My improvised Standard Model lesson August 2, 2006
Posted by dorigo in news, personal, physics, science.trackback
Today I had the pleasure to meet the italian Summer Students, a group of 14 excellent students from six italian universities (Udine, Padova, Trento, Pisa, Siena, Roma) who have come to Fermilab to work for two months at physics data analysis for the CDF experiment (the physics students) or engineering problems in the technical division (the engineers).
I am always curious to observe the fresh Summer Students. First, because I was one myself, back in 1992. Second, because many of them will become my colleagues soon. And third, because their reactions to the new world that I sometimes get a chance to introduce them to are always entertaining.
I remember one student, maybe eight or nine years ago, who was literally enthusiastic about everything he saw, from the signs on the highway to the color of dollar bills. It was such a treat to bring him downtown Chicago one evening… He even called his dad from a bar where a band was playing blues live, to let him listen to the music. That was fun.
Today we had an informal meeting to create the necessary connections between each student and his or her tutor - the person who will be responsible for their activities. At the end our big boss, Giorgio Bellettini, asked the students to make questions, since there just is too much to explain about the lab, the research activities, the physics we study. Since some of the students do not have a particle physics background, the question easily arose about what are elementary particles.
Giorgio was nice as always and he suggested that I give a brief seminar about the Standard Model and the structure of matter. So I gave this seminar “a’ la carte”, with attention to keeping things simple and to avoid boring my audience. I must say that the few physics posts I have written in 18 months of blogging here and in the old QD site helped me a lot in organizing a smooth flowing explanation with lots of easy examples and intuitive images, with just a white board and markers to visualize things.
I think I made a good job, given the sixty seconds I had to organize the lecture (while Giorgio was introducing me as “professor Dorigo” with his usual flattering remarks)… It was interesting to hear their questions, and attempt explanations that did not fish too deep in jargon or technical details.
Would that you had recorded this talk. Those of us who are “science groupies” can never get enough of this kind of thing.
I, for one, have read everything I can find about the standard model, provided it is accessivle to those of us with little math beyond calculus. While this pursuit will never make me a physicist, each new presentation helps give me a little more insight as to what is really happening in the “real” world.
Well, it was an improvised thing, so there was no chance to record anything… But I did nothing more than explaining what is in a proton, introducing quarks and gluons, explaining what happens when you try to pull a quark out, and discussing radiactivity. This was enough to create a table of known elementary particles, which in turn allowed to present the second and third generation of leptons, the top quark, etcetera. A discussion of the three forces that the Standard Model describes followed. Finally, I explained what we do with protons and antiprotons with the Tevatron collider, and the production of new particles in subatomic collisions… All in simple terms.
It was easy, since I had the examples I wrote about here in my mind. For instance, I perused the idea of garbage bags and bottles of jack daniels inside, to explain what happens when two protons collide, and the rarity of a hard collision, and the means we have to detect it.
Cheers,
T.