The God Particle
Excerpts from the book, God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? by Leon Lederman:
"We have absolutely no data on the beginning of the universe. None, zero. We don't know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billionth of a trillionth of a second."
"In the beginning, there was a void. And then the nothingness exploded."
"Right after the Big Bang, space and time boiled and foamed as black holes formed and dissolved."
"The Greek philosopher Democritus called the smallest unit of existence the atomos ."
"At the beginning of the universe there was no complex matter like we know it today. This is because the searing heat of the early universe did not allow the formation of composite objects; such objects, if formed by transient collisions, would be instantly decomposed into their most primitive constituents. There was perhaps one kind of particle and one force -- or even a unified particle/force -- and the laws of physics. "
"Metaphor for the physics of fundamental particles: Suppose we are given the task of discovering the most basic elements of a library. What would we do? First, we might think of books in their various subject categories: history, science, biography. Or perhaps we would organize them by size: thick, thin, tall, short. After considering many such diversions we realize that books are complex objects that can be readily subdivided. So we look inside. Chapters, paragraphs, and sentences are quickly dismissed as inelegant and complex constituents. Words! Here we recall that on a table near the entrance there is a fat catalogue of all the words in the library--the dictionary. By following certain rules of behavior, which we call grammar, we can use the dictionary words to compose all the books in the library. But there are so many words. Further reflection would lead us to letters, since words are 'cuttable.' Now we have it! Twenty-six letters can make the tens of thousands of words, and they can in turn make the millions (billions?) of books. Now we must introduce an additional set of rules: spelling, to constrain the combinations of letters. Without the intercession of a very young critic we might publish our discovery prematurely. A young critic would say, smugly, no doubt, "You don't need twenty-six letters, Grandpa. All you need is a zero and a one." Now if it makes no sense to take apart the 0 or the 1, we have discovered the primordial, a-tomic components of the library."
"In an accelerator, the 'debris' from a collision between a proton and an antiproton is captured electronically by a three-story-tall, $60 million detector. Here, the evidence, the "seeing", is tens of thousands of sensors that develop an electrical impulse as a particle passes. All of these impulses are fed through hundreds of thousands of wires to electronic data processors. The hot collision can generate as many as seventy particles, each of which can be "captured" by various sections of the detector."
"Thomas Huxley, 'The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful belief by an ugly fact.'"
"Theorists tend to be arrogant. During...I solemnly cautioned our theory group against arrogance. At least one took me seriously. I'll never forget the prayer I overheard emanating from him, 'Dear Lord, forgive me the sin of arrogance, and Lord, by arrogance I mean the following...'"
"Since we are using numbers that are either very large or very small, we use scientific notation. For instance, instead of writing one million as 1,000,000, we write it like this 10^6. That means 1 followed by 6 zeros, which is the approximate cost of running the US government for about 20 seconds. The universe is 10^18 seconds old. 10^7 seconds is about four months, 10 ^9 is about thirdy years. The smallest unit of measurement today is about 10^-17 cm, which is the distance a Z^0 (zee zero) can travel before it departs our world. The size of a superstring is 10^-35 cm. The radius of the universe is about 10^28 cm."
"My dream was to live to see all of physics reduced to an elegant formula that could fit on a t-shirt."
The Mysterious Mr. Higgs
"There is one thing standing in the way of such a t-shirt ending for physics, one villain who refuses to be caught. And what a villain! The biggest villain of all time! There is, we believe, a wraith-like presence throughout the universe that is keeping us from understanding the true nature of matter. This invisible barrier that keeps us from knowing the truth is call the Higgs field. Its tentacles reach into every corner of the universe, and its scientific and philosophical implications raise large goose bumps on the skin of a physicist. The Higgs field works its black magic through--what else?--a particle. This particle is called the Higgs boson."
"The Higgs boson is the primary reason for building the Super Collider. Only the SSC will have the energy necessary to produce and detect the Higgs boson. The boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that i have given it a nickname: the God Particle. Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one..."
