icle Table”). Bosons are the “field vectors” or force carriers of the four forces. Bosons are particles or “force quanta” produced by charges; there is associated with every charge a boson responsible for the transmission of the actual force associated with the charge. In the quantum mechanical interpretation of modern physics, every force is transmitted by an actual quantized particle. This notion supplants the classical Newtonian idea of “action at a distance” (which even Newton didn’t like). The bosons of the electromagnetic force are “photons”; “gravitons” are the bosons of the gravitational force; “gluons” and mesons are the bosons of the (two-level) strong force; and the very strange “IVBs” (W+. W-, Z, and hypothetical X) are the bosons of the weak force. These weak force bosons are called “Intermediate” because unlike other bosons, they have a large mass, whereas all other bosons are massless. The “W” and “Z” IVBs are about 80-90 times (respectively) more massive than the proton; the hypothetical “X”, presumably responsible for proton decay and the creation of matter itself, is thought to be much more massive.
The huge mass of the IVBs immediately tells us they are very strange particles indeed, because they cannot be made out of the usual nuclear material – quarks and gluons. What then is the “stuff” they are composed of? This is not “atomic matter” in the sense we are familiar with, and these are not particles in the sense we are familiar with, either. The IVBs are particles of interaction only – they are metric catalysts, mediators, or “brokers” which allow and facilitate transformations and decays within and between the “families” of elementary particles, the quarks and leptons, which are respectively the constituents of the nucleus and the electron shell of atomic matter. The “W” IVB is a type of “virtual” particle which exists only during the reaction it catalyzes and is otherwise not seen. Like all virtual particles, the “W” IVB is always potentially present but is actually materialized only within the Heisenberg spacetime limit for virtual reality, or if there is enough energy in the IVB’s immediate vicinity to momentarily bring it into existence.
“Virtual” particles are the creation/discovery of quantum mechanics. The “vacuum” of spacetime is actually full of photons left over from the “Big Bang” – resulting in the 2.7K “cosmic background radiation”. Traveling at velocity “c”, photons are “non-local”, which means they are effectively everywhere simultaneously. Due to the Heisenberg “Uncertainty Principle”, the energy associated with these photons (or with any chosen point in space), will vary due to “quantum fluctuations” – depending on the time scale one chooses to associate with a specific photon or spacetime point. The shorter the time scale, the more energy one is allowed to associate with a particular photon or spacetime point and its “quantum energy fluctuation”. Pick a small enough time and you can associate almost any amount of energy with a specific point or photon, energy sufficient to materialize almost any particle you choose (usually a particle-antiparticle pair due to symmetry conservation). This brief time interval is the “Heisenberg Interval” of “virtual” reality. The energy to produce these virtual particles must be borrowed from the vacuum surrounding their point of manifestation, and this energy must be paid back to the vacuum before its loss is “noticed” by the “police” – the conservation laws – particularly the conservation of energy. (“Cinderella” is one example of a folk tale involving virtual reality and its time limit. Indeed, almost every aspect of modern physics has an intuitively realized cultural counterpart, whether in art, mythology, religion, or the occult and mystical traditions.)
As we go back in time toward the “Big Bang”, the cosmic background radiation (the effective temperature of spacetime) gets hotter and virtual particles become easier to materialize, because there is more energy nearer at hand available to be borrowed – the energy “economy” becomes richer, so borr