From Atoms to Higgs Boson: Voyages in Quasi-Spacetime

Description

For millennia, natural philosophers and scientists have been actively engaged in the reductionist quest to specify the fundamental building blocks of matter and discern the dynamics of physical reality. During the last one hundred years, physicists have intensified this search, probing the deep interior of atoms, nuclei, and the entities of which these are composed. Their progress in this endeavor was highlighted by the announced discovery of the Higgs boson, a watershed moment for particle physics. All of this, however, has come at a cost: an increasingly abstract, inherently mathematical description of nature at its most basic level. This book is an assessment of this cost and critiques the modern orthodoxy that the ever-evolving models of particle physics are leading us towards a truer understanding of the real world. The authors propose that the ancient reductionist quest has been unintentionally side-lined by quasirealism, a philosophical approach to interpreting reductionist scientific models that finds reality hiding in places where it might not actually be. Cover Half Title Tilte Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Preface Introduction 1. The Reductionist Vision of Physics 1.1 Reductionism 1.2 Our View of the World 1.3 Democritus’ Atoms 1.4 Properties of Atoms in Early Physics 1.5 The Descent into the Quark Model 1.6 Contemporary Catalogue of Physical Things 1.7 Have We Reached the Bottom? 1.8 Defining the Bottom Rung of the Ladder 1.9 Are Quarks Really at the Bottom? 2. Quasirealism 2.1 Common Sense 2.2 Mathematics at the Centre 2.3 Quasiparticles 2.4 Quasirealism Defined 2.5 Against Quasirealism 2.6 Quasirealism and the Theory of Everything 2.7 Concluding Thoughts 3. Space, Time, and Relativity 3.1 Ancient Concepts of Space and Time 3.2 Philosophizing on Space and Time 3.3 Newton’s Absolute Space 3.4 Lines of Force and Fields 3.5 The Aether 3.6 Lorentz–FitzGerald Contraction 3.7 Special Relativity 3.8 General Relativity 3.9 Concluding Remarks 4. Mathematical Spaces 4.1 Space and N-Dimensional Spaces 4.2 Space and Geometry 4.3 Complex Numbers and Imaginary Planes 4.4 Minkowski Spacetime 4.5 Phase Space 4.6 Hilbert Space 4.7 String Theories and Multidimensional Space 5. Mass 5.1 Mass and Weight 5.2 Mass and Relativity 5.3 Mass of Small Things 5.4 Modern Mass Measurements of Subatomic Particles 5.5 Mass of Short-Lived Particles 5.6 Mass of Resonances 5.7 Mass of Quarks 5.8 Mass of Higgs Boson 5.9 Concluding Remarks on Mass 6. Quantum Physics 6.1 Statistical Microphysics and Waves 6.2 Quantum Theory of the Atom 6.3 What Evolves in Quantum Theory? 7. When Is an Atom? 7.1 The Classical Atom 7.2 The Divisible Chemical Atom 7.3 Protons and Neutrons Are Particles, but Are They Fundamental? 7.4 The Electron Is Fundamental, but Is It Still a Particle? 7.5 The Electron of Wave Mechanics 7.6 Niels Bohr’s Instrumentalist View 7.7 Electrons in Quantum Electrodynamics 7.8 Electrons in Bulk Matter 7.9 In Summary: We May Still Have Atoms 8. Elementary Quanta 8.1 Fermions, Bosons, Quarks, and Leptons 8.2 Quarks and Leptons Are Really Very Different 8.3 On the Reality of Neutrinos 8.4 On the Reality of Quarks 8.5 The Gauge Bosons 8.6 Summary 9. What Is a Photon? 9.1 Problem of Blackbody Radiation 9.2 Photoelectric Effect 9.3 Waves and Particles, Real and Virtual 9.4 Other Lives of Photons 9.5 Photons and Electroweak Unification 9.6 Are Photons Phoenixes? 9.7 Finally, What Are Photons? 10. Symmetries, Conservation Laws, and Gauge Bosons 10.1 Symmetry and Gauge 10.2 Gauge Invariance and Electromagnetism 10.3 Symmetry and Isospin 10.4 Mixing of Matter and Interactions 10.5 Conclusion 11. Higgs Boson 11.1 Knowing What We Cannot See 11.2 Searching for the Higgs Boson 11.3 Higgs Discovery 11.4 Particle or Resonance? 11.5 What Does the Higgs Boson Contribute? 11.6 Conclusion Epilogue Appendix: Epitaph for All Photons Index