The Art of Particle Physics

PhysicsDavid writes to tell us about an article in Symmetry magazine. Jan-Henrik Anderson, a designer with a background in architecture, has collaborated with several particle physicists to develop visual representations of particles based on their physical characteristics. It is the closest most will ever get to 'seeing' a top quark.

Website Mistake.

[pavon]

There is an error in the website - the bottom row of quarks is not correct.
The pdf version [symmetrymagazine.org] of the site shows the correct models.

I spent forever staring at those incorrect models trying to make sense of them, before realizing that top and down were the same, and that something must be wrong :)

Re:An absolutely PERFECT representation

[Rei]

This reminds me of the article on Nihilism [uncyclopedia.org]? It's almost as good as the article on Surrealism [uncyclopedia.org].

Cache

[Anonymous Coward]

The Coral cache [nyud.net] version worked for me.

Quark!

[Misanthrope]

Little bit of humorous background.

The name "quark" was taken by Murray Gell-Mann from the book "Finnegan's Wake" by James Joyce. The line "Three quarks for Muster Mark..." appears in the fanciful book. Gell-Mann received the 1969 Nobel Prize for his work in classifying elementary particles.

Mirrordot to the rescue...

[TigerNut]

They have it: Mirrordot front page [mirrordot.com]. You do have to get the PDF to see the corrected picture...

Re:Website Mistake.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the pdf isn't all correct either, they managed to mess up the URL of Mr. Hande's page [umich.edu], which has a lot more info than the article linked in the blurb.

I may be in a devil's-advocate mood today, but...

[jkauzlar]

The familiar model of the atom is just as fictional, but has been extremely useful for visualizing the atom's properties and structure, particularly for beginners in physics or chemistry students, for whom the knowledge of an electron being both a wave and a particle is too-much-information. These pictures, or something like them, could be potentially useful for scientists. The particle's spin becomes a visual part of the particle and not just a number associated with it! On the other hand, the figures might be too difficult for most professors to draw on a chalkboard.

Attractive, but misleading, representations

[xPsi]

I'm sure I don't have to remind most Slashdotter's that there is a big difference between visually encoding or organizing all of a particle's properties in a single image (a superperiodic-like table) and what that particle "looks like" physically or geometrically (through some filter of choice). Anderson trys to explain that he is doing the former by calling his method a "visual language" or "representation." The effort to visualize these things geometrically is going to be a much, much bigger task than is shown at that web site.

Moreover, as an encoder of particle properties, he has forgotten to include a bunch of those properties in his representations. There are also some funny misleading conventions too. For example, his representation does not even begin to convey how much more massive the top quark is than the up quark. So much for building intution. Also, intrinsic spin is a subtle beast and he seems to sweep the details under the carpet. For example, a spin 1/2 object (like a quark) must be be rotated 720 degrees before it returns to its original state. Making a little curley fry to represent a spin 1/2 object seems a lazy, misleading, and simply wrong.

In my opinion, while the art is an attractive visual treat (and certainly a little physics PR is not bad), it seems a long way from being a complete, useful, or pedagogical representation of these complex objects.

And yes, IAAP

Aptlets

[Doc Ruby]

I've always enjoyed Greg Egan's gallery of applets [netspace.net.au] illustrating the quantum physics that often underlie his splendiferous fiction [wikipedia.org]. Egan is a scientist, a programmer, and a top notch fiction writer. I recommend _Diaspora_ [netspace.net.au] first (the book is better than its applet) - its characters are quite good, the story interesting, the future vision compelling. And somewhere in the first 15% of the book, Egan blows your mind describing higher-dimensional quantum topology that's also integral (pun intended) to the story.

Only partly mistaken

[benhocking]

Particles with 3 quarks are fermions, and particles with 2 quarks (or more exactly, 1 quark and 1 anti-quark) are bosons.

However, fermions do not necessarily have 3 quarks, and bosons do not necessarily have 2 quarks. Any particle with a half-integer spin is a fermion. This includes electrons, neutrinos, and hadrons with an odd number of quark/anti-quarks. Any particle with an even-integer spin is a boson. This includes photons, gravitons, and hadrons with an even number of quark/anti-quarks. Neutron-pairs are bosons. This is important because it is responsible for the collapse of neutron stars.