• Question: What about matter warps the spacetime around it? How do you define matter or what space is? P.S. Are there any stable, neutral subatomic particles?

    Asked by gummybear10 to Emma, Jimmy, Janet, Niall, Simon on 18 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: James Holloway

      James Holloway answered on 18 Mar 2013:

      Ah I can’t really answer the first two questions, and i’m not sure that theoretical physics is at a stage where it can answer the first one. However I can answer the P.S.

      Electron is stable, but charged so dosn’t count.
      Protons are stable (we believe – if they are unstable they have a lifetime many many times greater than the age of the universe), but again charged.
      Neutrons are neutral but when they are outside a nucleus they are unstable.

      Neutrinos are neutral, they are stable in the sense that they do not have a one way decay channel to a daughter particle – But! they do oscillate from one form to the next. That is to say an electron neutrino will oscillate to either a muon neutrino or a tauon neutrino, which in turn can oscillate back into an electron neutrino.

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