Strange matter: One single particle could destroy the whole world!!

This is not an exaggeration. One particle, just one tiny, little particle could destroy the earth as we know it.

But how?! There isn’t anything in the universe that’s so explosive that just one particle could destroy a planet!

Who said anything about explosions? Strange matter doesn’t just push atoms away, it converts everything into more of itself, which in turn converts everything IT touches into more of itself, which… you get the drift.

What the hell is this thing even made of? You know atoms? They’re made of protons, neutrons and electrons which are, in turn, made of quarks. Quarks are so infinitesimally small, that it’s impossible to see them. Strange matter is all these quarks pressurized until they’re ridiculously dense. Like really. So dense that they can’t exist as atoms anymore, which is why they broke down into quarks. A teaspoon full of the stuff would weigh around 3 billion metric tons, minimum.

Not that you can hold this stuff in a teaspoon, of course… this matter breaks any matter it touches into its constituent quarks, and absorbs them. This continues until there’s no more matter left to convert.

There’s a chance that there IS not strange matter in the universe, because the strange matter disappears almost instantly. On the other hand, scientists have discovered at least two possible ‘quark stars’ which they think might be composed entirely out of strange matter.

must read: A man eaten by a python!!

If we assume that every particle of strange matter touches one atom of non-strange matter, the entire earth would be converted into strange matter in about… 3 minutes.

Maybe the reaction’s started on the other side of the globe. Is this really how you imagined spending the last minutes of your life?