Abstract
Herman Wouk’s A Hole in Texas (2004) begins with an author’s note: “At rough guess, 99.9999% of all Americans don’t know what the hell a Higgs boson is” [1]. The percentage may be comparable today, but thanks to the well-advertised discovery of the particle at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012, a large percentage of the general public will have at least heard of it. Unfortunately, hearing about a scientific discovery doesn’t necessarily make it less scary. Quite the contrary, in some cases. Various subatomic particles have made guest appearances in popular culture for decades. For example, in the 1964 episode of The Outer Limits “Production and Decay of Strange Particles” the introductory narration invokes the “strange world of subatomic particles”, including “anti-matter composed of inside-out material, shadow-matter [neutrinos] which can penetrate 10 miles of lead shielding. Hidden deep in the heart of strange new elements are secrets beyond human understanding. New powers, new dimensions” [2]. In this chapter we will embark on a whirlwind tour of both the basics of particle physics and the enormous, complex machines used to test its predictions, including the possibility of “new dimensions”. The interested reader is encouraged to consult the works referenced in this chapter if a deeper dive into the physics is desired.
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Notes
- 1.
Or we observe high-energy events in space.
- 2.
In a touch of whimsy, the t and b quarks are sometimes referred to as truth and beauty.
- 3.
The source of the small masses of the neutrinos may be the same as for these particles, or it may not. Stay tuned as physicists figure this out.
- 4.
These energy units (based on the electron volt) will be explained in more detail in Chapter 3. An MeV is a million eV (electron volts), a GeV is a billion eV, and a TeV is a trillion eV. While a trillion anything sounds like it should be very large, the energy of motion (kinetic energy) of a mosquito buzzing around your head is about 1 TeV.
- 5.
It is never explained what exists in the fifth, sixth, or seventh dimension (besides a 1970s musical group, of course).
- 6.
It is possible that there exists more than one extra spatial dimensions, but adding more dimensions further restricts their possible properties.
- 7.
Only Seasons 1 and 2 are referenced in this book, in part because depictions of science in this series deserve their own book-length treatment, but mainly because the plot becomes exponentially more convoluted beginning in Season 3.
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Larsen, K. (2019). A Whirlwind Tour of Particle Physics. In: Particle Panic! . Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12206-5_1
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