Breakdown of Atoms

Try this: http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/intro_9_2.html

Look at the section on Half Life

You might also be rememering something about Proton Decay. Proton Decay is predicted by GUT, but has yet to be observed by experiment.

See the following for more on Proton Decay: http://hep.bu.edu/~superk/pdk.html

That's about covered it.
Nice one Rosborne.

I love this stuff

It would be amazing to hear that they found evidence of Proton Decay. I'm also looking forward to confirmation of gravity waves from LIGO. Big stuff.

Photon decay may be the one I'm thinking of, but it didn't have the figures (at least in plain english) on what I was looking for, so it might not be it. Basically the theory was that in some trillion years all atoms would basically decay. May have been the subatomic particles inside the atoms decaying that would cause the atoms to decay, not sure been a long time. Photon decay may be what I'm looking for, would that effect everything in the end?

Thanks for the help guys.

Me too.
I spend a good portion of my life keeping marginally up to date with the papers even though I don't understand the most abstruse aspects of the maths.
Physics is definitely a passion of mine.

We should not confuse photons = electromagnetic waves with proton = nucleus of a hydrogen atom. It is the later that were predicted to decay, but the experiments indicate very long, perhaps never. Neil

From what I've read in a few trillion years every atom in the universe will be an iron atom. A few jillion years after that those atoms will decay and the universe will cease to be.

This is only if the universe is "flat" though.