Beyond the God Particle - Hardcover

Lederman, Leon M.; Hill, Christopher T.

 
9781616148010: Beyond the God Particle
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1616148012 ISBN 13: 9781616148010
Verlag: Prometheus Books, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Two leading physicists discuss the importance of the Higgs Boson, the future of particle physics, and the mysteries of the universe yet to be unraveled.
 
On July 4, 2012, the long-sought Higgs Boson--aka "the God Particle"--was discovered at the world's largest particle accelerator, the LHC, in Geneva, Switzerland. On March 14, 2013, physicists at CERN confirmed it. This elusive subatomic particle forms a field that permeates the entire universe, creating the masses of the elementary particles that are the basic building blocks of everything in the known world--from viruses to elephants, from atoms to quasars.
    
Starting where Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman's bestseller The God Particle left off, this incisive new book explains what's next. Lederman and Hill discuss key questions that will occupy physicists for years to come: 

     * Why were scientists convinced that something like the "God Particle" had to exist? 
     * What new particles, forces, and laws of physics lie beyond the "God Particle"? 
     * What powerful new accelerators are now needed for the US to recapture a leadership role in science and to reach "beyond the God Particle," such as Fermilab's planned Project-X and the Muon Collider? 

     Using thoughtful, witty, everyday language, the authors show how all of these intriguing questions are leading scientists ever deeper into the fabric of nature. Readers of The God Particle will not want to miss this important sequel.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Leon M. Lederman, Nobel Laureate (Batavia, IL) is the author of the highly acclaimed Quantum Physics for Poets and Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe (both coauthored with Christopher T. Hill), as well as The God Particle (with Dick Teresi). He has served as the editor of Portraits of Great American Scientists and a contributor to Science Literacy for the Twenty-First Century. He is formerly the Resident Scholar at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy and Pritzker Professor of Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and he is director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Christopher T. Hill, PhD (Batavia, IL) is the coauthor with Leon M. Lederman of Quantum Physics for Poets and Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe. He is a theoretical physicist (Scientist III) and the former head of Theoretical Physics at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

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Chapter 2
A Brief History of the Big Questions

The most fundamental of questions we are asking today concern the
smallest objects, objects that lie far beyond the atom, the quarks,
the leptons (“matter”) and gauge bosons (“force carriers”), the
Higgs boson, and whatever lies beyond these things. Here we are exploring
a strange new world— world of the smallest things. No one has ever been
here before, to examine what is happening at the smallest distances that
are now probed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This is not entirely
blind exploration, for we actually have an inkling of what we are trying to
understand—ut surprises may be around the next corner.

In short: we are attempting to answer the vexing question: What is the
origin of mass? Mass is one of the most important defining quantities of
matter. But where does it come from? What makes mass happen? Will we
ever become skillful enough to calculate the mass of the electron or the
muon or the top quark from a “first principle”? What shapes and controls
and sculpts the elementary constituents of matter and their masses?
This is a bit like trying to answer the deep biological question “What
and where is the genetic code of life?” The answer to that question came in
the 1950s—it turned out to be encoded into a very long and durable molecule
called DNA. And from that has come an entirely new set of capabilities,
as DNA can be “read” and “reread” and, eventually, we think, “rewritten.”
All structure and function and ultimately all diseases of living organisms
are controlled by DNA and its associated processes. Understanding DNA
and its evolution is the foundation of understanding all life on Earth. Our
open physics questions today are much like the biological ones before the
1950s: “What causes the phenomenon of mass?” Put another way, “What
is the DNA of matter itself?”

To get some insight into the process of the exploration of nature, let us
ask, what deep questions were our ancient ancestors asking over the past three
millennia? Like newborn babies, our ancient ancestors awoke with rational
minds and conscious awareness into a world with a “reality” of its own. It was
difficult initially for them to shake off primitive prejudices, notions and fears,
unwarranted or otherwise, about things that seemed to happen or were only
imagined to happen. There was an internal reality to the human mind in the
early dawn of intelligence, voices that spoke in the night, apparent demigods
lurking behind every tree, making all things, good or bad, happen. This led
to peculiar notions, for example, that one must dance in strangely ostentatious
ways, while wearing bizarre make-up and costumes, in order to make
good things happen, perhaps to make it rain. Indeed, most appeals for divine
intervention are just a variation on a rain dance and are motivated by something
like the mortal fear of crop failure. It was difficult to discard that and
to create a distilled “objective reality.”

