Most of us don’t suppose a lot about electrical cost, aside from in these annoying moments when our telephones run out of it. However for physicists, it’s a huge deal. In each atom, negatively charged electrons orbit a nucleus containing positively charged protons, with the entire dance sustained by their mutual attraction. It could be truthful to say, then, that cost is about as elementary because it will get.
This explains why physicists have lengthy been at such pains to know its nature, and for essentially the most half they’ve been profitable. However there’s one query that has all the time hung within the air, unanswered. It appears that evidently the smallest attainable unit of cost is that of an electron – all different naturally occurring particles solely have multiples of this. In nature, you’ll find costs of -1 or +3 or -2, however by no means 0.25. Why is that this?
You may shrug and say that’s simply how the universe is. However in fact, there have all the time been good causes to suspect that fractional costs do exist, even when we haven’t caught one but. And it’s a significantly reside subject at present because of recent insights from string concept, one candidate for a concept of all the things.
Now, experiments are starting on the CERN particle physics lab close to Geneva, Switzerland, to hunt for particles that might have costs simply thousandths that of an electron. If they will discover them, it could…