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:

    The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.
    François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)

    Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
    Erich Fromm (1900–1980)

    She is a prude in her own defence ... under the specious mask of propriety, she conceals the decay of her worn-out charms.
    Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)

    Southern trees bear a strange fruit
    Blood on the leaf and blood at the root
    Black bodies swingin’ in the southern breeze
    Strange fruit hangin’ in the poplar trees.
    Billie Holiday [Eleanor Fagan] (1915–1959)

    When was it that the particles became
    The whole man, that tempers and beliefs became
    Temper and belief and that differences lost
    Difference and were one? It had to be
    In the presence of a solitude of the self....
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)