It might sound obscure, but the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three men who studied broken symmetry: Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa (forgive me if I don't write their names and risk repeatedly misspelling them).Broken symmetry is exceptionally important: without it, we would not exist! In the Big Bang, there should have been created equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. They have the bad habit of exploding in a burst of gamma rays when they meet. But, due to the broken symmetry, the amounts of matter and anti-matter are not quite equal. For every 10 billion particles of anti-matter created, 10 billion and one particles of matter are created. Everything you see is a result of that extra one. We have observed this broken symmetry in various particle accelerators (including Fermilab in Batavia, Illionois, a pleasant day trip from Racine to tour and see their bison herd).
But that's not all. The broken symmetries also give rise to the three families of subatomic particles. These particles make up everything in the universe, transmit the forces, and give us mass (assuming we find the Higgs Boson with the Large Hadron Collider).
Instead of me trying to explain all those little funky symbols representing all the particles, I will point you to Fermilab's Building Blocks of Nature video.
You might notice their work was done in the 60's and early 70's. It took a while for the other predicted particles to be discovered. The last of the quarks was not discovered until 1995 and the Higgs Boson is still awaiting discovery. If it is not discovered at CERN, I bet ther people who figure out why it wasn't will get a Nobel price 20 years or so from now.
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6 comments:
I had a broken symmetry once. The doctor said I would be in a cast for 6 weeks and no sex for 8.
Sometimes I think the physicists make this stuff up and then sit around laughing their butts off at the rest of us.
The Higgs Boson? I'm pretty sure we sold that at the estate sale last weekend. My mother's house was pretty full. Sorry hale, if I had only known you were looking for it...
I think sometimes the world moved to fast for humans. The smart ones pulled the species up, out of the slime too far and too fast. Too bad the smart ones didn't make a city just for them and let the rest grovel and kill each other until they matured enough to enter the smart city.
Having the power of mythical gods with a new-qu-lar button and still believing myth. Woe is us.
Huck, I nearly spit up my soda laughing at your first paragraph.
If you want a musical primer, you can always check out Lynda Williams Quark Song. Sorry, it's just an mp3. I have done the Quark Song Dance with her (yes, there really is a Quark Song Dance!) which you don't get to see.
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