Abstract

The discovery of the microworld presented a serious trial for many systems of views held by mankind, including its logic. This world was found to lack the familiar solid bodies, the unchanging particles and interrelations between them, the reflection of which, in one way or another, is the logic of the macroscopic world. What elementary particle physics encountered in the microscopic world seemed illogical: the rest-mass of a particle equals zero; a part that is not smaller than the whole; a particle that in diffraction experiments moved like a wave; and much else that was unusual and strange in the properties of elementary particles. One of these properties was actually so named by physicists — "strangeness."