It’s been nicknamed the God Particle. So far the Higgs has eluded physicists. But they hope the Large Hadron Collider will reveal it by going back to a moment that has been hidden from view – the time just after the Big Bang. Perhaps what’s most striking about the search for the Higgs is where it may take us. Some scientists believe its discovery could lead to an extraordinary level of insight about the universe. Horizon: The End of God? A Horizon Guide to Science and Religion, BBC 2010
What goes on beneath these fields in the Tevitron are some of the most violent collisions in the universe. Deep underground in a four-mile vacuum pipe, encased by superconducting magnets, they smash together two sub-atomic particles at close to the speed of life. Horizon: What is Reality? BBC 2011
Working out which of these are elementary is a problem that has defined particle physics for over sixty years ... When experimenters first broke into them [atoms] they discovered ever smaller bits inside. ibid.
The particle zoo – a whole new level of reality had been discovered. ibid.
With the discovery of the Top Quark, physicists are close to understanding one of the greatest mysteries of reality: what it’s all made of. ibid.
The most important particle of all – the Higgs Boson ... The Higgs is now Fermilab’s number one priority. But they aren’t the only ones looking for it. They have competition. From the biggest particle accelerator of them all – the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. It is more than three times as powerful. ibid.
In July 2012 the first glimpse of the Higgs Particle was announced. The Final Frontier: A Horizon Guide to the Universe, BBC 2012
We’re looking for a new particle. Horizon: Dancing in the Dark – The End of Physics, BBC 2015
Five days ago hundreds of the world’s brainiest people descended on a hotel in Chicago. They had come to hear news from particle physicists working in Cern ... They were on the brink of a huge discovery: a strange bump on a graph suggested that they might have discovered a brand new particle. Horizon: Inside Cern, BBC 2016
The biggest particle-hunting machine that has ever been built ... two beams of protons are sent hurtling around a twenty-seven-kilometre loop before being smashed together to make sub-atomic particles. ibid.
Unexpected bursts of photons – this could be evidence of a brand new particle. ibid.
The dream of the 750GEB bump is over. ibid.
Particles really are entangled … Entanglement means instant communication … faster than the speed of light. Horizon: How to Build a Time Machine, BBC 2018
But as soon as you delve deeper into the atom things get stranger. Hidden within the maze of mathematics were the descriptions of an array of sub-atomic particles no-one had ever seen before. Jim Al-Khalili, Lost Horizons: The Big Bang, BBC 2009
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle ... The more I know about where something is, the less I know about how it is moving. In the Quantum world I cannot at the same time know both these quantities exactly. Jim Al-Khalili, Everything & Nothing: Nothing, BBC 2011
Heisenberg showed in his mathematics that this is an inescapable feature of reality on this scale. ibid.
If particles can pop into existence, where do they go? ibid.
So it seems nothingness is a seething mass of virtual particles. ibid.
Nothing really has shaped everything. And what’s more, we now have a way to see this. ibid.
The teeming seething activity of the vacuum of nothing, and the quantum fluctuations with it were the seeds – seeds which grew into the universe we see today. ibid.
With perfect mathematical elegance Durac’s equation describes an atomic particle travelling at any speed ... As well as matter Durac’s equation predicts the existence of anti-matter. Jim Al-Khalili, Atom: The Illusion of Reality, BBC 2008
The vacuum seethes with huge numbers of matter and anti-matter particles continually being created and annihilated. ibid.
The quark is a tricky and illusive beast. There are six different kinds or flavours of quark: up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom. Also, quarks never exist in isolation. ibid.
Quantum Entanglement – it involved particles that seem to communicate faster than the speed of light. Jim Al-Khalili, The Secrets of Quantum Physics II: Let There Be Life, BBC 2014
Just now nuclear physicists are writing a great deal about hypothetical particles called neutrinos supposed to account for certain peculiar facts observed in ß-ray disintegration. We can perhaps best describe the neutrinos as little bits of spin-energy that have got detached. I am not much impressed by the neutrino theory. In an ordinary way I might say that I do not believe in neutrinos ... But I have to reflect that a physicist may be an artist, and you never know where you are with artists. My old-fashioned kind of disbelief in neutrinos is scarcely enough. Dare I say that experimental physicists will not have sufficient ingenuity to make neutrinos? Whatever I may think, I am not going to be lured into a wager against the skill of experimenters under the impression that it is a wager against the truth of a theory. If they succeed in making neutrinos, perhaps even in developing industrial applications of them, I suppose I shall have to believe – though I may feel that they have not been playing quite fair. Arthur Stanley Eddington, Tamer Lectures 1938, ‘The Philosophy of Physical Science’
In modern physics, there is no such thing as nothing. Even in a perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though they cannot be directly observed, the effects they create are quite real. The assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by experiment to a high degree of accuracy. Richard Morris
Radioactivity is shown to be accompanied by chemical changes in which new types of matter are being continually produced ... The conclusion is drawn that these chemical changes must be sub-atomic in character. Ernest Rutherford, Philosophical Magazine September 1902
It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. Ernest Rutherford, experiment in which one in eight thousand alpha particles scattered backwards when fired at metal sheet of foil, cited E N da C Andrada ‘Rutherford and the Nature of the Atom’, 1964
When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all – except life. We shall have found the basis of everything – of the earth we walk on, of the air we breathe, of the sunshine, of our physical body itself, of everything in the world, however great or however small – except life. Ernest Rutherford, cited Frank S Pepper ‘The Wit and Wisdom of the 20th Century: A Dictionary of Quotations’, 1987
If I could remember the names of all these particles I’d be a botanist. Enrico Fermi, cited R L Weber, More Random Walks in Science, 1973
One of the most strange and enigmatic of the particles is the Higgs-Boson (not yet found). And that’s what scientists here at Cern are trying to do. According to scientific theory, the Higgs particle ought to be there, somewhere in the sub-atomic soul of the atom. Without it, atoms would have no substance. The universe would have no substance ... One scientist has called Higgs, the God Particle. Robert Winston, The Story of God, BBC 2005
We do not know why they [elementary particles] have the masses they do; we do not know why they transform into another the way they do; we do not know anything! The only concept that stands like the Rock of Gibraltar in our sea of confusion is the Pauli principle. George Gamow, cited Scientific American July 1959
When the particles collide they break open and throw out a shower of even smaller particles .... Within these super-heated collisions a completely new form of matter appears: and this matter contradicts the earlier theories about the nature of the universe: because it’s not a gas but a liquid. Birth of the Universe, 2006
In the past century physicists have discovered that matter really is made of tiny little pixels, fundamental indivisible particles billions of times smaller than an atom. Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman s1e1: Is There a Creator? Science 2010
Physicists started breaking atoms apart and they discovered a slew of new particles that turned their theories upside down. Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman s1e7: What Are We Really Made Of?
The sub-atomic world earned the nickname the Particle Zoo. ibid.
Why the stuff inside us holds its shape. The key breakthrough in particle physics was the discovery that certain particles are actually false carriers. ibid.
At around a million billion degrees the electromagnetic and the weak force begin to merge. This merging is called electro-weak-unification. ibid.
The Standard Model of Particles Physics. ibid.
The Standard Model cannot explain why there is such a wild range of masses, or why some particles have any mass at all. ibid.