Data Comes From Papers

There’s a lovely resource that I suspect most non-physicists don’t know about. It’s called the Particle Data Group, and its interactive site PDGLive. If you want to know the most up-to-date information on a subatomic particle, PDGLive has your back. From their home page, you can click on familiar particles like photons (), electrons () or gluons and find the best info experiments have provided on properties like their mass and charge. It’s a great place to get an authoritative number for any particle physics property you’re interested in. Of course, scientists don’t just accept one authoritative answer for anything, even whether Pluto is a planet. That’s why each measurement in PDGLive comes with an arrow you can expand to see a table of past measurements, which you can compare to. Each measurement comes with a link to a source. And each source is not an experiment webpage, or some entry in a database. It’s a document, a publication, a paper. In fact, PDGLive itself is just a website…