Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The particles that are in ...

A clever mathematical tool known as virtual particles unlocks the strange and mysterious inner workings of subatomic particles. What happens to these particles within atoms would stay unexplained ...

Every time I write about particle physics, I encounter a moment of uncertainty about a quantity that, at first glance, ought to be clear. How many kinds of elementary particles should I say there are?