"Electrons are particles of matter. They belong to the lepton family. Quarks and leptons make up matter (six of each type, six flavors). Photons, gluons, W's, Z's, and gravitons make up the forces. The quark is point-like. It has no dimesion, and therefore no shape. It is a mathematical point, and therefore the issue of solidity is moot. The apparent solidity of matter depends on the details of how quarks combine with one another." [Me: Irreducible points, like a Cantor set or Sierpinski Triangle.]
"There is a strong force between quarks, a very curious kind of force that behaves very differently from the electrical forces. This force is composed of gluons. Gauge bosons carry information about the force from particle A to particle B and back again to A. Gauge bosons are force carriers, mediators of the force which determine behavior. Photons carry the electromagnetic force. The strong force is carried by zero-mass gluons, and have an infinite reach; the weak force is carried by W and Z heavy-particles, and have a short reach; gravitons carry gravity, but we don't know anything about them. Quarks are building blocks of a large class of objects called hadrons. That's the greek word for 'heavy'. It takes three quarks to make a proton, itself a type of hadron. "
"There are twelve basic particles of matter, six quarks, six leptons. "
"But the trick is to get down to one a-tom, one fundamental unit that cannot be further cut. That is where the particle accelerator comes in."
"The problem is that, even though the quarks are all point-like, dimensionless, they have mass. They shouldn't. The sensible theories predicted they wouldn't, but they do."
"We suspect the mass comes from a field called the Higgs field. It pervades all of space, the Apeiron, cluttering up the void, tugging on points, making them heavy. The field is represented by a particle called the Higgs boson. We haven't found it yet. It exists only in our math. "
"Why do we think it exists? Because it has to exist. The quarks, the leptons, the four known forces--none of these make sense unless there is a massive field distorting what we see, skewing our experimental results. If we don't find it, everything crumbles. Our theories, our standard model, all if it will be next to worthless. "
"The SSC is built to go after the Higgs field, to capture the Higgs particle. What evidence do we have that it exists? None so far, zero. In fact, outside of pure reason, the evidence would convince most sensible physicists that it doesn't exist."
"When we collide these particles, they will release about 4 billion tetravolts, TeV, which is a little less than the energy released when you strike a match. However, this energy will be concentrated in a few particles, not 10^21 atoms like a match."
"How does the accelerator work? One, phase stability, which error corrects for the trajectory of a particle. Two, strong focusing, which provides stable acceleration, involves shaping the magnetic fields that guide the particles so that they are held much closer to an ideal orbit where the oscillations are kept to tiny amplitudes around the ideal orbit. This allowed the accelerator to get bigger. The third breakthrough was cascade acceleration, where it is inefficient to do high energy with one machine. This uses a sequence of accelerators, each optimized for a particular energy interval. These are like gears on a sports car. The fourth breakthrough was superconductivity. It was discovered that at extremely low temperatures, certain metals lost all resistance to electricity. A loop of wire at that temperature would carry a current forever with no use of energy. To get this temperature, we use liquid Helium, which is a true liquid at 5 degrees above Abs. Zero (everything else solidifies at this temp) to cool wires made of special alloys."
"The anti-proton (p-bars) are focused into a magnetic ring called the debuncher ring, where they are processed, organized, and compressed, then transferred to the accumulator ring. Storage is a delicate affair, because when antimatter comes into contact with matter--they annihilate each other. On milligram of antiprotons would contain about as much energy as two tons of oil, but it would take about a few million years at the present rate to produce that much."
"Because of their volatility, the p-bars must be kept orbiting extremely close to the center of the vacuum tube. The quality of the vacuum must be extraordinary--the best nothing that money can buy."
