Photoncreateur

More than 2000 years before the atomic age, Greek philosopher Democritus cut up a cheese after a meal with his disciples and wondered whether it could be divided into an infinite number of pieces. Others who shared this preoccupation included Leucippus, Epicurus and Roman Lucretius. Thus arose the concept of the ultimate element, a uniform, single, indivisible substance that was dubbed the "atom", i.e. "the indivisible", by the Greeks.

The centuries passed. Then the atom was found to contain a variety of particles, which subatomic physics undertook to explore. The quest for the ultimate was once again on. Some physicists believed that the indivisible quark would be the ultimate element; still others looked for the even smaller, hypothetical parton. Energy and space-time also came in for their share of scrutiny.

Still nothing was settled. The dogged hunters are dissatisfied with the overfull table of 24 pairs of elementary particles and antiparticles. We are poaching on their territory, something we would not have dared to do if we had not had the appropriate weapons to hand. The table stemming from group theory, combined with similar reasoning establishing a correspondence between it and the elementary particle and antiparticle table, allows us to identify the three elements that apparently constitute the building blocks of the world.

Table of 48 subsets of six permutations of {abc}


Table of 48 elementary particles and antiparticles