“Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.”
-Democritus
Leon Lederman is the President of Fermilab, a particle accelerator
located in Batavia Illinois (aprox an hour west of Chicago). It sits on 7000 acres of converted corn fields. The particle accelerator itself is located 30 feet beneath the ground, and makes a circle that is 4 miles around. It is a stainless steel tube that is only a couple of inches in diameter, but it is surrounded by a thousand superconducting magnets. Protons race at nearly light speed, on a collision course with anti-protons. These collisions produce for a split second tempuratures of 10 000 trillion degrees above absolute zero. (The last time that these tempuratures were naturally reached was just after the Big Bang.)
Above the particle accelerator there is the detector. in the dead center of it is where the protons and p-bars (anti-protons) collide. It records and catalogues what happens. The Brain of the operation is called DAQ (Data Acquisition System), it is programmed to decide which of the hundreds of thousands of collisions are important and record them onto magnetic tape. It is made up of Macintosh computers.
The First Particle physicist was Democritus, a Greek theoretical physicist and mathematician, known as the Laughing Philosopher. He was influenced by philosophers befor him, like Thales who said that everything was made of water. Although Democritus knew that he was wrong, it implanted the idea of a basic universal particle. Thales and his friends decided that “Fron this day forth, explanations and theories of how the world works will be based strictly upon logical arguments.” (page 36). This was the birth of modern day science, and a large leap considering it happened 2600 years ago.
Next came Anaximander who was a student of Thales, he thought that the world was made up of warring opposites, like hot and cold, which kept a very delicate balance. The thought that the basic particle was apeiron, which was a infinite substance, with infinite mass and proportions. This idea led to his theory of a “void”, which is what we call a vacuum. He was a modern thinker who believed that humans were desendents of lower animals which in turn came from animals from the sea. He gave the world of Greek philosophy and science new avenues to explore.
Then came Anaximenes, who theorized that various elements of matter were separated out of air via condensation and rarefraction. He thought everything came from air.
Nect there were Peremenides and Empedocles. Perimenides said that matter cannot just pop into or out of existence, it is there and there is nothing that humans can do about it. Although he is wrong (the particle accelerator does just that) his idea was very fond among greeks, including Democritus, because it was the idea of wholesness and unity. Empedocles agreed with Peremendes, but said that everything is made of four elements; air, earth, fire and water, in various proportions. These are unchangeable particles. He was the first to theorize this.
Democritus was a very peculiar person, he was very well traveled, learned astronomy in Egypt, mathematics while visiting Babylonia. This gave him the experiences and knowledge base needed to ignore the popular myth of his time (Zeus and other Greek Gods and Goddesses) and make huge intellectual leaps. He never got married or had children because women were below him intellectually, and sex and children would take his concentration away from his work. Most of what is known about him is from the writings of later Great Minds, like Aristotle, because all of the hundreds of works Democritus wrote were destroyed through time.
Democritus came up with his a-tom -the smallest invisible and indivisible unit of matter- through pure reason. He surmised that there were a few different types of atoms, like smooth, rough, round etc..and an infinite number of them randomly colliding in “the viod” and some of them would randomly stick together and create all matter. An infinite supply of atoms colliding randomly would give you the variation seen in matter.
“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.”
–Democritus’ most famous quote
Democritus’ atom is called a quark today, quarks are pointlike and have no dimensions, so no shape. The solidity of matter is the result of how quarks combine with each other and with leptons.(Leptons are a family of elementary particles that are subject to magnetic and gravitational forces and weak interactions, examples are Neutrinos, electrons, and muon and tau, which are cousins of electrons but much heavier. ) Quarks are held together by gluons, which carry information about forces between particles. It takes three quarks to make a proton or a neutron, and there are six different quarks in total, each coming in three colours, but only two of the quarks (the Up and the Down) occur naturally in our universe.
The line between force and matter is blurring in todays scientific community, everything is being boiled down to particles. Ther are Photons, gravitation, the W+, W-, the Z family anf gluons which are all particles that transmit electromagnetic, gravitational, and weak and strong forces. Only 2 of the 6 quarks, and 1 of 6 leptons are in abundance today, but during the Big bang they were all equally present.
Because quarks are dimensionless the only way to tell them apart is by their masses. Some are heavy and some are light, and scientists cannot explain why, according to theory they should all have a mass of zero!! They suspect that the unknown mass comes from a field (a force – particle) and this particle is the Higgs boson, also called the God Particle. None of what is known about quarks, leptons, and the four forces makes any sense unless there is this God Particle skewing experimental data.
