Beyond the God Particle

Beyond the God Particle by Leon M. Lederman, Christopher T. Hill Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Beyond the God Particle by Leon M. Lederman, Christopher T. Hill Read Free Book Online
Authors: Leon M. Lederman, Christopher T. Hill
Tags: General, science, History, Cosmology, Physics, Nuclear
“atoms” from the Greek atmos ( indivisible ). Out of these basic building blocks we can construct more complex objects and the forms and shapes of all that we see. The behavior of the large-scale physical world is thus emergent from the fundamental properties of atoms.
    This is a wholly modern view of the physical world, as well as one of the tasks of science. While, in Democritus's theory, certain materials could change and rearrange their structure under chemical reactions (e.g., burning them, letting them rot, or dissolving them in water), the underlying atoms were immutable, unchangeable, invariant. His theory was useful and offered a prescription for further research. Here was the basic tenet of “fundamental particles,” and their role as the irreducible components of all things throughout the universe, which sculpt and shape the world through their own intrinsic properties.
    Alchemists over the subsequent centuries went to work. They never succeeded in turning the element lead (Pb) into the element gold (Au), or achieving any other elemental transmutation, for that matter. In countless attempts to do so they merely rearranged elements within the many exotic compounds, but they provided the service of amassing an enormous empirical “database” of recipes and processes and properties of chemicals that formed the foundation of the science of chemistry. In this sense, Democritus's theory was tested, found to be correct, but has been so significantly enlarged in detail by later science that it ultimately proved to be more of a philosophy, a prescription to actually do the hard work of science, and not to be merely contented with a dismissive shake of the wrist, invoking “air,” “fire,” “earth,” “water,” and “quintessence,” panacea for lack of a deeper understanding.
    What we come into contact with on a daily basis, the “everyday matter,” is the first layer of the “onion of nature.” It is comprised of “molecules,” which are either large or small groupings of atoms. Salt (NaCl), water (H 2 O), oxygen in the air we breathe (O 2 ), and methane (CH 4 ), the gas we use toheat our homes, etc., are all molecules, composed of combinations of the more fundamental elements or atoms. Molecules can be broken down chemically into their constituent atoms, which can then be rearranged into other molecules. Just light a match to a certain mixture of oxygen molecules and methane molecules, and these will rapidly rearrange to form water molecules and carbon dioxide molecules, releasing a lot of heat. 2 On the other hand, sodium (Na), chlorine (Cl), hydrogen (H), oxygen (O), carbon (C), and so on, are all atoms, or “elements.” These are invariant, or unchanging, in chemical reactions—they are the “fundamental particles” of chemistry.
    The total numbers of these atoms never change in chemical reactions—the atom of gold (Au) cannot be changed into lead (Pb) by chemical reactions. The atoms cannot be further subdivided without doing things that aren't possible in a high school chemistry lab. To smash atoms apart, into “smithereens,” takes us beyond the realm of chemistry. It takes us into a deeper layer of the onion of nature, the realm of atomic and nuclear physics, eventually into the realm of quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons. These are, today, the true “fundamental particles” of nature, perhaps to be replaced by smithereens in some science of the future.
    By the mid-nineteenth century, based upon the accumulated knowledge of all the known chemical processes, the elements, or atoms, were classified according to their properties by the great Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev. This classification scheme is called the Periodic Table of the Elements . The Periodic Table was a stunning summary of the thousands of years of alchemy, chemical science, and simply messing around with matter. It represented the reduction of the virtual infinity of molecules into a simple list of approximately

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