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
1 - The beginning of the journey to the small: cutting paper
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
Let us begin our journey to the world of the tiny by beginning with what we can see with the naked eye, and with those laws of physics that we are all accustomed to. Take a large piece of paper and fold it into an airplane. You may decide to cut the paper in half to make two smaller airplanes. You could even cut the smaller pieces again to make even smaller planes. The properties of the paper, and the rules for folding it into an airplane, will hardly be different, except that the airplanes will become smaller and smaller. Gradually, however, as you continue to cut the paper into smaller and smaller pieces, you will find it harder to make planes, and eventually you will only have little shreds of what once was usable pieces of paper. The property ‘foldable into an airplane’ has been lost.
We have a similar situation when we start off with a bucket of water and pour the water into smaller buckets. The physical properties of water such as ‘flows from high to low’ remain the same, until finally we have less than one drop left. You cannot pour drops from high to low; you have to shake them off.
Every child who plays with toy cars or dolls knows that one can imitate the world of the large at a smaller scale. The writer Jonathan Swift based his famous stories on this.
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- Information
- In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks , pp. 1 - 3Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996