A Breakthrough in Measuring the Building Blocks of Nature

n a recent experiment done at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, in Germany, physicist Alexey Grinin and his colleagues came a step closer to resolving one of the more significant puzzles to have arisen in particle physics over the past decade. The puzzle is this: Ordinarily, when you set about measuring the size of something, you’d expect to get the same answer no matter what you use to measure it—a soda can has the diameter it does whether you measure it with a tape measure or callipers (provided these are properly calibrated, of course). Something must be amiss if your attempts to measure the can return different answers depending on the equipment, yet this is precisely what’s happened over multiple attempts to measure the spatial extent of a proton. What’s potentially at could be heralding the existence of new forces or particles.