meson

"...this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preference or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data." -Steven Weinberg One of the most fundamental questions we could ever ask about all of existence is "What makes up the Universe?" Image credit: Misti Mountain Observatory. I don't mean "stars and galaxies," like you see above. That might make up the Universe on the largest scales, but that's taking a look at the question of what the fundamental constituents of the Universe compose themselves into. The other side of the…
"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way -- things I had no words for." -Georgia O'Keeffe When it comes to the Universe, it isn't just the stuff that's in it that's important. Image credit: 2MASS Extended Source Catalog (XSC). It's also how all that stuff interacts with itself and everything else. To the best of our knowledge, there are four fundamental forces in the Universe, and they're all essential to our existence. Image credit: Stichting Maharishi University of Management, the Netherlands. Some of them are familiar, like gravitation. On the…