Yat's a Yotta Years!

You may remember from high school science or a non-turkey WKRP in Cincinnati episode that matter is made up of atoms, which are in turn made up of particles like protons, neutrons and electrons. If you took a little more science or you are a nerd who regularly scours the internet for this kind of stuff, you may have learned that subatomic particles themselves were made up of things called quarks.

And if you sometimes don't sleep and wonder about things like this, you may have asked whether or not atoms would eventually break down and the particles that make them break down as well. Which would be a pretty depressing situation, except that you and I would be physically broken way down past our constituent atoms and probably not capable of depression anymore. How long would that take? Are those particles breaking down now? Even though there are countless numbers of them in the universe, so it would take millions or even billions of years for them all to break down, could you or I happen to roll a cosmic snake-eyes and have a bunch of our atoms break down right here and now?

Apparently not. Scientists at the Borexino detector in Italy experimented to see if they could detect electron decay and predict how long it would take for one to actually break down. Turns out a single electron would take 66,000 "yotta-years" to break down. This comes out to 660,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, or five quintillion times the current age of the universe. In other words, we will probably never see even one electron break down anywhere in the universe for as long as beings exist to detect electrons and see if they are breaking down. So you may strike "death by unexpected subatomic decay" from your list of possible concerns, and Merry Christmas to you!

In an unrelated but kind of also nerdy-cool note, the Borexino detector is what's called a "liquid scintillator," which is a very cool phrase I expect to turn up in a Dr. Who episode, and a couple of the descriptions of this method have the acronyms PC and PPO. This would make it, of course, C-3PO, and all of my nerd circuits are now shot and I will need to have me a little lie-me-down.