The Standard Model of Particle Physics

[CharmQuark]

This pleases me Orion

Thank you for writing it and posting

[PeteKropotkin]

Can you give a bit more detail on mesons ?
Are there any non-Gauge bosons?

(They've invented a lot of stuff since I did school physics! )

TIA

Pete

[DCWhitworth]

I thought the fundamental particles were protons, neutron, photons, croutons and newtons.

[March_Hare]

[Harbles]

Orion Have you heard of this guy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Garrett_Lisi

And his "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Excepti ... Everything

His Surfer / Physicist lifestyle gets the headlines and there was a recent paper that supposedly Disproves his conjecture, " The model is formulated as a gauge theory, using a modified BF action, with E8 as the Lie group."(from wikipedia).

Way beyond me. What do you think?

[mrgumby]

Orion111....just found "the standard model" etc...that is exactly what I wanted..I shall print it out and hang it by my PC as a reference.

[mrgumby]

I've been reading about the 4 fundamental forces....and I'm confused... are there 4 distinct forces, or 1 force acting in 4 different ways?

It would seem simpler to have just 1 force..."attraction"....

[chriwi]

As far as I know 3 forces (electromagnetic, weak, strong) acting different at low energys but unify in the standardmodel at higher energys. GUT-theorys assume that also the 4th force (gravity) will unify with the 3 others at even higher enrgys.
But also I have difficulties to understand this unification at high enrgys and would apreciate some easy to understasnd explaination without too much math.

[Kasuha]

As far as I understand it, it's about describing these interactions in an unified way.

As an example - at low speeds, particles increase their speed with added energy; at speeds near speed of light they rather increase their mass. Quite different sets of relatively simple equations can be used to describe these two individually but we also know somewhat more complicated equations which describe both and anything in between.

For forces, similar thing happens when we reach higher energies - their effects become closer to each other. Therefore, a single set of equations can be found which describes it all - the common behavior at high energies and both different behaviors at low energies, and anything in between.