February 13th, 2025
The first chapter is pretty basic and someone picking up this book would be familiar with most of it. It talked about atoms, atomic particles, and subatomic particles. It touches quarks, electrons, the standard theory, and CERN. It’s a fine introduction but not the most interesting. I began the second chapter which also didn’t provide a lot of information. It broadly talks about general relativity and quantum mechanics as successors to classical physics. An important topic was Feynman diagrams, with the example of two electrons interacting. In words, the approach, exchange a photon, and recoil away from each other. This is Quantum Electro-Dynamics (QED) and explains why electrons repel. The comparison is to two dudes on skateboards who pass a ball. Conservation of momentum has the thrower and receiver go “backwards”. Then if they turn around and throw a boomerang that goes around, the still move “backwards” but now towards each other. This is QED attraction.
I’m not satisfied with this explanation for two reasons: First, why is a photon being exchanged? Do electrons constantly fire photons, or does the electron “know” it is in proximity and then fire a photon? Second, how does this explain electrical attraction? An electron would fire a photon “behind” it, which would loop around to the proton? Can a proton fire a photon? Still many questions. This is then used to explain why solids do not pass through each other, because the electrons push each other away. However, clapping my hands has a different reaction than stabbing my hand. How do the knife electrons pass through my hand electrons?
February 14th, 2025
I have more problems with the second chapter. It talks about randomness and probability, about how it is impossible to know what type of interaction two particles will have until the moment it happens. I’m fine with that; we have to accept that there will be many unknowns in a level that is unobservable. Then it says there are situations where the electrons will not exchange one photon, but two, or three, or absorb one and emit it later, ad nauseum. The simplest is most likely, but experiment says its probability (alpha) is 1/137. That’s less than 1% of the time. But it follows this up by saying that all of these things, all possible paths for the electron, happen simultaneously. What is the proof of that? How can someone take that seriously? The more you get into it, the more Schrodinger’s Cat theory makes more sense. What is the proof against it? The book provides slim information and I don’t know who the target audience is. It explained what squaring a number is. For the love of God, if you can’t square a number, you are not reading about particle physics. And then we get into antimatter, which is fine, but how particles can travel backwards in time and all this nonsense without even a mathematical proof. So far this book is junk. If a gamma ray photon can turn into a electron-positron pair, does the photon exist at the same time as the particle pair because there is also a path where this does not happen? How does anything exist then?
February 16th, 2025
The third chapter is better. It talks about the history of particle physics, starting with classical and going through the 70s. A lot of the JJ Thompson and Rutherford experiments were discussed in greater detail in The Making of the Atomic Bomb. There was some cool information about the invention of the cloud chamber. With permanent magnets, the trails will bend and the radius & direction can be used to determine polarity, speed, and probably mass. With this method, Carl Anderson discovered the positron, which had the bend of an electron that went the opposite direction. This was antimatter predicted by the Dirac equation. I wish more time was spent explaining the Dirac equation and using an example. We can handle the math. Another important discover was a V-trail, which can be explained as a gamma ray photon becoming an electron-positron pair and going off at opposite angles. Through the 30s to the 70s, a number of different particles were found based on the mass. Muons were heavy electrons, but pions, Kaons, and a number of others were somewhere in the proton region of mass. More and more were discovered and the cause was learned to be cosmic rays, or essentially protons traveling from space. Bubble chambers replaced cloud chambers as liquid is more dense and thus there is a higher chance for contact with high speed particles. It then just got more advanced from there. Discovering a bunch of heavy particles and heavier leptons is one thing, but the author did not explain any proof for quarks. Sure, smaller particles make sense at the surface level, but then the gluon and color charge gets out of hand. Hopefully the next chapter gets into that.
February 17th, 2025
Chapter 4 is another chapter where things are told to you but nothing is really explained to you. Based on this reading, I am just supposed to take on faith that quarks and gluons exist. It even says in the end it is impossible to “see” a quark or gluon in isolation, but waves this away saying that the way things smash in the LHC proves it and if it weren’t this way, they’d have different results. I’m sure you could come up with another explanation for the results. To be brief, quarks have a color, or trinary, charge and can only exist in neutral combinations. Baryons are RGB, or anti-R anti-G anti-B, and mesons are combinations of a color and its anticolor. They’re held together by gluons, which unlike photons, carry charge. They’re pretty confusing. Quarks are constantly changing color by exchanging gluons. Why? I don’t know. Gluons can also create additional gluons. How? I don’t know. Are there different energy levels of gluons? Are there radio and gamma gluons? When an proton hits another proton, the author says it’s the internal quarks which collide, shooting one off. As it goes off, the gluons “stretch” by creating a gluon chain. Either the quark is pulled back in, or it escapes. The binding energy released turns the gluon string into a quark and antiquark. The quark joins the other two quarks to form a baryon, and the antiquark joins the free quark to make a meson. I may be mistaken, but I thought a proton would be the lightest and thus lowest energy baryon. So if smashing a proton creates a proton and meson, is this proton lighter than the original? Does it have less binding energy? Where did the energy come from? All poorly explained for the sake of simpliciation. I could get this garbage from a Youtube video.
