Advanced Concepts in Particle and Field Theory
Genres: Education book
Book Preface
PHYSICS MAY BE DEFINED AS THE DISCIPLINE OF UNDERSTANDING NATURE. This definition is about as good as any other I can think of, although – or perhaps exactly because – much of the material in the following chapters is required even just to more precisely describe what it is we are to understand under discipline, understanding and Nature. That is, what is the nature of disciplining our understanding of something of which we ourselves are a part: Nature.
True to the meaning of the Greek original , physics is indeed concerned with all aspects of Nature. Molecular phenomena are the objects of study in both chemistry and physics, which disciplines are separate but tightly related through quantum physics [477]. The science with which we study phenomena of continental proportions is called geology (but areology on Mars), whereas (planetary, stellar, galactic, cosmic) events that are at least a few orders of magnitude larger are labeled as astrophysics. Living things and events are the object of study in biology, but life itself and its characteristics quite probably derive from quantum physics [477]. Extending this point of view, phenomena of thought and feeling (commonly labeled as “psychologyâ€) may well be shown to be caused and determined by definite physical processes in the brain, so that social phenomena may be regarded as the “psychology of large ensembles of people,†just as thermodynamics is the “mechanics of large ensembles of particles.â€1
Of course, a mere reduction of all phenomena to a common denominator achieves very little other than irking those who would rather keep up the appearance of separateness or those who insist on “irreducible wholeness.†Hoping that this has nudged the Reader to think along (or against) such sweepingly unifying avenues of human understanding of Nature, let us turn to the real focus of this tome: to the fundamental physics of elementary particles.
Subject This book represents an attempt of a compact but comprehensive review of some of the key questions in contemporary fundamental physics, traditionally called both elementary particle physics and high energy physics. The correlation between these concepts is not at all accidental: The voyage towards an idealized but also pragmatically useful fundamental understanding of Nature really does lead through the world of ever smaller objects, the study of which requires ever larger energies in a complementary way.
The concept of “elementary particles†is in this sense a Democritean ideal, but it is also an evolving idea: On one hand, we follow this twenty-five-century hypothesis that the World around us may be understood as a complex system, ultimately consisting of certain basic and indivisible objects – elementary particles. On the other hand, the past two centuries of the history of science warn us that concrete things (and ideas) in Nature, which we at times identify as elementary, not infrequently later turn out to be themselves composed of more elementary things (and ideas). In this sense, the list of elementary particles was very short in the first third of the twentieth century. Everything in Nature was understood to consist of either the elementary particles (matter) the electron 
, the proton 
, the neutron 
and (hypothetically) the neutrino 
– or a form of their interaction, which could also be represented in terms of exchanging elementary particles such as the photon γ. Soon enough, however, hundreds of new particles were discovered. Already their unrelentingly growing number vanquished all hope that all these particles could really be elementary. Indeed, even the proton and the neutron were soon shown to be consistently describable as composite systems; they both consist of more elementary quarks.
Contents
| Download Ebook | Read Now | File Type | Upload Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Download here
|
Read Now | Epub | May 30, 2020 |
How to Read and Open File Type for PC ?
