| For non-physicists |
| 1 | Particle Physics for Non-Physicists— A Tour of the Microcosmos Part 1 Professor Steven Pollock Scope: The buzzwords appear with regularity in newspapers and magazines—quarks, neutrinos, the Higgs boson, superstrings... It's the lingo of particle physics, the study of the deepest, most fundamental constituents and interactions of the physical world. This course will offer a tour of the particle zoo and the ideas and phenomena involved in qualitatively understanding current concepts of modern physics. |
| 2 | No math involved! What's so strange about strange quarks? Why didn't we build a superconducting supercollider? Should we believe in particles that no one has ever seen—and never will? We'll learn about the most fundamental constituents of nature and the forces they feel—the history and discoveries, the apparatus and ideas, some of the curious characters involved, and the research and mysteries that are still being pursued today. |
| 3 | We begin on a fairly historical track. From the ancient Greek philosophers, we jump to Renaissance scientists whose work formed the starting point of physics. The scientific method developed by Isaac Newton more than 300 years ago continues to serve us well. Many of the physical insights Newton had, although now deepened and improved by modern physics ideas, are still relevant for understanding how the world works, which is the goal of this course and, indeed, of all physics. |
| 4 | We jump again, to the start of the twentieth century, when new discoveries forced a radical shift in thinking about the behavior of matter—the dawn of quantum mechanics. We will not cover (or assume) any detailed knowledge of these laws of physics, discussing only the key ideas we need for the rest of this course. A "classical" approach to particle physics, although not technically correct, will serve us quite well. |
| 5 | Students will find that understanding the basic elements of particle physics using common sense and classical intuition is possible, provided that we keep our minds open for the occasional quantum weirdness! We will follow the early developments, both theoretical and experimental, and see how they lead us to an organizing scheme for matter at the smallest possible scale. The idea of seeking the fundamental constituents and the forces they feel will guide us through the rest of the course. |
| 6 | We will learn about the growing "particle zoo," with just enough vocabulary to talk sensibly about the fundamental objects discovered from the early 1900s up through the most recent findings. This will lead us to quarks and neutrinos, force carriers and Higgs bosons, squarks and Zinos. Along the way, we will learn qualitatively about the theories required to describe such creatures—quantum fields, virtual particles, and all! All this leads to what is now known as the standard model of particle physics—really the standard theory—a complete and self-consistent description of the apparently fundamental, point-like building blocks of everything, their interactions with one another, and the "rules of the game." We then move to more modern questions: Do we really have a fundamental theory at hand? |
| 7 | Does that question even make sense? What is going on today in the world of particle physics? What are the central issues? What's hot these days? As we move through the course we will continually ask ourselves two key questions: Why is this idea interesting, and how do I know that it is true? Both are at the heart of appreciating science. Lecture One The Nature of Physics Scope: What is the world made of? |
| 8 | How do the constituents "fit together"? What are the fundamental rules that these constituents obey? These are the broad and deep questions addressed by the branch of science called particle physics. We will begin with a discussion of the history and development of human understanding of atoms and "subatoms." We will articulate some of the primary current ideas in particle physics. A central theme will be the idea of reductionism in science, which leads to the concept of simplicity as a guiding principle in seeking truths about nature. |
| 9 | We will discuss the broad relevance of particle physics to science, and to our lives, asking the key question (as we will throughout the course) "Why should we care about this?" What background do you need to know to follow this course? Very little—mostly just some curiosity and common sense. The content will be entirely nonmathematical, but we needn't be afraid of introducing the occasional number when it helps our understanding. |
| 10 | People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don't give us a chance to tell them anything about one of the theories that we know pretty well. They always want to know things that we don't know. So, rather than confound you with a lot of half-cooked, partially analyzed theories, I would like to tell you about a subject that has been very thoroughly analyzed. |
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