Sep 20, 2018
Everything is made up of fundamental particles. You have the
leptons: that’s the electron, muon, tau, and their ghostly
neutrinos that help us to conserve momentum. You have the quarks,
which make up all of the hadrons. The up, down, and strange quarks:
and their heavier cousins, the top, bottom, and charm quarks.
Mixing quarks can give you baryons, like the proton and neutron. It
can give you mesons, like the pion particles.
But you also have four forces.
There’s gravity, which pulls on everything with mass. There’s
electromagnetism, which pulls on everything with charge. There’s
the weak nuclear force, which is involved in the decay of neutrons
and other particles, and it’s also how the ghostly neutrinos
interact. And, finally, there’s the strong nuclear force: which
binds the protons and neutrons together in the nucleus, and binds
the quarks within each proton and neutron.
It turns out that the final part of the Standard Model is
associated with these forces. Because, although we can imagine
force fields that extend throughout space like Maxwell did, it
turns out that forces have ‘carriers’. In some sense, when one
particle exerts a force on another, another particle jumps between
them to spread that influence. These force carriers are bosons.
In this episode, we'll complete our picture of the Standard Model
by adding the force carriers and the Higgs Boson into the mix. And
then, we'll dive into the terrifying world of BDSM - BeyonD the
Standard Model.
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