Production and Decay of Strange Particles

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"Production and Decay of Strange Particles" is an episode of the original The Outer Limits television show. It first aired on 20 April 1964, during the first season.

In a nuclear research plant, although the workers wear radiation suits, they are taken over by some odd glowing substance. It fills their suits and causes them to act like puppets.

The episode mentions many modern physics concepts such as neutrinos, antimatter, quasi-stellar objects (at that time just discovered and perhaps mentioned here in TV fiction for the first time) and subatomic particles with the property of "strangeness" (a quantum property of matter which had been named only a few years before by physicists, despite objection at the time that it was no more "strange" or odd than any other property of subatomic particles). The episode name echoes a Physical Review paper of 1956, titled "Cloud-Chamber Study of the Production and Decay of Strange Particles."^[1]