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February 28, 2008

Garrett Lisi at TED

The phenomenal (and probably phenomenological) surfer physicist Garrett Lisi manifested advanced creative physics at the TED conference. [Link]

Referencing the Large Hadron Collider, he tells us about the "whole zoo" of subatomic paricles, the 226 particles we know about, including simple particles like electrons and quarks, and their "second and third generation" relatives, which exist at much higher masses. He talks about the forces that effect each particle - the weak, strong, gravity and mass. A major hope for the Large Hadron Collider is that it will allow us to detect the Higgs Boson, which should give mass to other particles.

Lisi shows us force maps of particles, organized in terms of hypercharge and weak charges. They organize into symmetrical patterns - these symmetries are the result of projecting from 4D into 2D. "These pictures are not just pretty - they tell us what's allowed to happen." A great deal of progress has been made in physics by drawing these maps ad looking to see what's missing - broken symmetries often reveal particles that are supposed to exist.

jon posted this at 5:21 PM
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