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Andrew Cohen. Forces of Nature
Copyright
Contents
Taking a different perspective
The Universe in a snowflake
Why do bees build hexagons?
Knocking on the doors of chemistry
The fundamental building blocks and the forces of Nature
Why is the Earth a sphere?
Why does life come in so many shapes and sizes?
Symmetry and symmetry breaking in biology
The Universe in a snowflake
Somewhere in spacetime
Life on an orbiting planet The Seasons
The formation of the Earth and Moon
Life on an orbiting planet Storms
Life on an orbiting, spinning planet The Tides
Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity
Somewhere in spacetime
Spacetime calculations
The moth and the flame
Chemistry is all about the movement of electrons
Frankenstein’s monsters
On the Origin of Species A framework to make sense of life on Earth
The oldest life on Earth
A warm little pond?
Life, thermodynamics and entropy
The moth and the flame
A very different Eden
Life beyond Earth
Pale Blue Dot
The rainbow connection
Why does the Sun shine?
The nuclear physics of the Sun
Why do hot things shine? Part 1: James Clerk Maxwell and the Golden Age of Wireless
Why do hot things shine? Part 2: Max Planck and the Quantum Revolution
A serendipitous aside; the solar neutrino problem
Pale blue green planet Part 1: The Oceans
Pale blue green planet Part 2: The Sky
Pale blue green planet Part 3: The Land
Pale coloured dots
Plate section
Picture credits
Index
By the Same Author
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Отрывок из книги
Praise for Professor Brian Cox:
‘Engaging, ambitious and creative.’
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The theoretical prediction that building blocks exist beneath the level of protons and neutrons was made by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964. It was based on a pattern in the subatomic particles known at the time. By the early 1960s, an inelegant, profligate and seemingly ever-expanding list of subatomic building blocks had been discovered. The proton and neutron are part of a whole family of particles known as baryons; there are Lambdas, Sigmas, Deltas, Cascades and a host of others. There is also a family of particles known as mesons: Pions, Kaons, Rho and so on. There are thirteen different types of Lambda particle alone, nine Sigmas and eight Kaons. Particle physics was looking increasingly like a subatomic branch of botany. Then Gell-Mann and Zweig noticed a beautiful pattern. The particles could be arranged according to their observed properties in geometrical patterns. One such pattern is shown in the illustration here. Today, these are known as ‘super-multiplets’.
As Kepler suspected when he considered the six-fold symmetry of snowflakes, patterns in Nature are often a clue that there is a deeper underlying structure. The patterns may or may not be easy to recognise – Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for noticing the pattern amongst the particles – but they are the Rosetta Stone that allows Nature’s language to be deciphered. In this case, the pattern in the particles suggested to Gell-Mann and Zweig that the baryons are all constructed out of three smaller building blocks, that Gell-Mann called quarks. When they first recognised the pattern, they included three quarks in their scheme: up, down and strange. The different baryons on the lower planes of the super-multiplets are the possible three-fold combinations of the three building blocks. Adding a fourth quark – charm – constructs the higher layers. The quark constituents of the particles are shown in the illustration opposite: for example the ∆++ contains three up quarks.
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