Science Chats Forum

Spid4r · #1 07-01-2007, 11:54 PM

We all know that particles are always made up of sub-particles..

As in substances are made-up of molecules..
Molecules are made-up of atoms..
Atoms are made-up of protons, neutron and electrons..
n, p & e are made-up of quarks.. and this may go on upto somewhere .

But what may the end, i.e the smallest particle, the basic and single particle of all matter be made up of??

Is there an answer yet??

Neo · #2 07-07-2007, 08:18 PM

The smallest particles must be in accordance to the Planck Lenght, which is 1.16 x 10^33. Nothing can go further than this measurement. We may not yet still know however, all of the elementary fluctuations on much smaller scales.

Ang3r_D4nger · #3 07-08-2007, 06:15 PM

We will never know as technology continues to advance and as that advances so will our endeavor to reach smaller and smaller sizes.

-Michael

Jacob · #4 07-08-2007, 06:32 PM

I often wonder if there will always be something just a little bit smaller. Consider the human body. We have the body, the organ system, the organ, the tissue, the cell, the nucleus, the chromosome, the dna, the nitrogen, the proton, etc, etc. All of this continues to go down and down. I wonder how far it will actually go.

Neo · #5 08-18-2007, 12:10 PM

Don't get me wrong here though. We have been able to minimize matter down to cells, of cells of cells, molecules of molecules, atoms of atoms, and even electrons inside of atoms... Now we know that nuleons (protons and neutrons) are they themselvesz composed of even smaller energies called quarks and gluons... but they themselves can be mathematically made up of even stranger energy... What this energy might consist of though is of great debate. Thus, Jacobs question merits a stronger answer... from my point of view anyway.:rolleyes:
Neo

CotatiIvy · #6 08-20-2007, 02:23 PM

It is the massless energy that is the key: Photons. quanta. (quarks? gluons?) without mass we have to find a way to define the thing as energy. If it is only a mathematical concept, it is hard to get the mind around, for those of us not educated enough to follow. I'm trying to grasp not the source of the energy, but a way to visualise the energy itself, like trying to capture a photon and following it to it's very end. Is there one? Is light eternal?

CotatiIvy · #7 08-20-2007, 02:25 PM

oh nevermind. I go so far off what i'm trying to get at.

Neo · #8 08-20-2007, 09:01 PM

Yes... Light is indeed eternal... Just as is energy.
Photons themselves experience absolutely no dimensions at all. This might seem very strange, but if we link this to speed... Light speed... then we can see that a barrier is made for those particles which experience travelling through space and time, to those particles which do not... For this reason, a physicist can look at the lifespan of a photon a number of ways... One being that it doesn't have a life; it's birth is simultaneously it's death... Or one can see the photon as travelling [through space] - (even though we are told it doesn't) - and it needs not worry about time, because it has all the time in the world... All the time in the wide cosmos.
Neo

online.education · #9 12-03-2007, 02:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neo

... they themselvesz composed of even smaller energies called quarks and gluons... but they themselves can be mathematically made up of even stranger energy... What this energy might consist of though is of great debate. Thus, Jacobs question merits a stronger answer... from my point of view anyway.:rolleyes:
Neo

Is this where String Theory comes in?

Quote:

String theory is a model of fundamental physics, whose building blocks are one-dimensional extended objects called strings, rather than the zero-dimensional point particles that form the basis for the standard model of particle physics. The phrase is often used as shorthand for superstring theory, as well as related theories such as M-theory. By replacing the point-like particles with strings, an apparently consistent quantum theory of gravity emerges. Moreover, it may be possible to "unify" the known natural forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear) by describing them with the same set of equations, as described in the theory of everything.

For a scientific theory to be valid it must be verified empirically, i.e. through experiment or observation. Few avenues for such contact with experiment have been claimed. With the construction of the Large Hadron Collider in CERN some scientists hope to produce relevant data, though it is widely believed that any theory of quantum gravity would require much higher energies to probe directly. Moreover, string theory as it is currently understood has a huge number of equally possible solutions. Thus it has been claimed by some scientists that string theory may not be falsifiable and may have no predictive power.

Studies of string theory have revealed that it predicts higher-dimensional objects called branes. String theory strongly suggests the existence of ten or eleven (in M-theory) spacetime dimensions, as opposed to the usual four (three spatial and one temporal) used in relativity theory; however, the theory can describe universes with four effective (observable) spacetime dimensions by a variety of methods.

An important branch of the field deals with a conjectured duality between string theory as a theory of gravity and gauge theory. It is hoped that research in this direction will lead to new insights on quantum chromodynamics, the fundamental theory of the strong nuclear force.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_...nd_controversy

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