Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword: an apology
- 1 The beginning of the journey to the small: cutting paper
- 2 To molecules and atoms
- 3 The magical mystery of the quanta
- 4 Dazzling velocities
- 5 The elementary particle zoo before 1970
- 6 Life and death
- 7 The crazy kaons
- 8 The invisible quarks
- 9 Fields or bootstraps?
- 10 The Yang-Mills bonanza
- 11 Superconducting empty space: the Higgs-Kibble machine
- 12 Models
- 13 Coloring in the strong forces
- 14 The magnetic monopole
- 15 Gypsy
- 16 The brilliance of the Standard Model
- 17 Anomalies
- 18 Deceptive perfection
- 19 Weighing neutrinos
- 20 The Great Desert
- 21 Technicolor
- 22 Grand unification
- 23 Supergravity
- 24 Eleven-dimensional space-time
- 25 Attaching the superstring
- 26 Into the black hole
- 27 Theories that do not yet exist…
- 28 Dominance of the rule of the smallest
- Glossary
- Index
20 - The Great Desert
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword: an apology
- 1 The beginning of the journey to the small: cutting paper
- 2 To molecules and atoms
- 3 The magical mystery of the quanta
- 4 Dazzling velocities
- 5 The elementary particle zoo before 1970
- 6 Life and death
- 7 The crazy kaons
- 8 The invisible quarks
- 9 Fields or bootstraps?
- 10 The Yang-Mills bonanza
- 11 Superconducting empty space: the Higgs-Kibble machine
- 12 Models
- 13 Coloring in the strong forces
- 14 The magnetic monopole
- 15 Gypsy
- 16 The brilliance of the Standard Model
- 17 Anomalies
- 18 Deceptive perfection
- 19 Weighing neutrinos
- 20 The Great Desert
- 21 Technicolor
- 22 Grand unification
- 23 Supergravity
- 24 Eleven-dimensional space-time
- 25 Attaching the superstring
- 26 Into the black hole
- 27 Theories that do not yet exist…
- 28 Dominance of the rule of the smallest
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
Gulliver boldly continues his journey. When protons and neutrons are magnified 1000 times, the Standard Model tells him what details as small as 1/1000 of their diameter will look like. What comes after that, at even greater magnifications, is uncertain. We are now entering the world of very heavy particles, carriers of forces over ultra-short distances. We will concentrate on structures at distance scales between 1/1000 and 1/10000000000000000000 (that is, 10−19) times the proton diameter.
This seemingly absurd figure implies that the territory we are entering now covers some sixteen orders of magnitude (sixteen more zeros). This is about as much as the difference in size between a house and an atomic nucleus.
Surely this new world could be just as complicated as the previous one, the one described in the preceding nineteen chapters. But it could also be quite a bit simpler, in the sense that it might be possible to extrapolate all of the laws of physics over the whole area. It certainly seems as if the rules which I described in Chapter 11 will remain irreplaceable. Perhaps we will continue to find other particles and other fields, but no matter how I adjust the magnification of my imaginary microscope, I will see the same ground rules for objects with spin 1, spin ½ and spin 0 (as long as the gravitational force may be neglected, but more about that later).
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- Information
- In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks , pp. 135 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996