February 18th, 2025
Can you discover something you can’t detect? We use that word lightly, like Columbus discovering America. Chapter 5 is about the weak force. It seems a bit more logical than the strong force and gluons. Something is needed to explain beta decay, where a proton or neutron switch “flavors” and emit an electron/positron and antineutrino/neutrino. In quark theory, a quark swaps between up and down and emits a W[eak] boson. This boson has electric charge of +/- 1, since the quark electric charge changes. The boson then decays into the lepton-neutrino pair. Now here are where things get weird, a W boson is 85 times heavier than the proton or neutron. Where the hell is that mass and energy coming from? It is a virtual particle, which I find hard to buy. It “borrows” energy to exist and thus must exist on borrowed time. Their existence is so short they cannot be detected; they travel nano-nano meters before decaying. The weak force has a binary charge, like a coin it can flip states. Thus things exist in pairs, up-down quark, electron-electron neutrino, etc. Except for quarks it’s BS because a heavy quark and become a lighter quark through the weak force a small percentage of the time. Why? The author admits this is not yet known. Is it because quarks don’t exist?
The author goes through a sample collision between two protons. In this scenario, they have two gluons interact and become a super energetic gluon that decays into a top and anti-top quark pair. These are the most massive quarks decay to real (i.e., not virtual) W bosons (+ & -) and some other quark; they don’t have to be the same quark(or antiquark). Further decays happen and the quarks emit gluons that snap into more quarks. This goes on until we get stable or fairly stable particles/hardrons like electrons, muons, protons, or pions. That’s the part that gets me. If I understand this correctly, the only things that are actually detected are the particles/hadrons that we were already seeing without the colliders. The tops and W bosons are still speculation as to how these combinations of detectable items came to be. I just don’t know, man.
February 19th, 2025
Side note to yesterday: the weak force is named so because it rarely happens in nature, otherwise matter would be quite unstable. Today I read chapter 6, about symmetry and the Higgs boson. Boy, is any of this hard to believe. Let’s say there is symmetry in the universal. The laws of physics are the same everywhere and all the time. Space independence leads to conservation of momentum, time independence leads to conservation of energy. How particles going back in time and time dilation fit in I don’t know. Charge is another conserved number, so it must have symmetry. Somehow that fits into the particles moving in parallel paths at the same time thing. Color charge is another one, and Weak “charge” is another. These charges, the author says, are relative and arbitrary. What is red to quark A might be blue to quark B. Now that sounds crazy. So “gauge bosons” have to know their relative charge and communicate it. A photon holds a value, so does a gluon, so does a W boson. Then things get real weird. We can’t see the relative “phase” of electrons or “color” of gluons be we sure as hell can see an electron vs a neutrino, so the W is broken. Also, where is the neutral charge W? Why is W so heavy? There is a Higgs field that fills the universe and this field provides mass. Somehow the W interacts and picks up mass, photons and gluons don’t. I don’t know why not. Then there’s some nonsense about the photon and the Z boson both being amalgamations of the neutral W and the B (both undetectable). B is massless and the photon is mostly B with some W, while the Z is very massive and is mostly W. The author says “You can’t make this up”. That is exactly what it sounds like.
February 24th, 2025
This was an interesting chapter. It described the LHC and how the proton collisions work. It has a lot of good information in decent detail; I wish the rest of the book was like this. I remember seeing a pretty cool video that follows a proton through the accelerators. To summaraize, hydrogen gas is ionized with a 90kV electric field (somehow it goes from H2 to H) and goes through a linear accelerator. Uncountable protons go through RF chambers that alternative an increasing amount of voltage. It is synchronized so the end of the chamber attracts while the rear repels. It gains energy (measured in eV) this way. Note mass is measured in eV because E=mc^2, and c is normalized to 1 in this scenario. What’s important for the accelerator is not the level of energy, which is unimpressive, but energy per area, which is unlike anything in the present universe. After a “short” linear accelerator, it goes to a series of different diameter synchrotrons. Magnets going up to 8T bend the protons path. Note that during the curves, particles emit radiation and lose energy, but this loss goes down with a power (fourth?) of mass. That’s why electrons are not used; it is too hard to get them to high energies in cyclotrons without losing tons of energy.