"After accumulation and compression, which takes ten hours, we are ready to inject the p-bars back into the accelerator. A tense countdown ensues to make sure that every voltage every current, every magnet, and every switch is correct. The p-bars are zapped into the main ring, where they circulate counterclockwise because of their negative charge. They are accelerated to a certain speed, then put into the Tevatron collider, where the protons are waiting, circulating clockwise. Both proton and p-bar beams are accelerated further. The final step is the "squeeze." "Squeeze" energizes special superconducting quadrupole magnets that compress beam diameters from soda straws to human hairs. This increases the density, and collision is ensured."
"Accelerators are the largest machines our civilization has ever built. They are our pyramids."
"Quarks have asymptotic freedom. The closer one quark is to another, the weaker the strong force. The farther away, the stronger. This means that there are no such thing as free quarks. Close together, they are almost free."
The God Particle at Last
"In the influence of the Higgs field, all particles suckle energy and absorb this energy and become massive. Once a particle has mass, it travels at less than the speed of light. The Higgs breaks the symmetry of nothingness by creating differences, generating strangeness, and hiding unity. Mass is not an intrinsic property of particles, but a property acquired by the interaction of particles and their environment. The Higgs is a spin-zero boson. Spin implies directionality in space, but the Higgs field exists at every location with no directionality. "In the beginning there was a Higgs field." The immense potential energy of the Higgs field created a "false vacuum" in the beginning, and the transition to a true vacuum released this energy to create particles and radiation, and to drive inflation, which is the increase in the difference between nothing and something, all at the enormous temperature of the beginning."
"Having donated all of its energy to the creation of particles, the Higgs field retires temporarily, reappearing later to supervise the increasing complexity as the forces and particles continued to differentiate. [Me: And on the seventh day...] Inflation separated the close regions of space into causally disconnected regions."
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. "
"We have absolutely no data on the beginning of the universe. None, zero. We don't know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billionth of a trillionth of a second."
"In the beginning, there was a void. And then the nothingness exploded."
"Right after the Big Bang, space and time boiled and foamed as black holes formed and dissolved."
"The Greek philosopher Democritus called the smallest unit of existence the atomos ."
"At the beginning of the universe there was no complex matter like we know it today. This is because the searing heat of the early universe did not allow the formation of composite objects; such objects, if formed by transient collisions, would be instantly decomposed into their most primitive constituents. There was perhaps one kind of particle and one force -- or even a unified particle/force -- and the laws of physics. "
"Metaphor for the physics of fundamental particles: Suppose we are given the task of discovering the most basic elements of a library. What would we do? First, we might think of books in their various subject categories: history, science, biography. Or perhaps we would organize them by size: thick, thin, tall, short. After considering many such diversions we realize that books are complex objects that can be readily subdivided. So we look inside. Chapters, paragraphs, and sentences are quickly dismissed as inelegant and complex constituents. Words! Here we recall that on a table near the entrance there is a fat catalogue of all the words in the library--the dictionary. By following certain rules of behavior, which we call grammar, we can use the dictionary words to compose all the books in the library. But there are so many words. Further reflection would lead us to letters, since words are 'cuttable.' Now we have it! Twenty-six letters can make the tens of thousands of words, and they can in turn make the millions (billions?) of books. Now we must introduce an additional set of rules: spelling, to constrain the combinations of letters. Without the intercession of a very young critic we might publish our discovery prematurely. A young critic would say, smugly, no doubt, "You don't need twenty-six letters, Grandpa. All you need is a zero and a one." Now if it makes no sense to take apart the 0 or the 1, we have discovered the primordial, a-tomic components of the library."
"In an accelerator, the 'debris' from a collision between a proton and an antiproton is captured electronically by a three-story-tall, $60 million detector. Here, the evidence, the "seeing", is tens of thousands of sensors that develop an electrical impulse as a particle passes. All of these impulses are fed through hundreds of thousands of wires to electronic data processors. The hot collision can generate as many as seventy particles, each of which can be "captured" by various sections of the detector."
