when national geographic imitates the onion

Quantum physics are weird, but they're probably not fill-the-universe-with-galaxy-group-sized-subatomic-particles weird...

Sometimes, when you read articles like this, you feel like you might as well be reading The Onion instead. A universe filled with subatomic particles spanning the same swaths of space as galactic archipelagos? Isn't that an oxymoron of cosmic proportions? Maybe somebody should check on what those physicists are doing in their labs and make sure they're all right?

But believe it or not, there's actually some serious science in the idea that the first neutrinos created after the Big Bang might now be truly immense objects. It just got lost in a writer's search for a catchy headline and a reporting strategy designed to elicit a lot of raised brows.

The question that some physicists have been asking is whether the very first subatomic particles created just a few fractions of a second after the Big Bang, could have been caught up in the rapid expansion of space and time to stretch out into objects billions of light years across.

At first glance, the answer would seem to be a no because as space expands, objects stay the same size and shape as the distance between them increases. As our universe expands, galaxies don't get larger. They just end up farther and farther apart. Why would your garden variety subatomic particle do something different?

And that's where we step into the bizarre world of quantum mechanics. Neutrinos can behave both as waves and particles. In the presence of gravity, they collapse into a form we can identify and try to measure. But even then, their exact size is somewhat fuzzy and depends on a variety of factors. Depending on how you reconcile them and what variables you put into your equations, you can get all sorts of strange and surprising results.

One of these results would be neutrinos being caught up in the post-Bang inflation and stretching out into all sorts of vast blobs that have a tiny mass, no electric charge and would be extremely difficult to find even when they interact with other matter or collapse under the gravitational pull of a galaxy.

Now, if you remember the science news cycle, you know that a story listing a number of possibilities with an enormous list of complex conditions and variables isn't going to be nearly as interesting to the public as one with a contrarian headline touting some bizarre scientific curiosity the same way P.T. Barnum announced his shows. And so we end up with a story that talks about the universe being filled with subatomic particles bigger than clusters of galaxies without putting the hypothesis in the proper perspective.

While there is a note that the concept remains to be backed up by observational evidence, the article makes no mention of whether we could expect similar behavior from other primordial fermions and find electrons or protons as big as the Virgo Supergroup. If it can happen to some ancient neutrinos, couldn't other primordial subatomic particles behave the same way?