Particle Physics, the Standard Model, Dark Matter and everything...

A great site from the particle data group at the Lawrence BerkeleyNational Laboratory: supported by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation:
 http://particleadventure.org/

"The Shield of Achilles', by W. H. Auden

One of the greatest commentaries on modern war, constrastion with the visions of the 'Heroic Era;...

The Shield of Achilles
W. H. Auden

---

She looked over his shoulder
       For vines and olive trees,
     Marble well-governed cities
       And ships upon untamed seas,
     But there on the shining metal
       His hands had put instead
     An artificial wilderness
       And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
   No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, 
   Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
   An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line, 
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
   Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
   No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
   Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For ritual pieties,
     White flower-garlanded heifers,
       Libation and sacrifice,
     But there on the shining metal
       Where the altar should have been,
     She saw by his flickering forge-light
       Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
   Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
   A crowd of ordinary decent folk
   Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
   That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
   And could not hope for help and no help came:
   What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For athletes at their games,
     Men and women in a dance
       Moving their sweet limbs
     Quick, quick, to music,
       But there on the shining shield
     His hands had set no dancing-floor
       But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, 
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

     The thin-lipped armorer,
       Hephaestos, hobbled away,
     Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
     At what the god had wrought
       To please her son, the strong
     Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
       Who would not live long.

The Fine Structure Constant

Well, it's very late, so let's talk about one of the most interesting and obscure "things/values/contstants/whatever" in the universe: the 'fine structure constant', universally represented by the Greek letter alpha 'α'.
It's a coupling constant, in that it characterizes the strengh of the electromagetic interactions of everything.
In other words, it's fundamentally involved in one of the four fundamental interactions in the universe:
Electromagnetism
the strong nuclear force
the weak nuclear force, and
gravitation.
(PS: That's all there is, as we know it)
Alpha has always been mysterious, since it's a dimensionless number -- not 'meters per second' or 'pounds per square foot' or anything -- it's just a number. Where the hell did it come from, and why is it what it is, and not something else?

Here's a prophetic comment from the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, more than 40 years ago:
There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant e the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to -0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!

Feynman anticipated by a great leap of intuition and genius, that  'alpha' IS actually related to pi and and e (the base of natural logarithms), as has been subsequently shown - maybe.

But it's still a fundamental issue in the 'anthropic' question about physical theories: are the theories we use to explain the universe -- right down to its fundamental constants -- a necessary result that observations of the physical universe have to be compatible with the intelligent life which observes it? (Take an aspirin here).
It's relatively-easily calculated that alpha (the fine-structure constant) could not be greatly different from what it is, in our universe: a small variation on either side would make it impossible for stars to form, and eventually for carbon and oxygen atoms to be created through nuclear synthesis: no carbon atoms = no carbon-based lifeforms like us. Thus also, no one to measure these constants....

So, physicists still ask -- why 'this' rather than 'that'? ...

PS: this is still an open and controversial question. Some recent experimental evidence suggests that this constant: isn't.
It may now or have in the past varied in different parts of our universe. If this is the case, it is still unclear what this means...
Ref:
http://www.physorg.com/news202921592.html

The 'Big Bang' and cosmic background radiation

In about the middle of the 20th Century, cosmologists had come up with two basic competing theories about the beginning of our universe: the 'Steady State' theory and what popularly became known as the 'Big Bang' theory. The 'Steady State' theory maintained that the universe had always been around, and would continue to be so, without noticeable change. Fred Hoyle was probably the most popularly-known proponent of this theory.
Sputnik and the Russian space program actually made a big contribution to research leading to discoveries in this area.
Working at Bell Labs in 1964, Arno Penzia and Robert Wilson were trying to perfect means of communicating with satellites in orbit. To measure these faint signals, they had to eliminate ALL the interfering noise, from radios, television transmissions, nearby radar and radio transmissions, etc. They suppressed interference from the heat in the receiver itself by cooling it with liquid helium to −269 °C, only 4 °C above absolute zero. But still, there was this residual signal -- they even thought this might be from 'irregularities' in their large horn antenna (picture), caused from the accumulation of pigeon droppings. But even when the large horn antenna was thoroughly scrubbed, the residual signal remained.
Penzias and Wilson were not cosmologists or theoretical physicsts, but got in contact with Robert H. Dicke, Jim Peebles, and David Wilkinson, astrophysicists at Princeton University just 60 km (40 miles) away, who were preparing to search for microwave radiation in this region of the spectrum. Dicke and his colleagues reasoned that the Big Bang must have scattered not only the matter that condensed into galaxies but also must have released a tremendous blast of radiation. With the proper instrumentation, this radiation should be detectable. (wikipedia).
After talking to Robert Dicke at length, Penzias and Wilson invited them all down to the Bell Labs facility in New Jersey, to actually listen to -- and see on monitors -- the residual 'noise' they were recording. To avoid controversy, their results and interpretations were published in separate papers.

In 1978, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint discovery.

To put it succintly, there is no longer any argument about the 'beginning' of the universe, when it happened, and a good part of its history since then. Aside from all the other evidence, there is no other explanation for the pervasive 3 degree K blackbody radiation which pervades the universe: it's the predicted and calculated remnant of the 'Big Bang' event which created this universe. End of story.

How confident are we? Check the attached photo, with the predicted vs. measured radiation, together with the 1% error bars.

PS: It must seem rather demeaning now, for Penzias and Wilson having to spend days on their hands and knees inside the big horn antenna, scrubbing all the surfaces with bleach, to remove all the pigeon shit.
Worth it, perhaps, for a Nobel Prize.

PPS: Bell Labs - whose scientists invented the transistor, the intergrated circuit, the photovoltaic cell, the C programming language, the UNIX operating system, the first wireless local area network, etc. was effectively disbanded. As of now, there is reportedly no one doing basic research.
Hope your cell phone makes you happy.

The Bell Labs Horn Antenna In Crawford Hill, NJ (now a National Historic Site)

The data from the original scans from Bell Labs, correlated with the specific numerical predictions from the models of the 'Big Bang' theory. End of subject, as they say.

A 'Science Joke' and the meaning of 'limiting conditions'

A geneticist, a physiologist and a physicist were summoned to meet a wealthy racehorse magnate. He told them he would give a million pounds to the one who could accurately identify race-winning horses. After six months of hard work, they returned to present their results to the expectant millionaire.


The geneticist said, "I've looked into all the current genetic research, checked blood-lines going back decades, but there are just too many behavioural and environmental factors. I can't help."

The physiologist said, "I've looked at muscle mass, bone volume and density, and all the other factors I can think of, but the problem's too complex. There's just no guarantee of predicting a winner."

Finally, the physicist calmly walks up to the millionaire and gives him an index card. "Here you go," he says "I've found an equation that solves the problem for you."

"Wow," said the millionaire, "That's impressive...I'll get my cheque book."

"Great. But there's one thing you should know," said the physicist. "It only works for a spherically symmetric horse travelling in a vacuum."