Even more interesting than usual

Ah yes, the humble electron; where would we be without it? Well, we wouldn't exist, for one thing.

For over a century the electron was thought to be indivisible - a single particle, incapable of being broken apart. However people used to think of the atom in the same way, until some bright Kiwi threw a bunch of radioactive particles at a bit of metal. Now we have protons, neutrons, bosons, quarks and of course, the electron. And you couldn't get smaller than an electron, could you? Why on earth folks thought this to be the case when ever smaller nuclear particles have been found (by smashing stuff up in a massive tube) is anyone's guess.

So, a few folks have published some work in Science detailing their experiments to split the electron, and it appears to have worked. Not by smashing things up in a massive tube, however. They actually crammed a whole mass of electrons into a very tiny tube, and electrons being electrons, they found each other so abominally repellent that they burst apart, a bit like a Daily Mail reader confronted with an Azerbaijani immigrant. And from this catastrophic fission the Spinon and Holon were released and identified. Pretty cool, huh?

So we've come a long way since the electron was first identified (did you know people used to refer to them as "corpuscles"? Poor, misguided fools, even if they were fellows at Trinity College). But there are still a whole lot of elementary particles and properties still to be identified and analysed. Fermilab still haven't found the Higgs, CERN is about to power up the LHC again, and Gordon Brown is going to eat his own head. Probably.