1. Scientific Theories and Laws
2. The First Decade (1936-1946)
4. The Second Decade (1946-1956)
6. The Third Decade (1956-1966)
8. The Fourth Decade (1966-1976)
10. The Fifth Decade (1976-1986)
12. The Sixth Decade (1986-1996)
14. The Seventh Decade (1996-2006)
15. The Theory of More than Everything
16. The Eighth Decade (2006-2016)
18. The Ninth Decade (2016-2026)
Appendix A Paintings
Appendix B TTOMTE and a Steady State Universe
Appendix C Musical Compositions
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This toss creates the attracting force strong enough to hold all those positive protons together. The pion is called virtual because it lasts for such a short time; it's barely real. Is this strange enough? Maybe; but there's also a weak nuclear force.
What does this weak force do? It sets up a boundary around the proton-neutron bundle, the nucleus, but in spite of this boundary, an atom can still decay in two ways:
First, particles can develop enough energy to break into or out of the nucleus. This process may produce a chain-reaction as it does in stars keeping them cooking, and when a star becomes unbalanced with too much energy, it explodes. The light elements, hydrogen and helium rip apart and combine again into carbon and other heavier elements. The alchemists could have changed one kind of matter into something else; all they had to do was explode a star. Simple.
Second, the chances-are map allows a couple of protons to suddenly escape because of the uncertainty allowed when the time is right. The proton does a quantum leap to the outside of the nucleus which results in radioactivity. We'll describe radioactivity more in Chapter Seven. When a proton leaps, the atom of one kind of element automatically changes into an atom of another kind with no known cause. Even present-day alchemists aren't able to control the change.
We didn't like to have thousands of different kinds of atoms, so we narrowed the number to about one hundred different kinds of elements. Then we got down to three particles which was nice while it lasted. Now a whole bucketful of subatomic, exotic particles has come out of hiding.
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