fundamental particle

So far, they’ve been able to do that only for unrealistic black holes using speculative string theory—which assumes every fundamental particle is a tiny string or multidimensional “brane.”

By creating them and watching them decay, they have pieced together a theory of fundamental particles and forces called the standard model.

Physicists had learned that every fundamental particle seems to have an antimatter counterpart, an idea Segrè would later earn a Nobel Prize for verifying.

Science does deal with things that can’t be observed, such as fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, maybe even other universes.

Just after the big bang, the universe grew exponentially, hugely magnifying tiny quantum fluctuations in a dense soup of fundamental particles.