Today’s journey into Wikipedia took me into particle physics, where I learned about something called neutral particle oscillation, known less formally as “flavor oscillation”. It’s a condition where certain subatomic particles actually switch spontaneously between their matter and antimatter states. In most cases the switch occurs trillions of times every second, and eventually the particle collapses into a more stable state (usually a different particle, releasing a quanta of energy or another particle).
There was a time long ago when I might have been able to make sense of the quantum mechanical equations related to this:
But that time has long past. Now I just sort of skim the eigenvalue equations and trust that the guys in the white lab coats know what they’re talking about. Pretty cool stuff.