But gradually there emerged a coherent understanding and philosophy
of objective reality. Questions could now be posed and answers
sought without reference to mythical beings and magic, without the fear
of offending the particular gods that brought the rains. One learned to do
“experiments.” And one learned that the reproducibility of an experimental
result was far more important than the mere opinions of the witch doctors
and high priests. Does it really rain when we put on our costumes and
dance about? No. But there are certain crops that can grow better in a dry
climate than others, and certain clever ways to grow them. At some point
the issue of understanding reality became “science.”

Eventually people asked the deeper questions: “What are all things
made of?” “What are their properties?” “How do they interact with one
another?” “What are the fundamental laws of nature that govern these
objects?” These are practical questions, but they are also the biggest questions.
They deal with profound issues: “What constitutes physical reality?”
and “What is the nature of physical substance?” and “What is physical
force, motion, space, and time?” The answers hold deep secrets, and perhaps
the key to a better fire, a better sword, a cure for illness, perhaps a way to
make the rains come or prevent them from leaving, or to make the best
of what the conditions are, and how not to mess things up. By the end of
the nineteenth century, here on Earth, the question: “What is the nature
of matter?” was framed within the province of chemistry: All matter is
formed from the basic atoms that comprise the chemical Periodic Table
of the Elements—where “periodic”’ refers to their chemical properties.
The elements form chemical compounds and enter into chemical reactions
according to specific empirical rules. The laws of physics are those of
Galileo and Newton, embellished by Maxwell, Gibbs, Boltzmann, etc.
Many thinkers from antiquity had previously developed a rudimentary
concept of “elements.” These would be the basic, irreducible components
out of which things are made. Among the earliest ideas were the so-called
“classic elements,” as described by Plato: “Air,” “Fire,” “Earth,” and “Water,”
as well as mysterious “Quintessence.” The latter was considered to be an
all-universe-filling “ether.” This view of the nature of matter reduced every
question to the five classic elements and offered a (very) tiny hint of an
underlying order, but it certainly didn’t get into the details. It was more of a
dismissive answer to questions about the inner nature of matter.
Other philosophers of antiquity, however, were actually quite modern
from our perspective. The foremost of these was Democritus of Athens, one of
most advanced thinkers in all of human history, considered by some to be
the “father of modern science,” certainly the Galileo of his age. Democritus
was born around 470 BCE, and died around 370 BCE, thus living to the
ripe old age of about 100. He was often viewed as an eccentric fellow and
largely ignored in his home town of Athens, and was supposedly detested
by Plato, who denied ever meeting him (though this was unlikely since
Plato allegedly wanted all of Democritus’s books burned).

Democritus inherited the moniker “the laughing philosopher,” as he
evidently found most of the ideas of other contemporary philosophers to
be rather humorous, if not ridiculous. We can imagine him heckling Plato
during a lecture in some curia, circa 400 BCE, perhaps asking a subtle
and detailed question about a certain chemical reaction about which Plato
could not begin to answer:

P: And the natural order and simplicity of nature is simply that all things
can be resolved to the five “elements,” the “air,” the “fire,” the “water,”
the “earth,” and the “quintessence,” and that’s all of it.
D: Master, are these elements transmutable into one another?
P: No, truly not, sir, for as I say, they are elemental.
D: But of what element is the brilliant light of the sun?
P: (pause) I suppose . . . a form of quintessence as it does flow though
space which is filled of quintessence and so it must be such.
D: And, master, of what element is papyrus?
P:...

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Verlag
Prometheus Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1616148012
ISBN 13 
9781616148010
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
325
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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