Warped Passages - Lisa Randall [74]
Only forces with a range smaller than ten million billionths (10-17) of a centimeter will produce measurable effects on a particle with weak scale energy. This is a very tiny distance, but it is relevant to the physical processes in a nucleus and to the mechanism by which particles acquire mass.
Tiny as it is, the weak scale length is far greater than the Planck scale length, which is one million billion billion billionth (10-33) of a centimeter. That is the size of the region where forces influence particles that have the Planck scale energy. The Planck scale energy determines the strength of gravity; it is the energy that particles would have to have for gravity to be a strong force.
7
The Standard Model of Particle Physics: Matter’s Most Basic Known Structure
You’re never alone,
You’re never disconnected!
You’re home with your own;
When company’s expected, you’re well protected!
…When you’re a Jet, you stay a Jet!
Riff (West Side Story)
Of all the stories she had read, Athena was most thoroughly perplexed by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea.” The story tells of a Prince who searched unsuccessfully for a suitable princess to wed. After he had searched in vain for weeks, a potential princess arrived by chance at his palace, seeking shelter from a storm. This soggy visitor thereby became the unwitting subject of the Queen’s litmus test for princesses.
The Queen prepared a bed, which she piled high with mattresses and eiderdown quilts. At the very bottom of the pile she placed a solitary pea. That night, she showed her visitor to the carefully prepared guest room. The next morning, the princess (as indeed she proved herself to be) complained that she had not been able to sleep at all. She had tossed and turned the whole night, and found she had actually turned black and blue—all because of the uncomfortable pea. The Queen and Prince were convinced that their visitor was truly of royal blood, for who else could be so delicate?
Athena turned the story round and round in her head. She thought it fairly ridiculous that anyone, even the most sensitive of princesses, would ever have discovered the pea by lying passively on top of the pile of mattresses. After many days’ deliberation, Athena found a plausible interpretation, which she rushed to tell her brother.
She rejected the common interpretation that the princess proved her royal nature by demonstrating delicacy and refinement with her sensitivity to even something as minor as a pea under a pile of mattresses. She offered an alternative explanation.
Athena suggested that when the Queen went away and left the princess alone in the room, the princess threw decorum to the wind and gave vent to her boisterous youthful nature. The princess ran around and jumped up and down on her bed until she was exhausted, and only then lay down to try to sleep. Through her rambunctiousness, the princess compressed the mattresses so much that for a brief moment the pea stuck out like a sore thumb and gave her a small bruise. Athena thought this princess was still rather impressive, but found her revisionist interpretation much more satisfactory.
Finding substructure within the atom was as remarkable an accomplishment as the princess finding her pea. Particles called quarks, the building blocks of the proton, occupy about the same fractional volume of the proton as a pea does in a mattress. A 1 cubic centimeter pea in a 2 meters × 1 meter × ½ meter mattress takes up one-millionth of the mattress’s volume, which is not too different from the fraction of volume a quark occupies in a proton. And the way in which physicists discovered quarks bears some resemblance to the rambunctious princess’s discovery. A passive princess would never discover a pea buried layers and layers down. Similarly, physicists didn’t discover quarks until