"Thomas Huxley, 'The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful belief by an ugly fact.'"
"Theorists tend to be arrogant. During...I solemnly cautioned our theory group against arrogance. At least one took me seriously. I'll never forget the prayer I overheard emanating from him, 'Dear Lord, forgive me the sin of arrogance, and Lord, by arrogance I mean the following...'"
"Since we are using numbers that are either very large or very small, we use scientific notation. For instance, instead of writing one million as 1,000,000, we write it like this 10^6. That means 1 followed by 6 zeros, which is the approximate cost of running the US government for about 20 seconds. The universe is 10^18 seconds old. 10^7 seconds is about four months, 10 ^9 is about thirdy years. The smallest unit of measurement today is about 10^-17 cm, which is the distance a Z^0 (zee zero) can travel before it departs our world. The size of a superstring is 10^-35 cm. The radius of the universe is about 10^28 cm."
"My dream was to live to see all of physics reduced to an elegant formula that could fit on a t-shirt."
The Mysterious Mr. Higgs
"There is one thing standing in the way of such a t-shirt ending for physics, one villain who refuses to be caught. And what a villain! The biggest villain of all time! There is, we believe, a wraith-like presence throughout the universe that is keeping us from understanding the true nature of matter. This invisible barrier that keeps us from knowing the truth is call the Higgs field. Its tentacles reach into every corner of the universe, and its scientific and philosophical implications raise large goose bumps on the skin of a physicist. The Higgs field works its black magic through--what else?--a particle. This particle is called the Higgs boson."
"The Higgs boson is the primary reason for building the Super Collider. Only the SSC will have the energy necessary to produce and detect the Higgs boson. The boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that i have given it a nickname: the God Particle. Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one..."
"Electrons are particles of matter. They belong to the lepton family. Quarks and leptons make up matter (six of each type, six flavors). Photons, gluons, W's, Z's, and gravitons make up the forces. The quark is point-like. It has no dimesion, and therefore no shape. It is a mathematical point, and therefore the issue of solidity is moot. The apparent solidity of matter depends on the details of how quarks combine with one another." [Me: Irreducible points, like a Cantor set or Sierpinski Triangle.]
"There is a strong force between quarks, a very curious kind of force that behaves very differently from the electrical forces. This force is composed of gluons. Gauge bosons carry information about the force from particle A to particle B and back again to A. Gauge bosons are force carriers, mediators of the force which determine behavior. Photons carry the electromagnetic force. The strong force is carried by zero-mass gluons, and have an infinite reach; the weak force is carried by W and Z heavy-particles, and have a short reach; gravitons carry gravity, but we don't know anything about them. Quarks are building blocks of a large class of objects called hadrons. That's the greek word for 'heavy'. It takes three quarks to make a proton, itself a type of hadron. "
"There are twelve basic particles of matter, six quarks, six leptons. "
"But the trick is to get down to one a-tom, one fundamental unit that cannot be further cut. That is where the particle accelerator comes in."
"The problem is that, even though the quarks are all point-like, dimensionless, they have mass. They shouldn't. The sensible theories predicted they wouldn't, but they do."
"We suspect the mass comes from a field called the Higgs field. It pervades all of space, the Apeiron, cluttering up the void, tugging on points, making them heavy. The field is represented by a particle called the Higgs boson. We haven't found it yet. It exists only in our math. "
"Why do we think it exists? Because it has to exist. The quarks, the leptons, the four known forces--none of these make sense unless there is a massive field distorting what we see, skewing our experimental results. If we don't find it, everything crumbles. Our theories, our standard model, all if it will be next to worthless. "
"The SSC is built to go after the Higgs field, to capture the Higgs particle. What evidence do we have that it exists? None so far, zero. In fact, outside of pure reason, the evidence would convince most sensible physicists that it doesn't exist."
"When we collide these particles, they will release about 4 billion tetravolts, TeV, which is a little less than the energy released when you strike a match. However, this energy will be concentrated in a few particles, not 10^21 atoms like a match."
