Particle physics acts as a "guide" to the theory of everything or a "stepping stone" to the theory of everything, and people may be laymen of the boson concept, whether they are born smart people or stupid people, these concerns are superfluous, and physicists can't say the properties of boson particles for a while and a half. Quark may have left people with strange feelings, the concept of gluons will make people's brains fail, and there are many enthusiastic popular science authors in the group of scientists, who explain the esoteric scientific concepts in plain language, meeting the growing demand for scientific knowledge in the public. With the help of scientific guides, people will not lose their way in the "zoo" of the Standard Model of particle physics. Cashel O'Conrier is an avid science communicator who is a guide to the "Particle Zoo."
At the turn of the 4th century BC, the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus once smelled a smell of baked bread, and inspired by the "smell of the tip of the nose", he pondered a problem of "interesting physics": the breadcrumbs floating in the air burrowed into his nasal cavity, and Democritus, the originator of European materialist philosophy, "made a clever move" by calling the smallest piece of breadcrumbs "atoms", meaning breadcrumbs that could no longer be cut, and he imagined atoms as tiny balls.
The atom is not actually the smallest unit of matter, it is made up of smaller particle components, modern physicists call it particles, and scientists have best described particles and the fundamental forces that control their behavior, resulting in the Standard Model of particle physics or simply called the Standard Model. It classifies all the particles in nature as if it were classifying all the elements of nature in the periodic table. The theoretical format of particle physics, known as the Standard Model, has been so successful that it has formed a "standard theory" that has been tested many times.
There are neither economical simple models nor luxury complex models, there are already some problem-solving models, and some models have the need to patch to eliminate possible size holes in the model. People need a guide to the "theory of everything", how does everything start? If one goes back to the early 20th century, scientists believed that there were only three types of elementary particles in natural matter, which were protons and neutrons, electrons, and protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus at the center of the atom, and the electrons rotate around the nucleus.
But in the 1950s and 1960s, with the help of the Collider Lab, physicists began crushing bound particles into smaller components, some of which shattered, and smaller particles appeared to exist inside neutrons and protons. Dozens of new particles have been discovered through collision experiments, and particle experimental physics has achieved dizzying results, while no scientist has given a complete explanation, simply calling the collection of new particles a "particle zoo", just as astronomers call the celestial aggregate of the universe a "cosmic zoo".
In the 1970s, physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others found an order in the chaotic particles, and "as a treasure", they took a similar step to that of the historical Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, in which all the elementary particles were organized into a table, as if Mendeleev had compiled all the chemical elements into an orderly table in the periodic table. After the particles are sorted, many of their properties are explained, and even some new particles can be correctly predicted, as if the periodic table predicted new elements.
The characteristics of the particle family are shown, the particle Standard Model will make all the particle members into a big family, the first introduction is "daunting", as if a large party was held, many distant relatives came, some participants felt strange and panicked, could not call out many people's names, those "relatives with the past" members have never heard of, should come and should not come, no matter how strange the arrival of distant relatives, the organizers have to show great enthusiasm, just remember the important point, The participants had family ties of close and distant relatives.
What are the basic facts about elementary particles? Gell-Mann and other scientists divided particles into two main types: fermions and bosons. Fermions such as electrons make up what people call materials, and bosons such as photons transmit forces. Fermions are further divided into two types, which are divided into quarks and leptons depending on how these particles respond to forces. What are the fundamental forces in nature? Particles transmit interactions through four fundamental forces: electromagnetic, strong, weak, and gravitational. The Standard Model describes the interaction of 3 forces, with only gravity not yet included in the Scope of Interpretation of the Standard Model. Different particles are transported by different fundamental forces, as if people around the world communicate with each other through different languages, for example: only quarks speak "gluon" language, only electrons say "photon" language (photons transmit the electromagnetic force between electrons), and likewise, only W bosons and Z bosons speak "photon" language.
What are the elementary particles? All matter is made up of two types of particles, quarks and leptons. Quarks exhibit 6 "flavors," each given a bizarre name, and they are combined into three generations, each of which is made up of a pair of particles. The 6 "flavored" quarks are divided into the first generation of "upper quarks" and "lower quarks"; the second generation of "cannabis quarks" and "odd quarks"; and the third generation of "top quarks" and "bottom quarks". Only the upper and lower quarks were of great importance to nature and humans whose movements changed day after day, and the first generation of upper and lower quarks constituted protons and neutrons. Other quarks make up "exotic matter" that does not form stable atomic states, and physicists create exotic matter in particle accelerators, but they are extremely unstable, lasting only a few minutes and seconds, and then decay.
There are 6 types of leptons, the most well-known of which is the electron, which is a tiny elementary particle with a negative charge. μ mesons (second generation) and τ mesons (third generation) resemble obese versions of "electrons", which also carry negative charges, but they exhibit very unstable properties in ordinary substances. The above three types of leptons all have their own neutrinos, forming electron neutrinos, μ neutrinos, and τ neutrinos, all three types of neutrinos are not charged. The parameter values of neutrinos have been given special attention by physicists, and neutrinos are perhaps the least understood of all the particles in the Standard Model. Neutrinos interact at the speed of light and only through weak forces, which means that they can easily travel directly through any planet, and neutrinos are created by nuclear reactions, for example: they are produced in the "nuclear reactor" in the core of the sun.
(Compiled: 2016-5-11)
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