• Question: what other types of particles are there apart from atoms?

    Asked by kibo to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 13 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 10 Jun 2011:

      Hi @kibo
      This is a tricky question for someone who researches the brain to answer 🙂
      In fact, I don’t KNOW whether there are particles other than atoms, but I have some physicist friends I could ask!

      I know that atoms are made up of smaller particles, called protons, neutrons and electrons, and these are made up of even smaller particles called quarks and fermions (I love these names).

      There’s also something called ‘antimatter’, and things called positons, protons, neutrinos, gluons, bosons and such like….but I’m afraid I’m heading out in to a realm of cool words that I have NO IDEA what they mean. I know these are particles, but I’m not sure whether they’re part of atoms, or different to atoms, so I can’t really answer your question properly!

      Sorry about that 🙂

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      The answer to this question blows my mind as well. But I do know that, when you get right down to the smallest particles that exist, physicists are really talking about theories and not about facts that they actually know and can prove. Apparently, they suspect but haven’t proved that over 90% of what the Universe is made of is something called ‘dark matter’, which they haven’t even found direct evidence of yet! They only suspect it exists because of the effect that they think it has on other things that we can see – an effect which can’t be explained any other way.

      This is why I love to watch Brian Cox on the telly.

Comments