by John Cowley

Created on: August 07, 2008   Last Updated: August 09, 2008

"What are little girls made of?"

The traditional answer found in the nursery rhyme is "sugar and spice and all things nice". In other words little girls are made of bits and pieces of things, as are little boys although apparently not such nice things. When we take the next step and ask what such things are made of we enter the realm of physics and elementary particles, of molecules and atoms and the like. In fact atoms used to be considered the smallest indivisible particles of matter, of all things, living and non living. With dramatic and sometimes terrifying consequences we have discovered that it is possible to split atoms and produce even smaller particles such as protons, neutrons, electrons plus a myriad other tiny particles and huge quantities of energy. Further than this, it would seem that even protons and neutrons could possibly be split into theoretical particles called quarks, the ultimate bits of matter. Quarks, so named from a passage in the book Finnegan's Wake', are thought to exist only in two dimensions and have weird names like up' and down' and charm' and strange'. If this isn't strange enough, some quantum physicists question whether matter is really made up particles at all. A highly respected physicist from Berkeley, Henry Stapp, suggests that matter often behaves as though it consists of bits of knowledge rather than rocklike' particles.

It all sounds a bit more like science fiction than science fact. How is it possible for elementary particles to behave like bits of knowledge? In an experiment conducted over the Swiss telephone exchange two paired electrons were separated and sent in different directions at close to the speed of light. It was found that an action performed on one member of the pair, comparable to flipping a coin, was instantly translated to the other member of the pair. It was as if the electrons had instant knowledge of each other. This surprising result defies the idea put forward by Einstein that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. In a similar quite famous experiment into the duality of light, sometimes behaving as particles sometimes as waves, it was found that paired photons, light particles; appear to share instantaneous knowledge of each other even should they be separated by galactic distances. Such are the happenings in the world of quantum physics.

Quantum physics is the science of the very small, so small in fact that no one has ever actually seen' the individual particles themselves and their

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