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

It must just be me

[geomon]

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.

Re:It must just be me

[starwed]

For each generation of quarks, the article says that the two types of quark (such as top and down) are complements of each other; that is, if you put them on top of each other it creates a solid space.

Overall they did a decent job of representing the spin, color, and generation. And they chose a shape which has an orientation, so that direction can be expressed. I'm not sure that you get so good feel for the masses of the particles, though...

Might be some pretty pictures, but...

[Jason1729]

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.

Antimatter

[Tumbarumba]

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)

Complements

[benhocking]

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".

Re:Attractive, but misleading, representations

[theonewho]

hey now,

[disclaimer: IAAHEP]

a most basic lack in the visual representation of these "objects" is the lack of *relationship* -- quarks *cannot* exist in isolation in our dimensioned universe, just as leptons (in the understanding of them as point particles) *must* be "dressed" by virtual interactions -- reducing quarks and leptons to static visual representations is a dis-service at both the PR and substantive levels (interestingly enough, before i was a HEP, i was a PR flack -- life is so strange)

it is not the "objects" but the "operators" that connect them that contain nearly all the wonder and understanding -- the representation (visual, sonic, olfactory, mathematical or what-have-you) of a quark or lepton is interesting and useful only insofar as it leads to a deeper understanding of the way they are embedded into the whole world -- this depth of understanding seems to me to be the goal of both interesting art and science, and it does not seem to be well served by the images offered here

to my mind (viz. IMHO), feynman diagrams are a deeper and truer art in the sense that they evoke the underlying nature of the thing they purport to represent -- think of feynman diagrams in the same sense as picasso's line art -- the only difference i see is that picasso drew up in us the things we (or nearly all of we) share in our wordless hearts while feynman created a method of seeing new things in a way that leveraged old visual understandings -- feynman's vision (his *notation*) will only be superseded in the sense that newton's representation of gravitational interaction is superseded by einstein's -- the images presented here lack this deeper nature

cheers,
kevin (as if you didn't already know!)