"How does the accelerator work? One, phase stability, which error corrects for the trajectory of a particle. Two, strong focusing, which provides stable acceleration, involves shaping the magnetic fields that guide the particles so that they are held much closer to an ideal orbit where the oscillations are kept to tiny amplitudes around the ideal orbit. This allowed the accelerator to get bigger. The third breakthrough was cascade acceleration, where it is inefficient to do high energy with one machine. This uses a sequence of accelerators, each optimized for a particular energy interval. These are like gears on a sports car. The fourth breakthrough was superconductivity. It was discovered that at extremely low temperatures, certain metals lost all resistance to electricity. A loop of wire at that temperature would carry a current forever with no use of energy. To get this temperature, we use liquid Helium, which is a true liquid at 5 degrees above Abs. Zero (everything else solidifies at this temp) to cool wires made of special alloys."
"The anti-proton (p-bars) are focused into a magnetic ring called the debuncher ring, where they are processed, organized, and compressed, then transferred to the accumulator ring. Storage is a delicate affair, because when antimatter comes into contact with matter--they annihilate each other. On milligram of antiprotons would contain about as much energy as two tons of oil, but it would take about a few million years at the present rate to produce that much."
"Because of their volatility, the p-bars must be kept orbiting extremely close to the center of the vacuum tube. The quality of the vacuum must be extraordinary--the best nothing that money can buy."
"After accumulation and compression, which takes ten hours, we are ready to inject the p-bars back into the accelerator. A tense countdown ensues to make sure that every voltage every current, every magnet, and every switch is correct. The p-bars are zapped into the main ring, where they circulate counterclockwise because of their negative charge. They are accelerated to a certain speed, then put into the Tevatron collider, where the protons are waiting, circulating clockwise. Both proton and p-bar beams are accelerated further. The final step is the "squeeze." "Squeeze" energizes special superconducting quadrupole magnets that compress beam diameters from soda straws to human hairs. This increases the density, and collision is ensured."
"Accelerators are the largest machines our civilization has ever built. They are our pyramids."
"Quarks have asymptotic freedom. The closer one quark is to another, the weaker the strong force. The farther away, the stronger. This means that there are no such thing as free quarks. Close together, they are almost free."
The God Particle at Last
"In the influence of the Higgs field, all particles suckle energy and absorb this energy and become massive. Once a particle has mass, it travels at less than the speed of light. The Higgs breaks the symmetry of nothingness by creating differences, generating strangeness, and hiding unity. Mass is not an intrinsic property of particles, but a property acquired by the interaction of particles and their environment. The Higgs is a spin-zero boson. Spin implies directionality in space, but the Higgs field exists at every location with no directionality. "In the beginning there was a Higgs field." The immense potential energy of the Higgs field created a "false vacuum" in the beginning, and the transition to a true vacuum released this energy to create particles and radiation, and to drive inflation, which is the increase in the difference between nothing and something, all at the enormous temperature of the beginning."
"Having donated all of its energy to the creation of particles, the Higgs field retires temporarily, reappearing later to supervise the increasing complexity as the forces and particles continued to differentiate. [Me: And on the seventh day...] Inflation separated the close regions of space into causally disconnected regions."
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. "
posted by John Aristides at 2/16/2007 12:07:00 PM
1 Comments:
Our reach ever exceeds our grasp. Mind, consciousness, precedes our perception and formulation. "Gaze steadfastly at stars distant to the eye yet present to the mind." A kind of Universality? What kind of world is it that the mind is centered everywhere, bounded nowhere? Pointless? Its a device. God is that by which we enjoy universality. Sentient life is that by which God enjoys individuality. He confers individuality on us(using the Higgs to break the symmetry of nothingness?). We confer on him individuality. He descends into matter in order to reemerge a self realized being. The Word made Flesh; the story of Christ.
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