Little Things Mean a Lot

A paper published this week in a British science journal reports the first “indisputable evidence” for the existence of a very tiny and strange particle. Its entire lifetime lasts no more than a billionth of a second and it travels less than half a millimeter before decaying. It does not, in other words, seem like much of a mover and shaker in this world.

However, the paper’s author, Piyare Jain, a University of Buffalo particle physics professor, is rightly enthusiastic about his discovery. If the particle, called an anomalon, is confirmed by later studies, it could help explain how quarks, the tiniest known particles, are clumped together to make up atoms and other forms of matter. Only recently, it was thought that clumps of quarks behaved like billiard balls when they collided. But sometimes the clumps, rather than clicking apart on predictable trajectories, interact more unpredictably and fluidly. Some physicists believe that anomalons, particles formed out of collisions, may explain a lot of strange behavior within atoms.

At the dawn of particle physics in the 1930s, many erudite theorists laughed at the new science, which held that the universe could be understood basically by crashing particles together. That messy business, says Timothy Ferris, a science journalist, was “ridiculed as being like trying to find out how Swiss watches work by smashing two watches together.”

Well, no one is laughing about particle physics nowadays. The particles it studies get ever smaller, but the discoveries it nurtures keep growing.