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, decay, strange and/or particles:

    ... this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth.
    Jane Addams (1860–1935)

    The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    I dreamed that one had died in a strange place
    Near no accustomed hand;
    And they had nailed the boards above her face....
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    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)