The Art of Particle Physics 125
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.
It must just be me (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, I always find it interesting how the visual arts community attempts to capture the reality of the world based on the known principles of their day. Looking back through history at the artist rendering of our world provides us with a unique perspective on how wrong we were in describing the world in art.
I'm afraid that the world of quantum mechanics is just too weird for us to capture in visual display. Perhaps it will take someone like Dali [dali-gallery.com] or Escher [mcescher.com] to provides us with a view of the quantum world.
But again, it could just be me.
could be better? (Score:3, Interesting)
As a non-scientist, the images I was exposed to growing up were always spheres orbiting spheres, which inevitably led to the 'realization' of everyone I knew (including myself) at some point in their life that atoms were just like the solar system, and what if we are in just a big atom, and atoms really are just little solar systems...? This image [wikimedia.org], showing the electron 'cloud' around a hydrogen nucleus, is very enlightening for someone who is terrible at math. Totally destroys the 'recursing solar system' theory ;)
Might be some pretty pictures, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Antimatter (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It must just be me (Score:4, Interesting)
For each generation of quarks, the article says that the two types of quark (such as top and down) are complements of each other; that is, if you put them on top of each other it creates a solid space.
Overall they did a decent job of representing the spin, color, and generation. And they chose a shape which has an orientation, so that direction can be expressed. I'm not sure that you get so good feel for the masses of the particles, though...
Complements (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, I noticed that too. I think this might lead to misconceptions that up/down, strange/charmed, top/bottom have the same relationships to each other as guanine/cytosine and adenine/(uracil|thymine), when, of course, these pairs merely represent (AFAIK) sibling relationships within a family. First of all, quarks come in threes, not twos (unless you consider anti-quarks to be quarks), and secondly, the threesomes can come from combinations from different families, such as \Lambda^0 which is one each of the up, down, and strange quarks.
I was hoping that the designs had something to do with their proposed string theory vibrations, but as far as I can tell, this was not the inspiration. Instead, TFA mentions that the shapes are just to indicate whether the particles are first, second, or third "generation".
Re:why visual? why not auditory, smell, touch, etc (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Working for Me (Score:3, Interesting)
At these scales, "things" become meaningless. Its just points of force and energy wiggling near each other. There would simply be "nothing" in the "tube" in a photon (remember its just an artists representation).
What is there between two oxygen molecules in the near void of space?
These things aren't made of anything. They are parts of an equation. We don't even know that they exist in any real sense, we can only infer their existence through crude macro scale experimentation. That experimentation leads us to theories which adequately explain what it was that we saw in our experiment.
Even if we somehow created something "smaller" (these words are not really useful here) its not really a thing at all, of any size. Its a reaction, a vibration, something more along those lines.
Re:Complements (Score:2, Interesting)
Whilst the skill of graphical artists continually amazes me, I think trying to represent eleven dimensions on a 2D plane would prove to be somewhat difficult, especially as humans have conceptual difficulty visualising, let alone representing, any other than the main four.
Re:Antimatter (Score:2, Interesting)
Particle Drawings in 2004 & 1878 (Score:2, Interesting)
Andersen seemed unaware of all this when I spoke to him a year or so ago at one of his lectures at the University of Michigan. Michigan does not have a copy of Babbitt's book, but Harvard does.
Slightly off-topic... (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple of other links from the page above:
The rest is slightly off-topic.
I actually had Jan-Henrick as a professor in college [umich.edu] for Introduction to Industrial Design. One of the top five classes I had there. Not only is he an incredibly smart guy, he's also very well rounded, with knowledge and background in all manner of subjects and interests, some well-known, others quite obscure. And he's absolutely one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. It only makes sense that he was hired there when they were just starting to implement the new curriculum, which has a much greater emphasis on diversity of learning [umich.edu].
Re:Attractive, but misleading, representations (Score:5, Interesting)
[disclaimer: IAAHEP]
a most basic lack in the visual representation of these "objects" is the lack of *relationship* -- quarks *cannot* exist in isolation in our dimensioned universe, just as leptons (in the understanding of them as point particles) *must* be "dressed" by virtual interactions -- reducing quarks and leptons to static visual representations is a dis-service at both the PR and substantive levels (interestingly enough, before i was a HEP, i was a PR flack -- life is so strange)
it is not the "objects" but the "operators" that connect them that contain nearly all the wonder and understanding -- the representation (visual, sonic, olfactory, mathematical or what-have-you) of a quark or lepton is interesting and useful only insofar as it leads to a deeper understanding of the way they are embedded into the whole world -- this depth of understanding seems to me to be the goal of both interesting art and science, and it does not seem to be well served by the images offered here
to my mind (viz. IMHO), feynman diagrams are a deeper and truer art in the sense that they evoke the underlying nature of the thing they purport to represent -- think of feynman diagrams in the same sense as picasso's line art -- the only difference i see is that picasso drew up in us the things we (or nearly all of we) share in our wordless hearts while feynman created a method of seeing new things in a way that leveraged old visual understandings -- feynman's vision (his *notation*) will only be superseded in the sense that newton's representation of gravitational interaction is superseded by einstein's -- the images presented here lack this deeper nature
cheers,
kevin (as if you didn't already know!)
Re:I may be in a devil's-advocate mood today, but. (Score:3, Interesting)
To be more detailed (Score:3, Interesting)
When I say quarks come in threes, I mean they come in multiples of three - usually -1, 0, or 1 multiple of 3.
A few ways you can get to 3: