Читать книгу String Theory For Dummies - Andrew Zimmerman Jones - Страница 39

With the rise of modern physics in the 20th century, two key facts about matter became clear:

 As Einstein had proposed with his famous E = mc² equation, matter and energy are, in a sense, interchangeable.

 Matter is incredibly complex, made up of an array of bizarre and unexpected types of particles that join together to form other types of particles.

The atom, it turns out, is composed of a nucleus surrounded by electrons. The nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons, which are in turn made up of strange new particles called quarks! As soon as physicists thought they had reached a fundamental unit of matter, they seemed to discover that it could be broken open and still smaller units could be pulled out.

Not only that, but even these fundamental particles didn’t seem to be enough. It turns out that there are three families of particles, some of which only appear at significantly higher energies than scientists had previously explored.

Today, the Standard Model of particle physics contains 25 distinct fundamental particles, all of which have been experimentally detected (often decades after theoreticians proposed them).