Why Study Nature? Power (Control over it) “When will the Nile flood?” (time/astronomy) “What will make my sick baby better?” (medicine) “How can I make my spear fly faster and farther?” (physics) Celebrity Status A-List parties Red carpet treatment MTV interviews Because we must. Mankind has always been driven to understand the world. The world is inherently simple and beautiful. It can be understood. And always: Babes…never forget the babes…

As a single, unified thing there exists in us both life and death, waking and sleeping, youth and old age, because the former things having changed are now the latter, and when those latter things change, they become the former. - Heraclitus (quoted in pseudo-Plutarch, Consolation to Apollo )

Being is ungenerated and indestructible, whole, of one kind and unwavering, and complete. Nor was it, nor will it be, since now it is, all together, one, continuous...That it came from what is not I shall not allow you to say or think — for it is not sayable or thinkable that it is not...How might what is then perish? How might it come into being? For if it came into being it is not, nor is it if it is ever going to be. Thus generation is quenched and perishing unheard of. - Parmenides circa 480 BC

Science Is About Simplification

PHILOSOPHIÆ NATURALIS PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA Author Isaac Newton Third edition (1726) Three Laws of Motion Law I Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. Law II The relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma. Law III For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Everything pertaining from astronomical motion to falling here on Earth can be fully described by Newton’s Law of Gravity plus his laws of motion.

Science Is About Simplification

Electricity Magnetism ElectroMagnetism Light Three Become one James Clerk Maxwell (~1864) Modern Nomenclature

Then may we not fairly plead in reply that our true lover of knowledge naturally strives for truth, and is not content with common opinion, but soars with undimmed and unwearied passion till he grasps the essential nature of things ? -Plato Republic

Science addresses many things: –What is the ultimate nature of reality? –What is the simplest expression of nature? –Amongst all of the undeniable change, is there anything that is permanent and enduring? –How did the universe come into existence and what is its ultimate fate? –What is the ultimate answer to the ultimate question?

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What is the root of it all? From where comes meaning? لله ا Moslems PUNS Physicists DOG Dyslexic Christians GOD Christians

Beauty in the Universe

Innermost Space High Energy Particle Physics is a study of the smallest pieces of matter. It investigates the deepest and most fundamental aspects of nature. It investigates (among other things) the nature of the universe immediately after the Big Bang. It also explores physics at temperatures not common for the past 15 billion years (or so).

Periodic Table u d u u d d Proton NeutronElectron Gluons hold quarks together Photons hold atoms together HeliumNeon All atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons

t b c s u d While quarks have similar electric charge, they have vastly different masses (but zero size!)

 =e 2 /ħc

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (a.k.a. Fermilab) Begun in 1968 First beam 1972 (200, then 400 GeV) Upgrade 1983 (900 GeV) Upgrade 2001 (980 GeV) Jargon alert: 1 Giga Electron Volt (GeV) is 100,000 times more energy than the particle beam in your TV. If you made a beam the hard way, it would take 1,000,000,000 batteries

Increasing ‘Violence’ of Collision Expected Number of Events Run II Run I Increased reach for discovery physics at highest masses Huge statistics for precision physics at low mass scales Formerly rare processes become high statistics processes  The Main Injector upgrade was completed in  The new accelerator increases the number of possible collisions per second by  DØ and CDF have undertaken massive upgrades to utilize the increased collision rate.  Run II began March 2001

How Do You Detect Collisions? Use one of two large multi-purpose particle detectors at Fermilab (DØ and CDF). They’re designed to record collisions of protons colliding with antiprotons at nearly the speed of light. They’re basically cameras. They let us look back in time.

Typical Detector (Now) 30’ 50’ Weighs 5,000 tons Can inspect 10,000,000 collisions/second Will record 50 collisions/second Records approximately 10,000,000 bytes/second Will record (1,000,000,000,000,000) bytes in the next run (1 PetaByte).

Spooky?

Remarkable Photos This collision is the most violent ever recorded (and fully understood). It required that particles hit within m or 1/10,000 the size of a proton In this collision, a top and anti-top quark were created, helping establish their existence

Modern Cosmology Approximately 15 billion years ago, all of the matter in the universe was concentrated at a single point A cataclysmic explosion (of biblical proportions perhaps?) called the Big Bang caused the matter to fly apart. In the intervening years, the universe has been expanding, cooling as it goes.

Big Bang Theory White Sox Version

History of the Universe (Readers Digest Version) the universe was all concentrated at a single spot You are here Then God (or whoever, I’m not getting into that tonight) said “Let there be light,” and instead there was a vast explosion that created the universe and spread all of the matter that has ever been observed (and more) throughout the Cosmos. Hmmmmmmmmmm….. Large explosions  hot temperatures  very high energies Ice melts  water evaporates  steam ionizes  atomic nuclei break apart  quarks escape the nuclei….

Now (13.7 billion years) Stars form (1 billion years) Atoms form (380,000 years) Nuclei form (180 seconds) ??? (Before that) 4x seconds Nucleons form ( seconds) Quarks differentiate ( seconds?)

Mysteries How do we know about the universe before seconds? Just what is the simplest and most fundamental thing in the universe? Does the unification/simplification stuff discussed earlier continue to hold?

The Early Universe The forces have been unified. What about the particles? Possibly the true nature of particles is that they are actually minute vibrating 11-dimensional strings. Freebie: This theory is the only candidate way to unify gravity with the quantum forces.

Dark Energy 65% Dark Matter 30% Gas Clouds 4% Stars 0.5% Neutrinos 0.3%

Standard Model Summary The Standard Model (quarks, leptons, three generations and four currently-distinct forces) Can explain all known experimental data, from: The birth of the universe ( seconds) to now. Motionless objects, to those traveling at the speed of light. Temperatures from absolute zero to the Big Bang. Lotsa stuff….. Cannot explain The very early universe (before seconds). Do the forces unify? Are there many particles or just strings? Lotsa stuff…..

LHC

LHC Experiments

Coming to a Particle Laboratory Near You Summer 2008

www-d0.fnal.gov/~lucifer/PowerPoint/PopTalk_Sep2007.ppt

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