Fundamental Physics
in the Third Millenium
For my own enjoyment - and hopefully the
enjoyment of others - I have put together some resources for anyone who
wishes to understand - at a basic level - the standard model of
particle physics as well as nuclear physics. I've written a short
introduction (44 pages, see below) and collected several articles and
web sites that are related.
The primary impetus for this project was
a STEM workshop held at ERAU for Volusia county teachers on 2-3 Aug 2011.
I
gave
one
of
the
presentations titled "Fundamental Physics in the Third
Millenium."
Rather than hand out copies of all the writings that I mentioned, I
decided to make them available online, so that they could be accessed
by anyone at any time. Hopefully even those who were not at the
workshop will be able to get something out of the collection on this
web page.
Enjoy!
---
Anthony
Reynolds
First, here is my short
introduction to elementary particles and nuclear physics:
Fundamental
Physics
in
the
Third
Millenium
Here are some nice references:
The periodic table version
for printing (dynamic version)
Nubase
2003 (a detailed list of nuclear properties of all known
nuclei)
CODATA values
(list
of
the
current
values
-
with error bars - of the known fundamental
constants)
Fundamental
particles (posters depicting the standard model - quarks and
leptons)
Here are a few well-written articles,
for those who wish to delve deeper:
The
Discovery
of
the
Top
Quark (a Scientific
American article)
What
is
an
elementary
particle? (an article by Nobel-prize winner
Steven Weinberg)
Does
Dark
Matter
Really
Exist? (a Scientific American article)
Cosmic
Asymmetry
between
Matter
and
Antimatter (article by Nobel-prize winner
Frank Wilczek on why the universe is made of matter)
And finally, some miscellany:
Nobel
prizes (all the physics Nobel prize winners)
Hyperphysics
(a hyperlinked physics textbook)
Elementary
Particles
Color
Theory
Baryons
Discovery
of
Sigma
(bottom)
baryons
A few final thoughts on what we
are
trying to do in science:
"One of man's enduring hopes has been to find a few simple general laws
that would explain why nature with all its seeming complexity and
variety is the way it is. At the present moment the closest we
can come to a unified view of nature is a description in terms of
elementary particles and their mutual interactions."
- Steven Weinberg, Scientific
American, July 1974
Philip Anderson's "reply" to this is his 1972 Science article "More is Different," where he
argues that at each scale, new fundamental laws "emerge."
Mitchell Feigenbaum [mathematical physicist] thinks that particle
physicists are overly concerned with finding theories that are merely
true, in the sense that they account for the available data; the goal
of science should be to generate "thoughts in your head" that "stand a
high chance of being new or exciting. There isn't any security by
knowing that something is true, at least as far as I'm concerned.
I'm thoroughly indifferent to that. I like to know that I have a way of
thinking about things."
- quoted in 'The
End of Science' by John Horgan
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