Quote:
Originally Posted by dd74
Mike - who or from where did the Standard Model originate? And is it continually being re-tweaked?
I mean, I think for experiments like this, one would have to have a baseline of what occurred split-moments after the Big Bang. Is this what the Standard Model theorizes?
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Murray Gell-Mann (a bada$$ of epic proportions) was an American physicist who realized that the particle "zoo" had gone out of control in the 1960s. They were finding new things, and adding them into the list indiscriminately. The Zoo had become loaded with hundreds of particles, and any symmetry was disappearing. One thing that scientists like about the Universe is symmetry and simplicity.
He realized that by understanding the particles at a deeper level (quarks) that many of these apparently different things were actually the same particle (or close brothers), being "viewed" different ways. His Eightfold Way was a new way to structure the Zoo, and brought a huge amount of symmetry to it. It also (for the first time) allowed them to look higher up the ladder, and start predicting new particles based on this symmetry. This was done with the Omega Baryon, and was the first time that particle physics had predicted a particle (Quantum did it back in the '30s when Dirac predicted the positron).
The Standard Model is this new symmetric Zoo.
as for the Big Bang...we can use "standard" physics to turn the clock back quite a ways (gravity, electromagnetism, etc). however, when the energy levels of the Universe were quite high, those theories start to collapse. The error ranges explode, the force equations diverge, and things get weird. By forcing high energy conditions in colliders, we hope to get a glimpse of some of the environment at an energy level higher than we can currently calculate. By doing this, we hope to get a beacon where we can try to get the standard physics to point as we get closer to the Big Bang.