Deep Down Beauty: Particle Physics, Mathematics, and the World Around Us

Promotional image for talk: Elements of a successful scientific talk

Speaker(s): Bruce Schumm

Almost everyone has heard of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and, while stifling a yawn, can regurgitate its particle content: six quarks, a handful of force particles like the photon and gluon, and of course now the Higgs boson. But what many fewer enjoy is an appreciation for the deep underlying mathematical structure that, once grasped, reduces the principles needed to understand the fundamental underpinnings of almost all everyday phenomena (and a lot of non-everyday phenomena to boot) to a set of almost stark simplicity. In this colloquium, making use only of elementary mathematics, I will introduce the essential notions of group theory needed to present the current theory force that binds nuclei together (the strong nuclear force). I will then discuss how it is that we can only understand the existence of composite nuclei, and thus atoms, and thus life itself, if we ascribe to nature certain properties that arise solely from the scrawlings of the abstract mathematician.

Colloquium

Junior and senior physics majors attend our biweekly colloquium series, held on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 p.m. in Shanahan B460. The talks are open to all students and to the public, and are frequently attended by scientists from the other Claremont Colleges, Cal Poly Pomona, and others. The series features speakers from a broad range of institutions and fields of physics.