Though he remained forever ambivalent about it, his most public achievement came in 1965, when he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing it with Julian Schwinger and Shin» ichiro Tomonaga for their work in quantum electrodynamics, a description of
how subatomic particles interact.
Before the Large Hadron Collider goes hunting for sparticles, it will first test the boundaries of the standard model of particle physics, the reigning theory of
how subatomic particles behave (see «Catch Me if You Can» by Karen Wright, Discover, July 2005).
After the war, his Feynman diagrams — for which he shared the ’65 Nobel Prize in Physics — became the standard way to show
how subatomic particles interact.
Not exact matches
When women routinely win Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry or medicine, when a woman becomes a world chess champion, when a woman conceives and develops a brand new computer chip that represents a significant advancement over quad cores, when a woman invents warp drive or phasers, when a woman solves an «insolvable» math problem, when a woman, while working with the Large Hadron Collider, discovers the now - hypothetical Higgs Boson to be an actual scalar
subatomic particle, when a woman figures out
how to pinpoint the exact location of an electron at any point in time, when a woman working for Merck or Pfizer develops a remedy for Alzheimer's disease, when a woman's baseball team can defeat the New York Yankees, when a woman can bench press six hundred pounds, run the 100 meter dash in under nine seconds or set a world record in the high jump, then the fairer sex will have made an advance or contribution unlike any it has made before.
According to the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics (although «orthodox» seems an odd description for such a radical world view),
subatomic entities such as electrons or photons are either waves or
particles — depending on
how the physicist chooses to observe them.
Devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1925, it describes
subatomic particles and
how they may display wavelike properties such as interference.
This video shows
how the contraption accelerates and slams together
subatomic particles, and what comes out of the collision.
A breed of
subatomic particle made from nothing has huge implications for technology — and shows
how tenuous reality itself is
The answers sought by
particle physicists are essential for understanding the
subatomic building blocks of matter, and
how the Universe began.
Such fuzziness brings us back to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which describes
how measuring the location of a
subatomic particle inherently blurs its momentum and vice versa.
According to the big bang theory, one of the main contenders vying to explain
how the universe came to be, all the matter in the cosmos — all of space itself — existed in a form smaller than a
subatomic particle.
Currently, the universe we live in obeys two seemingly incompatible laws — quantum mechanics, which governs the behavior of
subatomic particles; and relativity, which describes
how clumps of atoms, such as humans, stars and galaxies, behave.
Astronomers can only theorize about
how density fluctuations in a sea of
subatomic particles could have formed the great variety of galaxy shapes and sizes that make up the universe as we see it today.
The discovery of the Higgs boson represents the final piece of the puzzle in the Standard Model of
particle physics, a theory that describes
how three of the four fundamental forces — electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces — interact at the
subatomic level (but does not include gravity).
Perhaps the programmer wants to find the underlying nature of reality but can not solve the hardest problem of all: the conundrum at the heart of quantum mechanics,
how can a
subatomic particle be both a
particle and a wave?