Back to Standard Model

Table of Contents

1. Key Ideas
2. 17th Century
3. 19th Century
4. 20th Century
5. Nobel Laureates of the Standard Model

Key Ideas

• Fundamental Interactions / Forces
• Classical Physics vs Quantum Physics
• Fields and Particles

17th Century

• 1687 Classical Mechanics
  • Phenomena exert forces on objects directly and instantaneously.
• Classical Physics…
  • … tracks objects through space and time
  • … generates deterministic predictions
  • … uses continuous quantities

19th Century

• 1808 John Dalton revived the atomic theory to explain chemical phenomena
• 1864 Theory of Electromagnetism
  • Charged particles exert forces on other charged particles, indirectly by electric and magnetic fields propagating at the speed of light.

20th Century

• 1897 The first subatomic particle, the electron, was discovered
• 1905 Special Relativity
  • The speed of light is the same in all non-accelerating reference frames, with the result that;
    • The elapsed time of an event may be different in different reference frames
    • The length of a rod may be different in different reference frames
• 1911 Rutherford’s Planetary Model of the Atom
  • Rutherford’s idea was that the electromagnetic force from nuclear protons keeps the electrons in orbit, just as the gravitational force from the Sun keeps the planets in orbit.
  • The idea fails because, per the laws of electromagnetism, the orbiting electrons would quickly lose energy and crash into the nucleus.
• 1915 General Relativity
  • The core idea of General Relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravitation, is that gravity is the curvature of spacetime.
• 1925 Quantum Mechanics
  • In contrast to Classical Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics…
    • … does not track particles through space and time
    • … generates probabilistic predictions
    • … uses discrete (quantized) quantities
  • Sean Carroll: the two greatest revolutions in physics:
    • Newton’s development of classical mechanics in the 1600s
    • The replacement of Newton’s theory with Quantum Mechanics
• 1940s Quantum Electrodynamics (QED)
  • QED governs the electromagnetic interaction
• 1960s Electroweak Theory (EWT)
  • EWT governs the weak and electromagnetic interactions
• 1973 Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD)
  • QCD governs the strong interaction
• 1975 Standard Model of Particle Physics (SMPP)
  • The Standard Model postulates
    • Quantum Fields and their particles
    • The equations governing their behavior, Quantified Field Theory

Nobel Laureates of the Standard Model