At some point the protons get to the 27km diameter LHC. They do several laps and get up to 13TeV, which is 6.5TeV per proton going in opposite directions. There are different detectors like ATLAS and ALICE that measure the effects of a smashing. I don’t know if they are in different physical locations so that each one can be used once at a time. The detectors use silicone pixels to “count” particles (by electric charge) and some other thing that tries to capture and measure energy. It uses some sort of “shower” effect where it relies on collisions to dampen the energy and change it from one high energy particle to many lower energy particles. One part detects electrons and photons, another hadrons, and a third section any muons that escape. Note that due to the distance from the collisions, only longer living particles can be detected. Rarely do particles that travel some millimeters make it. Anything less will never be seen. That leads me to believe most particles in the so-called zoo have never been detected, only inferred.
The data is analyzed statistically. First, most data is not of interest and tossed. Millions of proton collisions occur every 25ns, so there’s a lot of data. Then whatever is detected as described above, the total starting energy is calculated. When they were looking for the Higgs boson, they knew they needed a lot of energy and they knew what the final products that would be detected. All the energy findings were categorized in histogram and any “bump” above the expected “background” numbers was a clue. So the discovery was not very interesting. A bunch of people analyzed data and saw a rise in a chart around 125eV. What still needs to be explained to me is why does this need to mean there is a Higgs boson. Why can’t there be another method for a 6.5TeV proton to end up with some photons and electrons and positrons.
February 25th, 2025
Chapter 8 is all about neutrinos. These seem to be poorly understood and the current understanding kind of breaks the standard model. Neutrinos were theorized as the “missing” energy during beta decay, when a proton/neutron swaps and emits a *tron. They have no charge and are undetectable electromagnetically. They don’t interact with the strong force and pass through matter, trillions flying through us right now. They only interact with the weak force, which is why they are so hard to detect. They were thought to be massless, but now the idea is they must have mass. All neutrinos from the sun should be electron flavored, as opposed to muon or tau, and yet experiments have found all flavors (electrons only have W boson interactions but heavier muons and tau can have Z interactions). Thus the neutrino must “oscillate” between varieties. There’s lots of other speculative stuff, like neutrinos are their own antiparticle and only have left-spin. I believe “spin” is just a word; things don’t actually spin. Whatever spin is, there’s CW and CCW. The Higgs field alternates a particles CW and CCW and somehow two spins are needed for the EM force. Seems a bit far fetched, especially since the neutrino breaks all this. Also I forget how neutrinos are detected. They rarely interact with material. I guess the idea is that it turns into a W boson and changes a proton to a neutron? There was an experiment in a mine that turned chlorine into argon gas. Another in Japan used heavy water, though I forget the interaction. This heavy water test could also detect muon and tau neutrinos through Z bosons. Very mysterious stuff, but something must account for the beta decay missing energy.
February 26th, 2025
The 10th chapter is an honest chapter; it’s about what we don’t know. I’d say most of the book is about what we don’t know, but that’s just me. First up is antimatter. Where is it all? Everything we see is matter, and our experiments suggest that matter and antimatter should be created in equal amounts. One theory is that there is some asymmetry, some unknown characteristic that is different between the two that led to a slightly higher increase in matter. Once all the antimatter and matter annihilate, there’s just some matter left. Another concept is that they react to gravity differently. Could we be an island of matter surrounded by a halo of antimatter? We never see antimatter in enough quantities to see how it reacts to gravity.
Next is Dark Matter, or the heavy stuff we don’t see in galaxies. Galaxies rotate as if they have more mass than we can see through “regular” matter, that is stars and objects that give EM radiation. There must be mass we cannot detect yet. The idea is Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (like neutrinos) permeate space, but do not interact with EM or strong forces. Dark matter is not neutrinos, though, because neutrinos travel so fast that they have no problem escaping gravitational pulls of galaxies. Thus is must be slower and remains unknown.
Redshifting in the universe not only suggests it is expanding, but that it has accelerated. What is so much stronger than the pull of gravity? Dark Energy. We have no idea what it is, but they suggest it is 2/3 of the universe.
Last up is gravity. How does gravity fit in with standard model forces? Right now it doesn’t. There have been attempts to come up with quantum gravity, but the math does not work and there is no evidence for it. No gravitons. Gravity is useless at the subatomic level, meaning particles are so light that it has no effect. There are neutrinos, practically massless, then fermions and bosons, which go up to GeV in weight, and then the Plank Scale where quantum and gravity effects are equal, around a grain of sand. Between these two is a vast desert or a place waiting to be explored for more particles.
February 28th, 2025
Finished the book today. I read a chapter today and the last two chapters today. Not terribly exciting, and oddly the last chapter is riddled with typos and misprints. It must have been a last minute addition. Anyway, the end of the book talks a bit about on other physical speculative theories like Super Symmetry and string theory. Then it talks about how new experiments in the future might pick up on some of this, or find nothing at all. Glad to be done with this book; I didn’t think it was very good.