Meet the Chemiballs; The Particularly Spooky Subatomic Particles!

Unlike with the elemental chemiballs where I can assume you are at least vaguely aware of how classic physics works due to living on earth, I can’t with subatomic particles. Most of them obey quantum physics. Evolution, God, the aliens controlling the simulation, whatever you believe in didn’t prepare the human mind for quantum physics. This is one of those Lovecraftian things that humans were not meant to know, are beyond comprehension, and are hazardous to your sanity. If you don’t already get particle physics, I’m not going to change that in a blog article. But I can grossly oversimplify it so you can still enjoy reading it.

• Bosonballs
• Higgsball
• Photonball
• Wball and Zball
• Gluonball
• Quarkballs
• Baryonballs
• Muonball
• Neutrinoballs

The Bosonballs: The Bozo Particles!

Subatomic particles are controlled by the fundamental forces; strong, weak, gravitational, and electromagnetic forces. And those aren’t just some magic. They have a physical presence. Specifically, the forces are carried by the Bosonball family. 

The Higgs Boson; The God Particle!

The Higgs Boson has been called the God Particle because it gives the W and Z bosonballs mass. Which is cool and all, but is it really deific? This doesn’t mean that Higgsball is the force carrier of gravity, it just gives other particles mass that can then interact with gravity, but we don’t really know what gravity is yet. Some people think there may be a Gravitonball, but it has yet to be discovered. 

I’ve drawn a Higgsball wearing a sombrero because the Higgs field is often described as being “Mexican hat shaped”.

Photonball; the Brightest Particle!

Photonball is the force carrier of electromagnetism. You heard that right. Electrons don’t cause electricity, they just exhibit it. Like how protons and neutrons don’t cause gravity but are affected by it. And yes, that does mean that visible light, radiation, magnetism, and electricity are all technically the same thing. Chemical reactions are also caused by electromagnetic interactions between electrons and protons, so throw in chemical bonding as well. Photonball kind of does everything.

The electromagnetic force is longer ranged than the nuclear forces. It causes positively and negatively charged particles to be attracted to each other. So mostly just protons and electrons. 

Photonball and Gluonball are massless particles. Because apparently Higgs Bosonball doesn’t like Photons or Gluons and doesn’t want to give them mass.

You may be familiar with Einstein’s idea of a “cosmic speed” limit. Energy and mass are two states of the same thing, E=MC² is the conversion formula. Getting particle goes the heavier it gets. Specifically, this is 299,792,458 kilometers per second. The faster you go the more energy it takes. The more energy you have the more mass. The more massive you are, the harder it is to go fast. You must be familiar with this vicious cycle after a night at Denny’s. As it turns out, if you have any amount of mass, going 299,792,458km/s requires infinite energy. But since Higgsball doesn’t want to give photons any mass they can go as fast as possible, also known as the light speed.

That said, they can be slowed down depending on what they’re moving through. Light travels slower when traveling through air than through a vacuum.

W and Z Bosons; the Weakest Particles!

The W⁺ Boson, W^– Boson, and Z⁰ Boson (very creatively named) carry the weak force. The weak force tries to push hadrons and the quarkballs they’re made of apart, but it’s weaker than the strong force, so it only causes atoms to fall apart under certain conditions. When that happens we call it nuclear decay.

Gluonball; the Strongest Particle!

Gluonball is responsible for the strong force and lives inside of hadronballs (protons, neutrons, etc). The strong force, as you can guess, is the strongest but only at ranges the size of an atom’s nucleus. Larger composite particles are held together by Streams of point-like gluons are confined inside “flux tubes”.

The Quarkballs: the Most Quirked Up Particles!

There are six known Quarkballs, Upball, Downball, Charmball, Strangeball, Topball, and Bottomball. As a gay, the last two are hilarious to me. Just calling someone a bottom is truly the pinnacle of modern zoomer internet parlance.

Quarkballs are very polyamorous and extraverted. In fact, you basically never find a Quarkball on their own. Quarkballs can bond with Gluonballs to form a hadron, which is like a molecule but smaller and made of quarks.

Quarkballs come in three different “colors”, six if you count their antimatter equivalents. They don’t literally have color. What they have is not something that can be visualized by the human brain. It’s easier to give them a name that functions as an analogy.

In real life, if you mix together red, green, and blue light you get white. This is likely how the pixels in the screen you’re reading this on work. Lots of tiny red, green, and blue lights mix in different ways to make different colors (though some screens work differently). 

Hadronballs need to be white. So you can have a hadron made of a quarkball threesome if there is a blue, green, and red quarkball. Three quark hadrons are known as baryons. Examples of Baryonballs would be protons and neutrons.

Though not all Hadronballs need to have three quarkballs to get white. A meson is a hadron with more or fewer quarks, but usually two. Two quark mesons are made of a quarkball and its antimatter equivalent whose “color” is directly opposite on the “color wheel”. For example, you can have a mesonball made from mixing blue with antiblue (aka; yellow). As you might guess from something made of both matter and antimatter, these aren’t very stable.

The name quark was coined by Gell-Mann. The origins of the name are a bit unclear. He claimed the spelling “quark” was based on the old English word meaning to croak, taken from a passage in Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce because it lines up with the group of three theme. 

“– Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark

And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.”

