3247: Particle Census
The article discusses an upcoming decennial particle census where physicists will record the locations of all particles in the universe. This process is expected to cause some disruption as the momenta of the particles will become indeterminate. The audience is reassured that while the exact locations will be known, the future positions of the particles will remain uncertain.
- ▪The particle census is scheduled for Tuesday.
- ▪Physicists will document the locations of all particles in the universe.
- ▪The process will lead to indeterminate momenta for the particles.
Explain xkcd files mainly under misc. We currently carry 6 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Explain xkcd |
| Canonical URL | https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3247:_Particle_Census |
| Publication time | 2026-05-18T18:54:40Z |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T19:04:56.969Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T19:04:56.969Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | GdiRmtOk9AA0 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Particle Census|<< Prev#3247 (May 18, 2026) Title text: Remember, your answers to the physics census are confidential; we will not be issuing Pauli exclusion principle citations.|<< PrevRandom Explanation Explanation[edit] This is one of 46 incomplete explanations:This page was created at an UNCERTAIN TIME. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! Trivia[edit] When this comic was uploaded the normal sized image was incorrectly 2x size. Transcript[edit] This is one of 45 incomplete transcripts:Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! [Megan is standing at a lectern, presumably talking to an audience.] Megan: Remember, Tuesday is the decennial particle census.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Explain xkcd.
