Particles behaving oddly

Small world? Atoms used to be the smallest bits of the universe. Then came electrons, protons and neutrons.

Small world? Atoms used to be the smallest bits of the universe. Then came electrons, protons and neutrons.

Now scientists talk blithely about photons, gluons, muons, taus, neutrinos and gravitons. Oh, and quarks. The name, which rhymes with "stork"(it was originally spelled quork), harks back to Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"

The hunting of the squark

Nowadays a quark isn't just a quark. It can be an up quark or a down quark, a charm quark or a strange quark, a top quark or a bottom quark. And if string theory is proved correct there'll be something called a squark. Joyce would love it.

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Mad world

In the weird and wonderful universe of post-relativity physics, when you think you're sitting comfortably on a chair you're actually accelerating through space. Did I say on a chair? Make that levitating above the

chair at a height of 100 millionths of a centimetre, as your electrons repel the chair's electrons.

Spaced out

Is it a ball? Is it a doughnut? Some scientists believe the universe is shaped like a Pringles crisp. The jury is still out, but the smart science money is on a plain old flat universe - "zero curvature" to you and me.

Born and bread

The universe we inhabit may be like one slice of bread in a loaf, with other, parallel universes alongside that we can't see. This is not a plot for a Keanu Reeves film but a perfectly respectable theory in theoretical physics known as the braneworld scenario. And if you think that's bad, string theorists are beavering away to prove that the whole shebang is just a hologram anyway