– James Joyce

But Gell-Mann had already decided on the pronunciation before that, which isn’t even the correct pronunciation of the old word “quark”. He pronounces it as “kwork” and would have spelled it that way. Germanyball thinks he was inspired by the German word “quark”, which means “cheese curd”, but angrier.

The Baryonballs (also Electronball): the Atomic Particles!

Protonballs are like Twitch thots and Electronballs are their simps. The Electronballs want to be near their protonic oshi. The Protonballs like to keep their Electronball at arm’s length so they can exploit their parasocial relationship for their negative charge.

But because Electronballs are so asocial and, uh, “cultured” they’re also repelled from the nucleus and from each other. The competition between opposing forces is why they tend to “orbit” around the atomic nucleus. They have no chance of ever actually marrying their Protonball waifu. Not without the force of a neutron star.

Neutronballs are like the dumb jock that your highschool crush got hitched to. Unlike the Electronball orbiters, Neutronballs actually get to hang out with their Protonball girlfriends in the atomic nucleus. 

Some disgruntled Electronball incels, also known as Ecels or Electroweakmaxxers, claim women only ever go for muscle bound jocks who treat them like shit. But in reality, the Neutronballs know how to shower and don’t quote the communist manifesto in the middle of normal conversations (Neutronballs are political centrists). And in real reality, it’s because they aren’t repelled by electromagnetic forces but are drawn together by the strong nuclear force.

Not to say neutrons aren’t womanizing casanovas. Protons are repelled from each other because they both have positive charges. So it takes the strong attraction from bridging neutrons to hold the nucleus together. Which is to say many Neutronballs have relationships with more than one Protonball. But this can get pretty unstable if there are significantly more or fewer neutrons than protons.

As you’d expect of any insecure jock in a threesome or orgy with an “unfavorable” gender ratio, the weak nuclear force causes them to turn into a Protonball and an Electronball in a process known as beta decay. Only beta males run from uncomfortably bisexual situations. It takes a real ALPHA MALE CHAD to Eiffel tower for his girl (which I believe is like spit roasting but the guys kiss).

Muonball: Electronball’s Fat Twin!

Muonballs are members of the Leptonball family (the same kind of particle as electrons). They have the same properties except they’re less stable and weigh more. So in terms of our simp analogy; they’re the same as electrons but they’re also Reddit mods. This means you can have atoms with one of the electrons replaced by a muon. Being heavier means they orbit closer to the nucleus, shrinking the total size of the atom while making it heavier. This has a number of interesting uses.

Nuclear fusion happens when you force two atoms so close that their atomic nuclei merge into a single bigger nucleus. But it usually takes a tremendous amount of power to do this, such as the heart of a star or a tokamak reactor.

But what if you had an atom so small that it’s basically already in range with another atom, no squishing required? You could do nuclear fusion at room temperature, which could potentially be a better power source than a nuclear reactor and without any radioactive waste. This is known as cold fusion and is the holy grail of scientific achievement.

We actually know how to do cold fusion and have done it before. You just take some Deuteriumballs (an isotope of hydrogen) and shoot them with Muonballs. The Muonballs kick out the Electronballs, creating a much smaller Muonic Deuteriumball. When two Muonic Deuteriumballs come close they fuse into a Heliumball, and the Muonball is shot out to begin the cycle again.

Unfortunately, the amount of energy needed to make a muon is more than it generates through this method. Not only do they decay after a while, but there’s a chance of them getting stuck in the helium atoms creating a Muonic Heliumball. Cool party trick though.

The Neurinoballs; the Ghost Particles!

Neutrinos, which are neutrally charged leptons, have often been known as the “ghost particle” because they can phase through solid matter. When I say “phase through matter” I don’t mean that neutrinos are intangible or anything. They’re just very smol. Just smol little cute baby trick-or-treaters with sheets over their heads.

Remember that matter is actually almost entirely empty space. The protons, neutrons, and electrons are all very small and orbit a relatively far distance away from each other. Well, neutrinos are so smol that there is almost always an exceedingly low chance of them hitting anything.

It also helps that neutrinos, having a neutral charge, are not affected by the electromagnetic force. That’s what I really mean by their size. With no electric charge, they pretty much need a direct hit on the nucleus to be affected in any way. It’s like shooting in a random direction and hitting the bullseye at the end of a football field in the next city over. Electronballs and photonballs have a much larger “effective size” since they just need to get near the nucleus to be affected.

Photonballs produced at the center of the sun take something like 10,000 years to escape because they need to take a drunkard’s walk out. Then it takes them about 8 minutes to get to earth. But neutrinos take a pretty straight path out. In fact, about 65 billion solar neutrinos are passing through each square centimeter (about the size of your fingernail) right now!

Addendum;

I wanted to cover “spooky action at a distance” in this article, because it’s Spooky Month, but I still don’t understand entanglement well enough to confidently teach it. Maybe sometime in the *distant* future, I’ll write a sequel. Then I could also cover wave-particle duality, that everything is made of waveforms, tau, exotic hadrons, exotic elements, the incompleteness of the standard model, etc.

I drew all these. As I am a firm believer in freedom of info on the internet, I give anyone permission to do whatever they want with them. Copy, repost, modify, etc, I don’t care.

These are all poor-quality Jpegs because I value the page load speed of mobile users, and also because of a subversive plot to direct people to my social media. For higher quality versions check out this Reddit post. For more Chemiball stuff, check out r/Chemiballs. This is a shockingly obscure community and deserves more attention.