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.

Comments

Website Mistake.

[pavon]

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 :)

Quark!

[Misanthrope]

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 may be in a devil's-advocate mood today, but...

[jkauzlar]

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.

Attractive, but misleading, representations

[xPsi]

I'm sure I don't have to remind most Slashdotter's that there is a big difference between visually encoding or organizing all of a particle's properties in a single image (a superperiodic-like table) and what that particle "looks like" physically or geometrically (through some filter of choice). Anderson trys to explain that he is doing the former by calling his method a "visual language" or "representation." The effort to visualize these things geometrically is going to be a much, much bigger task than is shown at that web site.

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