I was wandering around the interwebs and opened up an article that asked “What Does the Grand Unified Theory Mean?” Okay what could I do? I haven’t read anything much on particle physics since undergraduate days when I took a course that was called, quaintly, “Atomic Physics.” When I signed up for the course I immediately thought in my best Bill Murray voice, “Back off man! I’m a scientist.”
Well, the article is a rambling incoherent mess. Which told me that my grasp of particle physics is woefully insufficient. So I found this book on-line, Elementary Particle Physics, TIMOTHY L. BARKLOWAND MARTINL. PERL, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. I’m going to try and glean enough about the standard model to be able to tell if the popular accounts are at all accurate.
I put this up just in case anyone else gets the bug.
It’s just a gut feeling but I think the Standard Model is incomplete.
It strikes me that the model of reality has become so paradoxical that we seem to know less than we used to. Reality must be so different from any of the models we can think of that something can be true and false at the same time. The wave particle duality is the best example I can think of. We’re going to have to get a lot smarter or just give up and go back to the caves.
What is the probability that the nature of the universe is such that it is understandable to humanity but only those at the 99.99 percentile in that type of intelligence and just barely even then? That’s a pretty specific fine tuning, no?
It seems to be one of those games that, when you get to the top of a level, another higher level reveals itself, ad infinitum.
That sounds about right. I guess the next step will be trying to figure out what the quarks are made of. But maybe they could do something useful instead, like making fission reactors orders of magnitude safer. We can probably wait a millennium or two before we need to know why their cosmic expansion model doesn’t work.
If we ever figure quarks out, I’m sure they will be strange and charming.
And full of truth and beauty.