5 Summary of Week 2

This week leaves us with a lot of lingering questions. Are quarks really the ‘elementary’ particles, in the sense that they do not possess a substructure? Are the symmetries used in the description of the forces indeed fundamental symmetries of nature? Are the four fundamental forces all there is, or are there more?

We don’t know the answers to these questions, and perhaps we never will. All we can say is that experimental results agree with the predictions from the models we’ve developed based on our knowledge. But even if discrepancies between theory and experiment are discovered at some point in the future, and these point to another layer of complexity, we could never be certain that we’ve reached the ultimate goal of identifying the fundamental building blocks of matter.

Next week stays on the ‘small scale’, as you move from particle physics to quantum physics.

You can now move on to Week 3 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .