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The Art of Particle Physics
PhysicsDavid writes to tell us about an article in Symmetry magazine. Jan-Henrik Anderson, a designer with a background in architecture, has collaborated with several particle physicists to develop visual representations of particles based on their physical characteristics. It is the closest most will ever get to 'seeing' a top quark.
But I don't see much difference in the representation of top and down quarks in the panels shown.
That said, I always find it interesting how the visual arts community attempts to capture the reality of the world based on the known principles of their day. Looking back through history at the artist rendering of our world provides us with a unique perspective on how wrong we were in describing the world in art.
I'm afraid that the world of quantum mechanics is just too weird for us to capture in visual display. Perhaps it will take someone like Dali or Escher to provides us with a view of the quantum world.
But again, it could just be me.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
There is an error in the website - the bottom row of quarks is not correct.
:)
The pdf version of the site shows the correct models.
I spent forever staring at those incorrect models trying to make sense of them, before realizing that top and down were the same, and that something must be wrong
The server is /.ed already?!
save your time, it's dead jim. PDF and html versions. Maybe two particales collided when everyone rushed to view the site.
can apparently be slashdotted too
I can't see the URL from the headline, but the PDF works fine ...
i can't find a cached version of this anywhere....mirrordot didnt catch it, network mirror didn't catch it, and it's not old enough for google cache it seems
anybody? copy and paste for us maybe for those who got there?
It's perfect. When you go there, you see nothing. This is probably the best way to visually describe a quark - something which is, for all intents and purposes, nothing that builds something.
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It is the closest most will ever get to 'seeing' a top quark.
Damn, slashdotted. I'm late to the party again. Then again, maybe this is the way phyicists are getting revenge for never being invited to those sorts of parties.
But the infinities must have cancelled out because I got nothing.
It is the closest most will ever get to 'seeing' a top quark.
What about seeing a "top-less" quark?
As a non-scientist, the images I was exposed to growing up were always spheres orbiting spheres, which inevitably led to the 'realization' of everyone I knew (including myself) at some point in their life that atoms were just like the solar system, and what if we are in just a big atom, and atoms really are just little solar systems...? This image, showing the electron 'cloud' around a hydrogen nucleus, is very enlightening for someone who is terrible at math. Totally destroys the 'recursing solar system' theory ;)
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
it wears a leather jacket and says "Ayyyyyyyyyyyy! Sit on it, Potsie".
It is the closest most will ever get to 'seeing' a top quark What does a wave in the ocean look like when you remove the water but not the wave? These particles don't have a "look" in any sense we can understand. Current theory is they're harmonic vibrations in the substructure of the universe. It is a fictional piece of art.
Physical diagram basics
Electron: Draw small circle with minus sign in it.
Proton: Draw small but slightly larger circle with plus sign in it.
Quark: Fire up raytracing software. For hardcopy, be sure to have a color printer handy.
So much for back-of-a-napkin physics.
Rich
I have some friends who play around all day smashing antimatter into matter, which I think sounds like a fun hobby. The theory of what they do is well above my head, but I recently got a chance to contribute by creating a new website for them at the Center for Antimatter-Matter Studies. Check it out (though I'm afraid there aren't any pics of quarks)
My business: Farstrider Studios.
The Coral cache version worked for me.
Someone opened the box. It's dead.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Little bit of humorous background.
The name "quark" was taken by Murray Gell-Mann from the book "Finnegan's Wake" by James Joyce. The line "Three quarks for Muster Mark..." appears in the fanciful book. Gell-Mann received the 1969 Nobel Prize for his work in classifying elementary particles.
I wonder what these quarks sound like, smell like, or feel like.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
They have it: Mirrordot front page. You do have to get the PDF to see the corrected picture...
Less is more.
The images were just kind of... blah. Just the name Quark sounds somewhat exotic and these pictures are anything but. It looks about like something I would have made years ago when I was first learning 3d Studio Max. Is this really what quarks and photons are supposed to 'look' like or what?
Maybe it was a case like this gem where some phycist was making a joke out of a colleague's poor artistic skills...
Government's view of the economy: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving,regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.
Does anyone else see a debian logo if you mirror that thing?
Sure beats, "Man on a chair" in my book any day.
In Soviet Russia, us are belong to all your base.
> It is the closest most will ever get to 'seeing' a top quark.
You figure there is some means whereby some will get closer?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
How can the first post be considered redundant? No on else has had a chance to say anything yet.
It's here: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~janhande/sizedmatte r/standard_model.htm
I wonder what these quarks sound like, smell like, or feel like.
Based on the universal poultry constant, the answer is intuitively Chicken.
liqbase
I mean, look at that rendering of a photon: it has a tube down the middle? What's in that tube? Shouldn't the most base substance of the universe be spheres? Can't think of a simpler structure...
Again, with the I'm not a physicist.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
So if its symmetry magazine, does that mean that it prints twice as much pages as it normally would?