-Democritus
Leon Lederman is the President of Fermilab, a particle accelerator
located in Batavia Illinois (aprox an hour west of Chicago). It sits on 7000 acres of converted corn fields. The particle accelerator itself is located 30 feet beneath the ground, and makes a circle that is 4 miles around. It is a stainless steel tube that is only a couple of inches in diameter, but it is surrounded by a thousand superconducting magnets. Protons race at nearly light speed, on a collision course with anti-protons. These collisions produce for a split second tempuratures of 10 000 trillion degrees above absolute zero. (The last time that these tempuratures were naturally reached was just after the Big Bang.)Above the particle accelerator there is the detector. in the dead center of it is where the protons and p-bars (anti-protons) collide. It records and catalogues what happens. The Brain of the operation is called DAQ (Data Acquisition System), it is programmed to decide which of the hundreds of thousands of collisions are important and record them onto magnetic tape. It is made up of Macintosh computers.
The First Particle physicist was Democritus, a Greek theoretical physicist and mathematician, known as the Laughing Philosopher. He was influenced by philosophers befor him, like Thales who said that everything was made of water. Although Democritus knew that he was wrong, it implanted the idea of a basic universal particle. Thales and his friends decided that “Fron this day forth, explanations and theories of how the world works will be based strictly upon logical arguments.” (page 36). This was the birth of modern day science, and a large leap considering it happened 2600 years ago.
Next came Anaximander who was a student of Thales, he thought that the world was made up of warring opposites, like hot and cold, which kept a very delicate balance. The thought that the basic particle was apeiron, which was a infinite substance, with infinite mass and proportions. This idea led to his theory of a “void”, which is what we call a vacuum. He was a modern thinker who believed that humans were desendents of lower animals which in turn came from animals from the sea. He gave the world of Greek philosophy and science new avenues to explore.
Then came Anaximenes, who theorized that various elements of matter were separated out of air via condensation and rarefraction. He thought everything came from air.
Nect there were Peremenides and Empedocles. Perimenides said that matter cannot just pop into or out of existence, it is there and there is nothing that humans can do about it. Although he is wrong (the particle accelerator does just that) his idea was very fond among greeks, including Democritus, because it was the idea of wholesness and unity. Empedocles agreed with Peremendes, but said that everything is made of four elements; air, earth, fire and water, in various proportions. These are unchangeable particles. He was the first to theorize this.
Democritus was a very peculiar person, he was very well traveled, learned astronomy in Egypt, mathematics while visiting Babylonia. This gave him the experiences and knowledge base needed to ignore the popular myth of his time (Zeus and other Greek Gods and Goddesses) and make huge intellectual leaps. He never got married or had children because women were below him intellectually, and sex and children would take his concentration away from his work. Most of what is known about him is from the writings of later Great Minds, like Aristotle, because all of the hundreds of works Democritus wrote were destroyed through time.
Democritus came up with his a-tom -the smallest invisible and indivisible unit of matter- through pure reason. He surmised that there were a few different types of atoms, like smooth, rough, round etc..and an infinite number of them randomly colliding in “the viod” and some of them would randomly stick together and create all matter. An infinite supply of atoms colliding randomly would give you the variation seen in matter.
“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.”
–Democritus’ most famous quote
Democritus’ atom is called a quark today, quarks are pointlike and have no dimensions, so no shape. The solidity of matter is the result of how quarks combine with each other and with leptons.(Leptons are a family of elementary particles that are subject to magnetic and gravitational forces and weak interactions, examples are Neutrinos, electrons, and muon and tau, which are cousins of electrons but much heavier. ) Quarks are held together by gluons, which carry information about forces between particles. It takes three quarks to make a proton or a neutron, and there are six different quarks in total, each coming in three colours, but only two of the quarks (the Up and the Down) occur naturally in our universe.
The line between force and matter is blurring in todays scientific community, everything is being boiled down to particles. Ther are Photons, gravitation, the W+, W-, the Z family anf gluons which are all particles that transmit electromagnetic, gravitational, and weak and strong forces. Only 2 of the 6 quarks, and 1 of 6 leptons are in abundance today, but during the Big bang they were all equally present.
Because quarks are dimensionless the only way to tell them apart is by their masses. Some are heavy and some are light, and scientists cannot explain why, according to theory they should all have a mass of zero!! They suspect that the unknown mass comes from a field (a force – particle) and this particle is the Higgs boson, also called the God Particle. None of what is known about quarks, leptons, and the four forces makes any sense unless there is this God Particle skewing experimental data.
