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Photon
A positively charged particle in the nucleus of an atom.
Proton Quotes in A Brief History of Time
The A Brief History of Time quotes below are all either spoken by Proton or refer to Proton. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 5 Quotes
We now know that neither the atoms nor the protons and neutrons within them are indivisible. So the question is: what are the truly elementary particles, the basic building blocks from which everything is made?
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Humans will keep digging for the answers behind the answers. After finding the atom, scientists found the proton and neutron, which form the nucleus of the atom. But that was not far enough. Scientists also found that these smaller particles were composed of quarks, as well as the characteristics of these even smaller particles. This particular search is symptomatic of humanity’s deeper longing for a greater understanding of the universe, everything in it, and how it all works. It seems scientists will not stop digging until the final answers, to everything, are found and understood.
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Proton Term Timeline in A Brief History of Time
The timeline below shows where the term Proton appears in A Brief History of Time. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 5
...has no charge) made up the nucleus of an atom along with the previously discovered proton, and later won the Nobel Prize for his discovery.
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...in three “colors”: red, green, and blue. These names are just labels. Quarks form the proton, electron, and neutron. Scientists can create other particles from quarks, but these are unstable.
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...size of the universe. But scientists can test low-energy outcomes of the theory. For example, protons could spontaneously decay into smaller particles. But the probability of that is very low, and...
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...beings came to be is possibly due to the reverse process—the production of quarks and protons. If there were regions of anti-matter (made of anti-particles), there would be a lot of...
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Chapter 6
...rather than collapsing. Landau also showed that stars supported by the exclusion principle acting between protons and neutrons would become neutron stars, which are much smaller and denser than white dwarves.
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Chapter 8
...have been made up of photons, electrons, and neutrinos, along with their anti-particles, and some protons and neutrons. As the universe cooled, electron and anti-electron pairs would annihilate each other at...
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...hundred seconds after the big bang, the universe’s temperature would be 1 billion degrees, meaning protons and neutrons could not escape the strong nuclear force and began to form into the...
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