The Fundamental Bricks of Matter: Why Do They Matter?

Neutrinos are the tiniest particles we can think of, they have very small mass, they are extremely abundant, yet they interact very rarely. There are three flavours of neutrinos (electron, muon, tau neutrinos), and since the 1990s we have known that neutrinos can change flavour when they propagate. Neutrinos and antineutrinos (their antimatter counterpart) might change flavour in a different way from each other, and this could explain how the universe evolved to be dominated by matter rather than antimatter.

Deep inside protons and neutrons are quarks and gluons. These elementary particles are described by quantum field theory. The ideas of quantum field theory are remarkably powerful and versatile. Some of these ideas have recently been used to analyse the statistics of words. Computer scientists build large matrices, harvested from large collections of written text, to represent the words. The ideas from quantum field theory allow us to condense and interpret the matrix data, leading to computer programs that can detect relations between words, by placing them in simple geometrical environments