This is Jacques' English homework. He has to choose a subject of interest (any subject), and prepare a presentation. The presentation itself is on Power Point slides. I put them together here so that the reader can read them together with the pictures. Have a nice journey into Jacques' world....!
There are six types of quarks, as you can see on the board, which makes up most matter in the universe. Quarks belong to a group called elementary particles which consist of, literally, the smallest particles and are the main building blocks of the universe.
Gluons, photons and the w and z bosons are the four force carriers; photons mediate light, gluons sticks particles together whilst the w and z boson mediate the nuclear weak force, which causes radiation.
The three neutrinos are thought to be the main ingredient of dark matter, a virtually invisible and ‘ghostly’ form of matter which makes up about 90-95% of the universe. These neutrinos travel near the speed of light (300,000km/s), they have a neutral charge and almost always pass through regular matter making them extremely difficult to detect even though the Earth is bombarded by millions of tons every day!
He also postulated Special Relativity (E=MC2) which states that light has a constant speed which therefore is an exception of General Relativity so light will seem to travel at the same speed to both the waiting commuter and the one on the train.
With Werner Heisenberg, they created the Copenhagen Interpretation. This states that any particle does not exist in one state or another but in infinite states of all possible outcomes and is only decided when it is observed. It was collaborated from theories such as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and ideas from thought experiments such as the double-slit experiment and Schrödinger’s Cat.
He, along with Pascual Jordan and Max Born, also gave birth to Matrix mechanics. Matrix mechanics interprets particles as matrices, a form of number arranging which means AB-BA doesn’t always equal zero. They then developed it into what is known as matrix mechanics. Because of this he won the Nobel Prize in 1932 whilst Born received it in 1954.
Questions and theories which will hopefully be answered because of the LHC are:
· The Higgs boson and the Higgs field; the origins of mass
· Supersymmetry; every particle has a supersymmetric partner which has a spin, a property of particles, different to its partner by a half.
· Extra dimensions
· Whether the four universal forces are manifestations of one single unified force.And why gravity is vastly weaker than the other three universal forces
In 2008 the LHC was finally finished and on the 10th September 2008 it successfully fired the first protons around the whole area in circuits. However on the 19th September one of the magnets holding the protons in circuit broke and lead to a loss of about 6 tonnes of liquid hydrogen which was used to stop the whole thing from overheating. On the 20th November the first low-energy particles were sent around the tunnel after the incident.
And on Tuesday 30th March, the two beams of protons collided at 7 TeV (teraelectronvolts), the highest energy ever produced by a collider, at 13:06 CEST, Central European Standard Time. They will continue colliding protons to make sure the first results are accurate. The results however will require months, years, possibly even decades to analyse and decode.
The LHC will hopefully revolutionise quantum physics by shedding light on old and modern theories.