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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.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
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.
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.
Sure beats, "Man on a chair" in my book any day.
In Soviet Russia, us are belong to all your base.
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
Need a professional organizer?
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