity compresses the Sun making it heat up inside: the particles move faster and the nuclear fusion proceeds at a more rapid rate. That produces an outward pressure that makes the Sun expand and cool back down again. Ken Lang, author
Solar flares release a cascade of high energy particles known as protons. Protons can pass through the human body potentially causing chromosome damage and even cancer. Death of the Sun s3e5, 2006
Every day the Earth is pelted with twenty-five tons of dust and sand-sized particles, but they burn up in our atmosphere. Extreme Universe s1e2: Collision Course, National Geographic 2010
All those woodland walks and conversations came to a brilliant climax in 1927. Early that year Werner Heisenberg gave a new characterisation of the electron: yes, it is a particle, he said, but a particle which yields only limited information. That is, you can specify where it is at this instant, but then you cannot impose on it a specific speed and direction of setting off. Or conversely, if you insist that you’re going to fire it at a certain speed and a certain direction then you cannot specify exactly what its starting point is, or its end point. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 11/13: Knowledge or Certainty ***** BBC 1973