Yeah, I noticed that too. I think this might lead to misconceptions that up/down, strange/charmed, top/bottom have the same relationships to each other as guanine/cytosine and adenine/(uracil|thymine), when, of course, these pairs merely represent (AFAIK) sibling relationships within a family. First of all, quarks come in threes, not twos (unless you consider anti-quarks to be quarks), and secondly, the threesomes can come from combinations from different families, such as \Lambda^0 which is one each of the up, down, and strange quarks.
I was hoping that the designs had something to do with their proposed string theory vibrations, but as far as I can tell, this was not the inspiration. Instead, TFA mentions that the shapes are just to indicate whether the particles are first, second, or third "generation".
Ben Hocking
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The "color" characteristic is taken from quantum chromodynamics. It has almost nothing to do with what we usually associate with the word color. In QCD, there are three types of "charge" instead of just one type as in electrodynamics, so these three types are referred to as colors. It fits because most humans perceive a three dimensional color space spanned by red, green, and blue.
"It is the closest most will ever get to 'seeing' a top quark."
Better than topping a seedy quark...
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Aww, man! Wiki's hotlinking my Pr0n collection again!
I've just started on the Navier-Stokes equations, Reynolds numbers and the other nuts and bolts of viscous flow in my Maths degree course. Turns out that last year's Fluid Dynamics course (Euler's equation, Bernoulli etc) was about 50% complete bull. But the bull was necessary to keep us awake and interested long enough to get to the good stuff. Same with almost every science or maths class I've ever taken (the "set theory" we did in First Year being the classic example). Same with this art.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Also, it seems odd to have the boson part of the chart arranged so that the photon is so visually connected with the quarks.
Credo sim. - I think I am.
They put it into Meridian. It's at the very end of the episode. Quark was trying to get Kira's holo-image for use in a "sexy" holodeck program. Kira figured out what was going on and sabotaged the program to replace her face with Quark's.
Ben Hocking
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Does anyone know which CMS they're running? It's not advertized anywhere.
-- Robi
Ahhh so THATS what a photon looks like. I hadn't seen one before.
The familiar model of the atom is just as fictional, but has been extremely useful for visualizing the atom's properties and structure, particularly for beginners in physics or chemistry students, for whom the knowledge of an electron being both a wave and a particle is too-much-information. These pictures, or something like them, could be potentially useful for scientists. The particle's spin becomes a visual part of the particle and not just a number associated with it! On the other hand, the figures might be too difficult for most professors to draw on a chalkboard.
Moreover, as an encoder of particle properties, he has forgotten to include a bunch of those properties in his representations. There are also some funny misleading conventions too. For example, his representation does not even begin to convey how much more massive the top quark is than the up quark. So much for building intution. Also, intrinsic spin is a subtle beast and he seems to sweep the details under the carpet. For example, a spin 1/2 object (like a quark) must be be rotated 720 degrees before it returns to its original state. Making a little curley fry to represent a spin 1/2 object seems a lazy, misleading, and simply wrong.
In my opinion, while the art is an attractive visual treat (and certainly a little physics PR is not bad), it seems a long way from being a complete, useful, or pedagogical representation of these complex objects.
And yes, IAAP
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Seems awfully shortsighted to me. I would hope that as we learn more about the quantum world, we will be able to develop more accurate visual models of it. Or am I missing something?
.....Someone puts something on /. that is TOTALLY incomprehensible.
Thank you for bringing me back down to earth.
"Uhhhhh.........the pictures sure are purty"
Today's show is brought to you by the number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0: 25
Anyone interested in Jan's drawings, might find books the 1908 edition of OCCULT CHEMISTRY, by Annie Besant & Charles Leadbeater, quite interesting indeed, especially those aware of its comtemporary interpretation by Stephen M. Phillips entitled: Extra Sensory Perceptions of Quarks. Potentially better still might be the 1878 wonder PRINCIPLES OF LIGHT AND COLOR, by Edwin D. Babbitt. Those interested in this title would do well to avoid the edited 1967 edition of this text, as the editor a certain Faber Birren removed all of the good stuff as a simple reading of the contents of the original edition will reveal. The contents seem to describe the wave/particle duality in a directly perceived way. Have a look and see for yourself.
Andersen seemed unaware of all this when I spoke to him a year or so ago at one of his lectures at the University of Michigan. Michigan does not have a copy of Babbitt's book, but Harvard does.
A couple of other links from the page above:
The rest is slightly off-topic.
I actually had Jan-Henrick as a professor in college for Introduction to Industrial Design. One of the top five classes I had there. Not only is he an incredibly smart guy, he's also very well rounded, with knowledge and background in all manner of subjects and interests, some well-known, others quite obscure. And he's absolutely one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. It only makes sense that he was hired there when they were just starting to implement the new curriculum, which has a much greater emphasis on diversity of learning.
