Week 2: Particle physics
Introduction
What are the fundamental ‘building blocks’ from which our universe is made? This week aims to explore whether that’s a question that can even be answered, beginning with the history of scientific discoveries relating to matter. You’ll learn about the smallest constituents of matter we’ve found, and the forces that act between them. But before you get there, you’ll take a close look at something more familiar: a triangle.
Here’s Marcus to introduce this week’s topic.
Download this video clip.Video player: Video 1
Transcript: Video 1 Introduction
MARCUS DU SAUTOY
This week, we’re going to be examining the very small. What are the building blocks from which our universe is made? Each generation has pulled matter apart, finding ever smaller ingredients that make up the physical world. The ancient Greeks thought that everything was made from earth, wind, fire and water. That was superseded by the theory of atoms, and the periodic table listing the ingredients for the molecular world. Atoms gave way to electrons, protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons gave way to quarks. We believe this is the bottom layer. As you’ll discover this week, the key to the current understanding of the building blocks of matter is the mathematics of symmetry. But are quarks really the final chapter? Or is it just the hubris of the current generation of scientists? How could we ever know when we’d really hit the truly indivisible?
Video 1 Introduction
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By the end of this week, you should be able to:
- outline the elementary constituents of matter
- understand the notion of symmetry
- combine simple rotation and reflection symmetries
- appreciate some basic properties of the quark model.