Science has taught us to think the unthinkable. Because when nature is the guide – rather than a priori prejudices, hopes, fears or desires – we are forced out of our comfort zone. One by one, pillars of classical logic have fallen by the wayside as science progressed in the 20th century, from Einstein’s realization that measurements of space and time were not absolute but observer-dependent, to quantum mechanics, which not only put fundamental limits on what we can empirically know but also demonstrated that elementary particles and the atoms they form are doing a million seemingly impossible things at once. Lawrence M Krauss
It’s absolutely ridiculous what particles do when they go through two slits ... When you throw an electron ... it does everything at once. It takes every possible way to get from one place to another at the same time ... What does it mean if you’re inside of it? Lawrence Krauss
The particles were moving around very fast, and as the universe cools down the particles move more slowly and in some sense less randomly. Lawrence Krauss
Particles can be in many different places at the same time. Lawrence Krauss
A particle fountain. The Federation lost more than a dozen ships examining a similar phenomenon in the Alpha Quadrant. Star Trek s6e5: Voyager: Alice, Janeway to Seven of Nine
There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature’s actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained ‘fine structure constant’ ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions. Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world ... all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else. John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality
When one studies the properties of atoms, one found that the reality is far stranger than anybody would have invented in the form of fiction. Particles really do have the possibility of, in some sense, being in more than one place at one time. Alan Guth
The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form – the one of the particles, the other of the waves – are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases. Werner Heisenberg
A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. Erwin Schrodinger
The result of the single photon interference experiment is the strangest thing I know. It is conclusive evidence that reality does not consist of just a single universe. Because that result couldn’t have come about unless there were another nearby universe interfering with ours. Dr David Deutsch, Oxford University
Last month an international group of scientists working here on a particle physics experiment ... made an astonishing claim: they said they had detected particles that seemed to travel faster than the speed of light. It was a claim that contradicted more than a hundred years of scientific orthodoxy. Professor Marcus du Sautoy, Faster Than the Speed of Light, BBC 2011
The neutrino – if there was one particle that was going to break the rules it was this one. ibid.
In June 1956 [Frederick] Rinus announced he had detected the neutrino. ibid.
As the neutrinos smashed into the lead nucleus they created charged particles which are detected as tiny flashes of light. ibid.
Nobody had anticipated what happened when they started measuring how long it took the neutrinos to arrive. They seemed to arrive early. Earlier than the laws of Physics allowed. ibid.
When the news broke it caused a sensation. ibid.
Einstein’s theory respects the relationship between cause and effect. ibid.
The MINOS neutrinos did seem to be moving faster than the speed of light. ibid.
At stake is one of the greatest prizes of science – a theory of everything. ibid.
Tachyons are pretty strange – most notably, their mass is an imaginary number ... If a particle is formed when it’s already travelling faster than the speed of light then it gets past this problem. ibid.
In our experiments we have measured that a single photon can tunnel across a tunnel barrier at one point seven times the speed of light. Professor Raymond Chiao, University of California
Trying to spot the laws. Trying to spot the relationship. The laws of the elementary particles are very special. The whole universe is made up of these little particles. The light from the most distant galaxy shows that there too the same laws hold. They too are made up of the same little particles that we are ... They determine the behaviour of matter. And it’s fascinating to try to figure out what these laws are. Professor Murray Gell-Mann, interview BBC Horizon
Neutrinos, they are very small
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The Earth is just a silly ball.
John Updike, Cosmic Gall
But the detectors had yet to capture a single supernova neutrino. But luckily on 23rd February 1987 they did see them: two detectors, one beneath the city of Kamaka in Japan and the other under Lake Erie in Ohio captured a dozen of the illusive particles. For the first time ever scientists on Earth saw tangible evidence of the illusive particle the Neutrino generated in the core of an exploding star. The Universe s2e9: Supernovas, History 2008
About sixty billion solar neutrinos pass through our thumbnails every second. The Universe s3e10: Strangest Things, History 2009
In addition to other particles and light vast numbers of neutrinos were released into the universe immediately after the Big Bang. Humans are the descendants of this primordial soup. ibid.
So the idea is that out of nothing, if you like, a pair of particles is created, and then exists for a short time and then annihilates. And that’s happening throughout space. Professor Bernard Carr, University of London
Neutrinos … are believed to be fundamental to the way our universe works. Professor Kathy Sykes
Neutrinos have been dubbed the ghost particle. ibid.
A neutrino detector ... We can show you it from the inside ... This giant acrylic globe ... Usually there is a thousand tons of [heavy] water in here. ibid.
There is a funny little particle called a neutrino: Italian for ‘little neutral one’. It has very little mass. Very small amount of matter. Almost nothing. But it has energy and it zips through space at close to the speed of light. These things are so non-interactive that if you imagine a light-year thickness of lead and you shine a beam of neutrinos toward it, half of those neutrinos would make it through that light-year thickness of lead completely unscathed. Alex Filippenko, University of California, Berkeley
According to Quantum Mechanics it’s possible for two similar particles to become linked in such a way that anything that happens to one of them is instantly communicated to the other regardless of distance: this is called quantum entanglement. Weird or What? s1e7: Mind Control, Discovery 2007
Even today scientists don’t truly understand the long-term effect of Z particles on the human body. First on the Moon: The Untold Story, Discovery 2005
Astronaut [Don] Pettit had discovered something huge: in the zero gravity of space particles of dust don’t float apart, they clump together. How the Universe Works s1e7: Solar Systems, Discovery 2010
But what about two neutron stars colliding? Creating one of the strangest and most lethal particles in the universe … releasing a huge surge of energy that was emitted across space … It’s possible that neutron star collisions release something that is incredibly weird – a new theoretical particle called a Strangelet. How the Universe Works s5e6: The Universe’s Deadliest, Science 2017
In some radioactive atoms the nucleus is spontaneously ejecting electrons: this transforms the atom to a different element ... where did the missing energy go? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still VI