Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Scientists imagine virtual particles popping in and out of existence to explain how forces transfer between particles.

THE first thing you need to know is that virtual particles, which are impossible to avoid if you want to understand how the fundamental forces of nature animate matter, aren’t really particles at all.

A clever mathematical tool known as virtual particles unlocks the strange and mysterious inner workings of subatomic particles. What happens to these particles within atoms would stay unexplained ...