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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.
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> Lucky you. I don't see a damn thing because Slashdot has destroyed another unlucky webserver.
You're leaping to conclusions.
I also don't see a damn thing, but from that I can conclude only that Slashdot has placed a webserver in a superposition of states between lucky-and-destroyed, lucky-and-not-destroyed, unlucky-and-destroyed, and unlucky-and-not-destroyed.
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".
If you can't accurately and easily render a volumetric superquadratic ellipsoid with specific parameters on the back of a napkin, maybe you shouldn't be in the field of physics in the first place. Nobody said it was going to be all fun and games.
The times, they are a-changin'.
(got sarcasm?)
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!)