It was at about this moment, say 1930, in the history of the physics of fundamental particles that serious attempts to visualize the processes in terms of everyday notions were abandoned in favour of mathematical formalisms. Instead of seeking modified procedures from which the awkward, unobservable infinities had been banished, the thrust was toward devising prescriptions for calculating what observable processes could occur and how frequently and how quickly they would occur. An empty cavity which would be described by a classical physicist as capable of maintaining electromagnetic waves of various frequencies, ν, and arbitrary amplitude now remains empty (zero-point oscillation being set aside as irrelevant) except insofar as photons, of energy hν, are excited within it. Certain mathematical operators have the power to convert the description of the assembly of photons into the description of a new assembly, the same as the first except for the addition or removal of one. These are called creation or annihilation operators, and it need not be emphasized that the operations are performed on paper and in no way describe a laboratory operation having the same ultimate effect. They serve, however, to express such physical phenomena as the emission of a photon from an atom when it makes a transition to a state of lower energy. The development of these techniques, especially after their supplementation with the procedure of renormalization (which systematically removes from consideration various infinite energies that naive physical models throw up with embarrassing abundance), has resulted in a rigorously defined procedure that has had dramatic successes in predicting numerical results in close agreement with experiment. It is sufficient to cite the example of the magnetic moment of the electron. According to Dirac’s relativistic theory, the electron should possess a magnetic moment whose strength he predicted to be exactly one Bohr magneton (eh/4πm, or 9.27 × 10⁻²⁴ joule per tesla). In practice, this has been found to be not quite right, as, for instance, in the experiment of Lamb and Rutherford mentioned earlier; more recent determinations give 1.0011596522 Bohr magnetons. Calculations by means of the theory of quantum electrodynamics give 1.0011596525 in impressive agreement.

This account represents the state of the theory in about 1950, when it was still primarily concerned with problems related to the stable fundamental particles, the electron and the proton, and their interaction with electromagnetic fields. Meanwhile, studies of cosmic radiation at high altitudes—those conducted on mountains or involving the use of balloon-borne photographic plates—had revealed the existence of the pi-meson (pion), a particle 273 times as massive as the electron, which disintegrates into the mu-meson (muon), 207 times as massive as the electron, and a neutrino. Each muon in turn disintegrates into an electron and two neutrinos. The pion has been identified with the hypothetical particle postulated in 1935 by the Japanese physicist Yukawa Hideki as the particle that serves to bind protons and neutrons in the nucleus. Many more unstable particles have been discovered in recent years. Some of them, just as in the case of the pion and the muon, are lighter than the proton, but many are more massive. An account of such particles is given in the article subatomic particle.

The term particle is firmly embedded in the language of physics, yet a precise definition has become harder as more is learned. When examining the tracks in a cloud-chamber or bubble-chamber photograph, one can hardly suspend disbelief in their having been caused by the passage of a small charged object. However, the combination of particle-like and wavelike properties in quantum mechanics is unlike anything in ordinary experience, and, as soon as one attempts to describe in terms of quantum mechanics the behaviour of a group of identical particles (e.g., the electrons in an atom), the problem of visualizing them in concrete terms becomes still more intractable. And this is before one has even tried to include in the picture the unstable particles or to describe the properties of a stable particle like the proton in relation to quarks. These hypothetical entities, worthy of the name particle to the theoretical physicist, are apparently not to be detected in isolation, nor does the mathematics of their behaviour encourage any picture of the proton as a molecule-like composite body constructed of quarks. Similarly, the theory of the muon is not the theory of an object composed, as the word is normally used, of an electron and two neutrinos. The theory does, however, incorporate such features of particle-like behaviour as will account for the observation of the track of a muon coming to an end and that of an electron starting from the end point. At the heart of all fundamental theories is the concept of countability. If a certain number of particles is known to be present inside a certain space, that number will be found there later, unless some have escaped (in which case they could have been detected and counted) or turned into other particles (in which case the change in composition is precisely defined). It is this property, above all, that allows the idea of particles to be preserved.

Undoubtedly, however, the term is being strained when it is applied to photons that can disappear with nothing to show but thermal energy or be generated without limit by a hot body so long as there is energy available. They are a convenience for discussing the properties of a quantized electromagnetic field, so much so that the condensed-matter physicist refers to the analogous quantized elastic vibrations of a solid as phonons without persuading himself that a solid really consists of an empty box with particle-like phonons running about inside. If, however, one is encouraged by this example to abandon belief in photons as physical particles, it is far from clear why the fundamental particles should be treated as significantly more real, and, if a question mark hangs over the existence of electrons and protons, where does one stand with atoms or molecules? The physics of fundamental particles does indeed pose basic metaphysical questions to which neither philosophy nor physics has answers. Nevertheless, the physicist has confidence that his constructs and the mathematical processes for manipulating them represent a technique for correlating the outcomes of observation and experiment with such precision and over so wide a range of phenomena that he can afford to postpone deeper inquiry into the ultimate reality of the material world.