For thousands of years, people have wondered what the Universe is made of and if there is a “smallest thing” from which everything else is made. Today, we call this area of science “Particle Physics.”

In the late 19th and 20th centuries, research led to major new understandings of the way atoms work. In the process, hundreds of new subatomic particles were found. But the way in which these particles behave is often very strange.

This course is the story of these discoveries and understandings, which led to the development of quantum physics and the standard model of particle physics. We’ll meet lots of interesting people and explore their experiments and see how the current understanding of what the smallest thing is began to develop.


LLI Coordinator: Jo Anne Renton