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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
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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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 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.
Armin Shimmerman without a shirt on...sounds like the beginning to a twisted holosuite program left on the DS9 cutting room floor.
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.
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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.
They have it: Mirrordot front page. You do have to get the PDF to see the corrected picture...
Less is more.
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.
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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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?
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!
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.
--
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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.
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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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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 think you missed my point slightly. Here's an approximate quote from my lecturer: "Now, back last year, we taught you that fluid going down a pipe looks like this [draws a diagram]. That's completely wrong. No fluid ever flowed like that."
The Fluid Dynamics I was talking about wasn't just lacking in applicability, it was completely misleading as to the true behaviour of fluids. If you want the specifics, it was along the lines of: second year FD teaches that a fluid can flow in a uniform fashion down a pipe - every bit going at the same speed. Third year FD teaches that that can't happen cos viscosity (friction) stops the fluid dead at the wall of the pipe. The second year version was a complete lie - but it was a necessary simplification if they didn't want us to get confused and bored and start skipping lectures.
Again, the Set Theory I was talking about wasn't just useless for applied mathematicians - I'm a pure mathmo myself, so I find plenty of use for that sort of stuff - it was actively wrong in places. I'm afraid this time I can't remember the specifics (that was first year and I haven't had the third year course yet) but I can remember being horribly disillusioned when, while proudly spouting off to my third-year friends, I was kindly informed that the theory I was relying on was only true in about half the variants of Set Theory floating around.
We all lie to students. How's a rainbow formed? Well, raindrops refract light, y'see, so... why doesn't it smudge out in a disgusting blur? How does a braincell behave? Well, you draw a bunch of lines going into the cell, and a bunch of lines coming out, and assign a matrix to your "cell" to estimate the level of synaptic firing. Shame it doesn't work like that in real life. I'm currently doing an entire course that reformulates Quantum Mechanics in a pretty way, and I'm feeling slightly depressed cos I know we throw most of it away when we hit Quantum Field Theory next year.
There are a lot of examples of bull out there. Many of them have beneficial side-effects because they allow you to construct a mental framework of what's going on that you can then graft information onto. Eventually the original framework may be trashed, but the process will be slow enough that you can avoid having to rebuild your intuition as to how the system behaves from scratch. I'd tend to place these pictures in that class.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!