Beyond the God Particle (57 page)

3
.
Estimated
shale oil alone is 1.5 trillion barrels, which at $100/bbl is $150 trillion. See, e.g.,
http://dailyreckoning.com/oil-shale-reserves/
; see also
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/american-oil-find-holds-oil-opec/story?id=17536852#.UVcVQPKbFXs
. Note the word “estimated” is key here, since proven reserves are significantly less and don't include shale. Estimated coal and natural gas reserves are comparable (sites last visited 4/7/2013).

4
. See, e.g.,
http://rutledgecapital.com/2009/05/24/total-assets-of-the-us-economy-188-trillion-134xgdp/
. This article essentially asks the sensible question “Why are we sweating the $17 trillion debt when we have $200 trillion in assets?” (site last visited 4/7/2013).

5
. See
http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/list/
(site last visited 4/7/2013).

6
. “Conjecture on the Physical Implications of the Scale Anomaly,” invited talk on the occasion of the 75th birthday celebration of Murray Gell-Mann (“Murraypalooza”), Christopher T. Hill (2005), downloadable pdf file at
http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0510177.pdf
and references therein.

7
. Steven Weinberg, “The Crisis of Big Science,”
New York Times Book Review
, May 10, 2012,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-big-science/
(site last visited 3/8/2013).

APPENDIX

1
. See “Quark,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark
, “Murray Gell-Mann,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann
, “George Zweig,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Zweig
(sites last visited 3/13/13). When Gell-Mann proposed the term “quark,” borrowed from the passage in James Joyce's novel
Finnegans Wake
: “Three quarks for Muster Mark,” he thankfully broke the tradition that everything requires a Greek alphabetical symbol for nomenclature in particle physics. The idea of quarks was also independently proposed by George Zweig, a colleague of Gell-Mann at Caltech who happened to be on a visit to CERN and wrote down the idea in a famous unpublished CERN preprint. Zweig chose the name “aces.” Zweig realized that certain dynamical properties of the many newly discovered particles could be explained on the basis of the next layer of matter, the quarks.

2
. See “James D. Bjorken,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjorken
, “Deep inelastic scattering,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_inelastic_scattering
(sites last visited 3/13/13).

3
. See “Quantum chromodynamics,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chromodynamics
; Frank Wilczek, “QCD Made Simple,”
http://www.frankwilczek.com/Wilczek_Easy_Pieces/298_QCD_Made_Simple.pdf
(sites last visited 3/13/13).

4
. See “Generation (particle physics),”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_%28particle_physics%29
(site last visited 3/13/13). We actually have some understanding of the fact that the charges of a generation must add to zero because of the cancelation of the Adler-Bardeen-Bell-Jackiw anomalies, a quantum threat to the symmetries in the weak interactions that must be perfectly canceled to zero. We also have beautiful “unified theories,” such as the Georgi–Glashow SU(5) theory that “predicts” this pattern. However, in any theory, we can't be absolutely sure that the electron goes with the
u
and
d
quarks, as opposed to the
t
and
b
quarks, or some other scrambling of things.

The CP violation observed in quarks
does require
all three generations, for technical reasons, and we also know that some kind of CP violation is necessary for matter to exist in the universe at all. Also, all quarks and leptons are active in the early universe and play a role in the formation of the universe we end up with.

5
. The number of gluons is 8 = 9 – 1. 9 is the number of (color, anti-color) pairs that we can ever possibly have. One combination,
, is not an SU(3) group element. That is, it doesn't rotate anything in color space and doesn't arise as a gluon.

6
. See also “Spin (physics),”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_%28physics%29
(site last visited 3/13/13).

7
. See “Wave function,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function
(site last visited 3/13/13).

8
. See “Boson,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosons
, “Fermion,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion
(sites last visited 3/13/13).

9
. See “James Clerk Maxwell,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell
(site last visited 3/13/13). Maxwell, Scottish born and living only to age 48, is a towering figure in the history of science. His importance in the history of physics is comparable to that of Einstein and Newton. He was the first to recognize that light is a propagating wave disturbance of electric and magnetic fields, and was responsible for finding a solution to the equations that describe all electric and magnetic phenomena, known as Maxwell's equations. The laws of special relativity are already contained in Maxwell's theory—Einstein unearthed them by contemplating the symmetries of the equations under different states of inertial motion.

10
. J. D. Jackson and L. B. Okun, “Historical Roots of Gauge Invariance,”
Reviews of Modern Physics
73 (2001): 663–80; John P. Ralston (private communication); Jackson and Okun write:

Notable in this regard, but somewhat peripheral to our history of gauge invariance, was James MacCullagh's early development of a phenomenological theory of light as disturbances propagating in a novel form of the elastic ether, with the potential energy depending not on compression and distortion but only on local rotation of the medium in order to make the light vibrations purely transverse…. MacCullagh's equations correspond (when interpreted properly) to Maxwell's equations for free fields in anisotropic media. We thank John P. Ralston for making available his unpublished manuscript on MacCullagh's work.
     Thus, MacCullagh actually constructed a theory of light as a propagating wave disturbance in a material medium, an “ether,” in 1839. This theory is equivalent to Maxwell's theory, of some 25 years later, and it involves the concept of an unobservable gauge field, hence MacCullagh seemed to have understood the symmetry principle that is required. But the connection of the underlying physical picture here, involving the concept of twists, or local rotations, in a material medium, to electrodynamics is remote. This discovery has gone almost completely unnoticed. MacCullagh, whose relationships with the rest of the physics community were not happy ones, and whose life ended tragically in suicide, may have been a man too far ahead of his time.

11
. See “Gauge theory,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_theory
,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_gauge_theory
, “Yang–Mills theory,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang%E2%80%93Mills_theory
(sites last visited 3/13/13). More mathematically, we can describe the gauge invariance of electrodynamics: We consider a
complex phase factor
, which is just an exponential, like
e
^iθ
, where
θ
is real, and this has a magnitude of unity, i.e., 1 = |
e
^iθ
|
²
. We also consider the electron wave function, which is a complex valued function of space and time,
. Multiplying the electron wave function by this factor means
doesn't change the magnitude of the electron's wave function, and it therefore shouldn't affect the measured probabilities
.

12
. See “Feynman diagrams,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagrams
(site last visited 3/13/13).

13
. See “Yang–Mills Theory,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang-Mills
; see also “Special unitary group,” under “n = 2,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SU%282%29#n_.3D_2
(sites last visited 3/13/13).

14
. See “Standard Model,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model
(site last visited 3/13/13).