Ack!
This stuff is just beautiful. It makes me miss doing physics all the more. I was taught that ultimately we were just building models to explain and predict the real world and not to confuse the model with reality, whatever that is. But I've always had a thing for lovely models!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I've always enjoyed Greg Egan's gallery of applets illustrating the quantum physics that often underlie his splendiferous fiction. Egan is a scientist, a programmer, and a top notch fiction writer. I recommend _Diaspora_ first (the book is better than its applet) - its characters are quite good, the story interesting, the future vision compelling. And somewhere in the first 15% of the book, Egan blows your mind describing higher-dimensional quantum topology that's also integral (pun intended) to the story.
--
make install -not war
Hey, im no particle physicist, but arent quarks way to small for any of this to really matter anyway? They dont really have a look, taste, smell or sound, because the messengers that carry these signals are much bigger than quarks, and some are even made of quarks. For instance, smell is the nose bits working out what molecule is in the nose, and telling ur brain. Taste is similar, though with the tongue. Sound is a little wierd, in that i suppose you could work out the frequency that the quark is viabrating or something, but its not like when u hit it it dings, let alone the ding being large enough for air particles to create a wave form long enough to reach ur ear, let alone hear it. Looks, well, photons are too big for images of quarks, unless somehow something to do with DeBroglie wavelengths allows them to be small enough for enough of them to be deflected by a quarck so that a detailed image can be obtained. Anyway, i think, a parallel to these artists impressions would be the infr-red or heat goggles and the colours they display for each heat. They arent really the colours of heat or wed be seeing funny colours everywhere. In fact i dont believe heat is EM as light is, i believe that things that are in our general environment happen to emit EMR in the Infra-red range. Anyways, my point (sorry im not real good with the whole sticking to the subject thing) with the whole IR thing is that the colours are fake, to give information of its frequency, as in hot stuff is blue because hotter stuff emits higher frequency radiation, and the high end of the visible light spectrum is blue. Same for red, low heat emits low frequency, which corresponds to red light. Actually my point is its fake, and just gives some details via pictures, even though it is impossible to get pictures of them. Anyone wanna explain this better feel free, no, feel paid. Except not paid. Just feel paid. Because what would i know, im only a 16 yr old finisheing high school. I would like to know more.
Seeing the photon rendition reminded me of virtual photons. I wonder how such art would represent virtual particles?
Now, I have seen said in many places that virtual photons are the carriers of the electromagnetic force. With infinite range, the carrier would have to be of a class like a photon.
What I haven't seen yet is a cogent explanation as to why a "colorless", chargeless particle could carry both the attractive (positive to negative) and repulsive (positive-positive or negative-negative) forces. I've seen some amazing somersaults and backflips like this, but little else.
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
Since quarks are spin-1/2 particles they have to be rotated through 720 degrees to get back to their original state and not 360 degress like normal objects. So these pics are a long way from what an actual quark might look like (not to mention they label the W boson as neutral when it is actually charged!).
exactly ; moreover, when you solve Schrödinger's equation for a molecule on a program like Gaussian, you end up with pictures of the electronic density which look most of the time surprisingly close to the old fashioned ball and stick representation.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
...but it only works for spherical horses moving in a vacuum.
Who ordered that?
When I say quarks come in threes, I mean they come in multiples of three - usually -1, 0, or 1 multiple of 3.
A few ways you can get to 3:Ben Hocking
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Seems awfully shortsighted to me. I would hope that as we learn more about the quantum world, we will be able to develop more accurate visual models of it. Or am I missing something?
Do you mean "accurate visual" in the sense of being more like what quark looks like, or a more accurate visualisation of it's characteristics?
If you mean the former, then I think that Quantum Mechanics pretty much precludes that possibility - the more precisely a (very small) object's location is known, the less precisely it's momentum can be known (Ref.). I believe this is why electrons and the like are typically visualised as clouds.
But you have to be quick.
The moment you see them, they're gone, so it's hard to get a good look.
Particles with 3 quarks are fermions, and particles with 2 quarks (or more exactly, 1 quark and 1 anti-quark) are bosons.
However, fermions do not necessarily have 3 quarks, and bosons do not necessarily have 2 quarks. Any particle with a half-integer spin is a fermion. This includes electrons, neutrinos, and hadrons with an odd number of quark/anti-quarks. Any particle with an even-integer spin is a boson. This includes photons, gravitons, and hadrons with an even number of quark/anti-quarks. Neutron-pairs are bosons. This is important because it is responsible for the collapse of neutron stars.
Ben Hocking
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I've read it a couple of times (had it for ~10 years). IIRC, Shlain is a neurosurgeon.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
The most-recent-version-only-in-Google-cache part, or the part with the desperate prom date?
(Me, I'm hoping for the desperate-prom-date part of course. My sorry, single ass could use one of those...)
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