News from the Large Hadron Collider that a new subatomic particle may have been found has hardly hit the headlines. A hypothetical particle called a leptoquark has appeared as an unexpected difference in how bottom (or beauty) quarks decay to create electrons or muons. [Skip over the detail if you must, I intend to leap from the physical to the metaphysical, from the science to the philosophy of it all...]
Four days ago, an article was submitted to the arXiv.org database, entitled Test of Lepton Universality in Beauty-Quark Decays. Here's the summary:
"The Standard Model of particle physics currently provides our best description of fundamental particles and their interactions. The theory predicts that the different charged leptons - the electron, muon and tau - have identical electroweak interaction strengths. Previous measurements have shown a wide range of particle decays are consistent with this principle of lepton universality. This article presents evidence for the breaking of lepton universality in beauty-quark decays, with a significance of 3.1 standard deviations, based on proton-proton collision data collected with the LHCb detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The measurements are of processes in which a beauty meson transforms into a strange meson with the emission of either an electron and a positron, or a muon and an antimuon. If confirmed by future measurements, this violation of lepton universality would imply physics beyond the Standard Model, such as a new fundamental interaction between quarks and leptons."
Wow - "physics beyond the Standard Model!". Since the 1970s, this is how science currently sees the matter and forces at work inside the atom. When I was learning physics at school, this was all theory; what was then the current orthodoxy was that atoms were made up of a nucleus containing protons (carrying a positive charge) and neutrons (carrying no charge), around which were 'shells' of electrons (carrying a negative charge). This we could get our head around. Since then, the Standard Model has emerged, based around different sorts of quarks, leptons and bosons.
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| [Note that the beauty quark is called the bottom quark here, its more common name] |
The existence of the quark was postulated by physicist Murray Gell-Mann in 1964, which he named after a reference to the novel Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce ("Three quarks for Muster Mark!" Book 2, episode IV). [My brother bought me a first edition of the book for Christmas, looking it up, the page (383) had not been cut open in the production process, forcing me to reach for a razor blade to gently part pages 382 and 383 for the very first time since it was printed in 1939. Coincidence!]
Anyway - the Standard Model is, as I've mentioned several times over the years, incomplete. It doesn't include gravity, nor dark matter. It doesn't square with Einstein's theory of relativity, which works fine at the galactic level, but not within the atom. Our understanding of the very fabric of matter is becoming increasingly speculative.
If confirmed, the results of the CERN discovery could be, to quote this week's The Economist, "the much-sought crack into which researchers can insert a metaphorical crowbar to prise the Standard Model open and reveal what it is hiding—perhaps a fifth force of nature to go alongside gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces."
I'm holding out for science to discover consciousness as an immanent manifestation in the material world - consciousness present across the Universe, a consciousness that's evolving, growing in scale, to something that we are familiar with, that we experience - but something that will keep on evolving as our Universe unfolds.
As a Monist, I hold that there isn't a material world and a entirely separate spiritual world inhabited by God and souls; there's one Universe containing 'all things visible and invisible'; God is of that - All in God, God in All.
Hawkwind's Quark, Strangeness and Charm from 1977, a time when all science was on the cusp of solving all of nature's secrets...
This time last year:
Time - religion and metaphysics
This time five years ago:
Easter Everywhere, Lent reaches an end
This time nine years ago:
Sunset shots, first bike ride to work
This time 11 years ago:
Poland's trains ran faster before the war
This time 12 years ago:
Winter in spring: surely this must be the last snow?
This time 13 years ago:
Surely THIS must be the last snow?
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