We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning out into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. Few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos come from, or whether it was always here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans may know. – Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Cambridge University, England
1. All things in the Universe are in one of four forms: gases, liquids, solids or plasma. In physics and chemistry plasma is a state of matter similar to gas in which a certain portion of the particles are ionized.
2. Gases, liquids, solids and plasma are all made up of atoms, molecules, and/or ions.
3. Atoms are made up of smaller objects, particles, and a lot of empty space (like inside John Edwards’ head.)
4. Electrons are the particles that orbit the nuclei of atoms.
5. The particles in the nuclei are protons and neutrons.
6. Protons and neutrons are made up of even smaller particles called quarks, but pronounced quarts. Why? Because. I’m not telling all I know. And quarks were so named by a Caltech physicist named Murray Gell-Mann from an enigmatic quotation from Irish novelist James Joyce: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” And you thought physics were simple and easy to understand, didn’t you?
7. There are number of different varieties of quarks. Currently, it is believed there are six different “flavors”: up, down, strange, charmed, bottom and top. Whatever you do, never try a cone of bottom.
8. Each quark, no matter its flavor, comes in three colors: red, green and blue. That’s it; no other choices. These are just terms for quarks – their wavelength is shorter than visible color wavelengths and quarks have no real color. Why give them a color? Because. I’m not telling all I know.
9. Want to build a proton or neutron? I don’t care – DO IT! Take 3 quarks, one of each color and add 2 up quarks and one down quark! A neutron takes 3 quarks of each color and you add 2 down quarks and one up quark. I’ll give you a moment here to make one.
10. Thrilling, was it not?
11. Particles have “spin” and depending on the spin have Spin 0 or Spin 1 or Spin 2 or, to really screw you up, Spin1/2. And they DO NOT SPIN. This is just a way to describe a particle from a certain viewpoint.
12. All these matter particles belong to a class of particles called fermions. Fermions are named after Enrico Fermi, the great Italian physicist.
13. Somehow fermions have a system of messages that pass among them, causing them to act and even change in various ways. No, I do NOT know how they do this, but then, neither does anyone else.
14. The message system among the fermions is composed of four forces.
15. These special classes of fermion particles that carry these messages among the fermions are called bosons.
16. Every particle in the universe is either a fermion or a boson, a type of fermion.
17. One of the four fundamental forces of nature is gravity. Think of this: messages carried by borons called gravitrons between the particles of the atoms in your body, and the particles of atoms in the Earth, influence these particles to draw closer to one another. Your feet draw closer to the ground, and vice-versa, until your feet and Earth touch, and you don’t float away. DON’T WORRY – BE HAPPY.
18. Gravity is surprisingly the weakest of these four forces, NOT THAT NASA THINKS SO. Or Michael Moore.
19. A second force, the electromagnetic force, occurs where messages are carried by bosons called electrons among the protons in the nucleus of an atom, between the protons and the electrons nearby, and among electrons.
20. The electromagnetic force causes electrons to orbit the nucleus of the atom. Otherwise, they all could meet surreptitiously behind Saturn for drunken orgies.
21. Photons show up as light, heat, radio waves, microwaves and other waves all called electromagnetic radiation. You may, if you like, wave back but you will be wasting your time.
22. The electromagnetic force is stronger than gravity, but acts only on particles with an electric charge. Plug one in and see if I’m not right.
23. A third message service, the strong nuclear force, causes the nucleus of the atom to hold together and not fly off, wasting our time looking for it.
24. A fourth force is the weak nuclear force that actually causes radiation and plays a necessary role in the formation of the elements in the stars and in the early universe. Actually, we are stardust.
25. Without the four forces, every fermion, every particle, would
exist, if it existed at all, in isolation, with no means of
contacting or influencing any other particle.
How about you think about all that and I’ll get back to you with some other surprises in physics. Is there a particle faster than light? Is light a wave or a packet of particles? What IS Nicole Kidman’s unlisted telephone number? Is Pluto a planet? Certainly Rosie O’Donnell is.
Horse Head Nebula
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