3 – Lost Little Friends

We started with the electron our Lost Little Friends. Maybe that’s the beginning of particle physics. Is particle physics over now? Well, NO. There are a few things missing from our Lost Little Friends. One of them is someone who can draw Isaac Newton properly; GRAVITY, of course.

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Lost in Particle Physics – Lost Little Friends

          There is no mention in our Standard Model of particle physics from our Lost Little Friends. There’s no feature on that map of Lost Little Friends which represents gravity. So we do have a good theory of gravity. We have Einstein’s general relativity, which gives us a very good theoretical model, absolutely beautiful, and a very precise theoretical model of how matter occurs– space-time and how that leads to gravity.

Physicist got a Standard Model of particle physics over here. Quantum mechanics then general relativity, which describes gravity. And so they don’t work very well together near a black hole, or in the Big Bang. It would allow you to do most things.

So physicist think what we’ve been doing in the last five years at the Large Hadron Collider; sort of sitting on the coastline, sometimes just sitting around in hotels, listening to wild stories from theorists who’ve claimed that they’ve seen stuff out here

Conflicts in Gravity and Lost Little Friends

      For all practical purposes, it’s not the way we like to think about physics. And also, it’s not good enough anyway, even if you want to just get on and explain everyday observations. So the conflicts between gravity and quantum mechanics at the moment are basically down to thought experiments, but there are real observations that don’t work as well.

So even if you buy general relativity and quantum mechanics and don’t worry about the thought experiments, you still cannot explain how fast stars rotate around galaxies. If you do the calculations, you say this is how much matter I see in the galaxy. It comes from the Standard Model. And this is the gravitational force it should produce. It comes from general relativity, and this is how fast they’re going.

Then the answer is no. Then that’s not right, because they’re going too fast. The galaxy should fly apart. There isn’t enough gravity to keep them spinning at that speed without them flying off. So something is awry. Something has gone wrong. And obviously, this is a conflict between the Standard Model, which tells you how much mass is in the galaxy and the general relativity, which tells you how much gravitational force that would produce.

And you can say, well– also, either gravity is wrong and there are people trying to change– modify general relativity to account for that, or you say, well, actually, there’s more matter in the galaxy than we think, and we call it dark matter. And it’s not part of the Standard Model. And we fill the galaxy with that, and that provides the extra gravitational force. It means things can sit together. It means the whole thing hangs together. Now, so you broke, either one of the theories has to be modified. Most likely in such a situation, both of them will change.

Universe of Quantum Mechanics

The neutrinos may provide another source for our Lost Little Friends of difference between matter and anti-matter. They may even be their own anti-particles. So there’s a lot to find out in that little bit of the world as well

      And there are other ancillary; there’s a lot more evidence than just galaxy rotation curves, now that there’s something going wrong, and that it’s probably dark matter. I would say that most physicists think dark matter is out there, but there are still people working on modifying gravity, so you don’t need it.

So that’s one massive actually, if one do the sums in the calculations, it tells you that something like 80% of the universe is dark matter, so it’s not a small correction. It’s kind of embarrassing if you’re trying to explain what the whole of the universe is. And so that claim I made about the Standard Model, that everything is made of this, is clearly wrong by a factor of five or something, at least. So that’s pretty bad.

Missing Quantum Map

           There are other things missing from our map our Lost Little Friends; here where the neutrinos live; we don’t really know what’s going on. We only rather recently got into this region with any confidence and discovered that the neutrinos have mass, and that they are mixed up amongst each other. We still don’t know, actually, whether the neutrinos have their own anti-particles, which is why it sort of fades out; which represents anti-matter in some physicist twisted view of the Standard Model.

So this is an area, also, where there’s unsurveyed map; where there are experiments planned and in operation that we’ll be shedding light on– what’s going on there. That may give us some clue.

       There’s another of Lost Little Friends— actually, not as gravity missing from the Standard Model. Another kind of major embarrassment, is the fact that most of the theories in this– most of the forces in the Standard Model treat matter and anti-matter identically.

So if you start off with a Big Bang, you should end up naively with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter around in the universe. That’s not true. It’s certainly not true on the Earth, otherwise it wouldn’t be here, I guess. But as far as we can tell, it’s also– all the galaxies are made of matter as far as we can see, otherwise we’d see annihilation, kind of boundaries between them, and things where matter and anti-matter come together.

So as far as we can see, the visible universe is made entirely of matter. Anti-matter is easy to produce. And it should presumably been produced copiously in the Big Bang, but it’s not around anymore.

Matter Anti-Matter as Lost Little Friends

       So we know there are some clues in the Standard Model as to where that might have come from. In fact, it’s connected to the fact that there are three copies of matter. Once you’ve got three copies of matter, you can introduce slight differences between the way matter and anti-matter are treated.

And, indeed, there are those differences in the weak force. And, interestingly, if you have only two copies, you can’t have those differences. Three is the minimum number of copies you need in order to have those. And three seems to be what there is in nature, so maybe there’s a clue there as to what’s going on, but it’s only a clue. We don’t have a theory behind it yet so here are our Lost Little Friends.

And the little bits of violation of the symmetry between matter and anti-matter of Lost Little Friends that we see in the Standard Model are not enough to explain the gross discrepancy that we see in the world around us. The neutrinos may provide another source of difference between matter and anti-matter. They may even be their own anti-particles. So there’s a lot to find out in that little bit of the world as well.

But, really, what we’re doing is looking off the map now. So physicist think what we’ve been doing in the last five years at the Large Hadron Collider; sort of sitting on the coastline, sometimes just sitting around in hotels, listening to wild stories from theorists who’ve claimed that they’ve seen stuff out here. But we have a ship. We have a vessel that’s sailing. We’re actually sailing these seas with the Large Hadron Collider. And what we see here is physicist simply don’t know.