The Theory of Everything Trivia Quiz

Answer: Wolfgang Pauli

The Pauli Exclusion Principle essentially states that two fermions cannot be in the same place at the same time. This may seem obvious, but boson particles do not have this property. The most common boson is the photon, the particle which makes up light and electromagnetic radiation. Boson particles explain why "X-rays" and other radiation are able to penetrate matter.

Answer: A quark must bind with another quark

Quarks must bind with other quarks, so you will never find a quark existing independently on its own. The other answers are all false. Even though "lepton" is derived from Greek for "thin/delicate", the tau lepton is much heavier than a quark. Quarks can have negative or positive charge (in fact, leptons cannot have positive charge). And all quarks and leptons have fractional spin -- only bosons have integer spins.

Incidentally, the name "quark" comes from the novel "Finnegan's Wake" by James Joyce. When the Standard Model was first conceived, only three quarks were postulated. The physicist Murray Gell-Mann then decided to name this particle after the birdcall in the book: "Three quarks for Muster Mark".

Answer: Top

The first quarks identified were the up and down quarks, which are used to form protons and neutrons. Then came the strange and charm quarks, which decay into the up and down quarks via the weak force. But where do the strange and charm quarks come from? To explain some experimental discrepancies, the top and bottom quarks were theorized as the predecessors of these quarks. Since top and bottom decay to strange and charm, which decay to up and down, these quark flavors are said to belong to different generations.

Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics when this prediction of theirs was validated by experiments, with the elusive top quark being detected last.

Answer: gluon

A mnemonic for remembering this is that a gluon "glues" together quarks of the appropriate "color" using the strong force. Without this strong force, atomic nuclei would be unable to form, and the very nature of the universe would be different.

Answer: No

No, particles are not immutable. In fact, the weak force (caused by W and Z bosons) can change a particle from one type to another type. Quarks can become other quarks, and leptons can become other leptons. The weak force is the process behind radioactive decay of particles, and nuclear fission.

Answer: the Higgs boson

Although Peter Higgs and several other physicists proposed the Higgs boson in 1964, it took nearly 50 years before a large enough machine, the CERN Large Hadron Collider, was built to detect it. Although informally the boson is said to give particles mass, technically, the boson is the manifestation of a field, which generates mass through its interaction with other particles.

Higgs and Francois Englert won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics when their theory was validated by this discovery. Higgs, an atheist, is said to greatly dislike the popular characterization of his idea as the "God particle".

Answer: The photon

Photons are not only the basis of light, but they also carry the electromagnetic force with them. The technology of the laser uses the process of stimulated emission to excite photons into a coherent beam that can be used to cut matter or send information over fiber-optic cables (the foundation of the Internet).

Answer: charged and neutral

A lepton may have a negative electric charge or a neutral charge. The most common lepton is the electron, which is negatively charged. Neutral-charged leptons are known as neutrinos. Like quarks, leptons are divided into three generations, and the leptons of the oldest generation (the tau and the tau neutrino) are the most difficult to observe, as they decay rapidly into the more stable, younger generations.

Answer: proton

Protons (and neutrons) form the most common types of baryon. A proton is formed from two quarks with +2/3 charge and one quark with -1/3 charge, for a net charge of +1. A neutron is formed from one quark with +2/3 charge and two quarks with -1/3 charge, for a net charge of 0.

Of the wrong answers, a meson is a particle formed from two quarks (a quark and its associated anti-quark). Both electrons and muons are leptons, not quarks.

It is interesting to think about how the Greeks once thought the atom was the smallest unit of matter. Then we discovered how atoms were formed of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Now we know that protons and neutrons themselves are built from quarks.

Answer: gravity

One thing that prevents the Standard Model from truly being a "theory of everything" is its failure to explain gravity. Physicists have theorized another boson called the gravitron which generates gravitic forces, but by 2015, its existence had not been confirmed by experimental observation.