Introduction to particles
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In particle physics, the concept of a particle is one of several concepts inherited from classical physics, the world we experience, that are used to describe how matter and energy behave at the very small scales of quantum mechanics. As physicists use the term, the meaning of the word "particle" is one which understands how particles are radically different at the quantum-level, and rather divorced from the common understanding of the term.
The idea of a "particle" is one which had to undergo serious rethinking in light of experiments which showed that that the smallest particles (of light) could behave just like waves. The difference is indeed vast, and required the new concept of wave-particle duality to state that quantum-scale "particles" are understood to behave in a way which resembles both particles and waves. Another new concept, the uncertainty principle, meant that analyzing particles at these scales required a statistical approach. All of these factors combined such that the very notion of a discrete "particle" has been ultimately replaced by the concept of something like wave-packet of an uncertain boundary, whose properties are only known as probabilities, and whose interactions with other "particles" remain largely a mystery, even 80 years after quantum mechanics was established.
[edit] Background
In the early 1800s, Thomas Young performed his landmark double-slit experiment which demonstrated that light behaved like waves would behave. Although this wasn't widely accepted at the time (Isaac Newton believed that light was entirely made of particles)...
[edit] Energy
Energy and matter we have studied from Einstein's hypotheses are analogous, matter can be austerely denoted in terms of energy. thence we have only discovered two mechanisms in which energy can be transferred. These are particles and waves [1].
Particles are discrete, their energy is centralized into what appears to be a finite space, which possesses absolute boundaries and its contents we contemplate to be homogenous i.e. the same at any point within the particle. Particles subsist at a particular location. If they are demonstrated on a 3D graph, they have x, y, and z coordinates. They can never exist in more than one locate at once, and to travel to a different place in space, a particle must move to it under the laws of kinematics, acceleration, velocity and so forth. [2]
Interactions between particles have been scrutinized for many centuries, and a few simple laws underpin how particles proceed in collisions and interactions. The most angelic of these are the conservation of energy and momentum which facilitate us to elucidate calculations between particle interactions on scales of magnitude which diverge between planets and quarks[3]. These are the prerequisite basics of Newtonian mechanics, a series of statements and equations in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica originally published in 1687.
[edit] References
- ^ Einstein, Albert; Robert W. Lawson (1920). Relativity: The Special & General Theory. New York Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 1-58734-092-5.
- ^ Laws of Kinematics
- ^ Isaac Newton - Newton's Laws of Motion (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica). 1687.
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