High Science

Getting Small Particle physics attempts to answer two questions: What is the smallest unit of everything? What are the most fundamental building blocks of the universe? How do those building blocks interact to create everything around us? In order to get to the foundation we need to start here, on our scale. Imagine we have a cup of water, and we want to get to the smallest unit of water. So we stick our finger in and take out a drop. We start flicking away water until we're left with a wet finger. Where is the smallest unit? If we zoom into the wet finger, we will find the smallest lump of water. This lump is a molecule: the smallest unit of water that still has the properties of water. Things get weird at this scale, for example, temperature does not exist. So we found the smallest unit of water. But is there something smaller? (Hint: yes) Getting Smaller So the smallest unit of water is actually a combination of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. The thing is, once we break up this combination,