Production and Decay of Strange Particles

List of The Outer Limits episodes

"Production and Decay of Strange Particles" is an episode of the original The Outer Limits television show. It first aired on 20 April 1964, during the first season.

The plot involves workers at a nuclear research plant wearing radiation suits, who are taken over by some odd glowing substance that fills their suits and causes them to act as puppets of the force inside.

Mentioned in the episode are many modern physics concepts such as neutrinos, antimatter, quasi-stellar objects (at that time just discovered and perhaps mentioned here in TV fiction for the first time) and subatomic particles with the property of "strangeness" (a perhaps unfortunately named quantum property of matter which had been chosen a few years before by physicists, despite objection at the time that it was no more "strange" or odd than any other property of subatomic particles). The episode name is close to that of an actual Physical Review paper of 1956, titled "Cloud-Chamber Study of the Production and Decay of Strange Particles."

Read more about Production And Decay Of Strange Particles:  Opening Narration, Plot, Closing Narration, Cast

Famous quotes containing the words production and, production, decay, strange and/or particles:

    Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.
    Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)

    The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.
    Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)

    The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence,—luxury, scepticism, weariness and superstition,—are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
    Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)

    It is a strange enterprise to make respectable people laugh.
    Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)

    In another’s sentences the thought, though it may be immortal, is as it were embalmed, and does not strike you, but here it is so freshly living, even the body of it not having passed through the ordeal of death, that it stirs in the very extremities, and the smallest particles and pronouns are all alive with it. It is not simply dictionary it, yours or mine, but IT.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)