Aren't we all traveling at same speed(SPEED OF LIGHT)? if yes how....

Before going in deep, you should know some basic concepts:

• In accordance to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, When an object moves through space relative to us its clock run slow as compared to ours(due to time dilation). That is, the speed of its motion through time slows down.
• Time is the fourth dimension, just like our other three spatial dimensions.

Einstein proclaimed “all objects in the Universe are travelling through spacetime at one fixed speed – that of light.” This is a strange idea. We are used to the notion that objects travel at speeds considerably less than that of light. We have repeatedly emphasised this as the reason that relativistic effects are so unfamiliar in the everyday world. All of this is equally true. We are presently talking about an object’s combined speed through all four dimensions – three space and one time. And it is the object’s speed in this generalised sense that is equal to the speed of light.

To understand this perspective, let’s imagine rather impractical automobile that rapidly attains its cruising speed of 100 miles per hour and stick to this speed, no more, no less, until it is shut off and rolls to a halt. As the distance between start and finish lines is 10 miles, the car should cover this distance with one tenth of an hour i.e. 6 minutes. Tyler is asked to drive the car and Misty records the data. Results are recorded from dozens of test drive, although most of the time it was 6 minutes but last few are good deal longer: 6.5, 7, 7.5 minutes. Misty is unable to explain such anomalously long times, he consults to Tyler and asks him about last few runs. Tyler has a simple explanation. He tells Misty that as track runs from east to west, as it got later in the day, the sun was glaring into his view. During the last three runs it was so bad that he drove from one end of the track to the other at a slight angle. The north south and east west directions are two independent spatial dimensions in which a car can move. Tyler’s explanation illustrates that even though car was travelling at 100miles per hour on each and every run, during the last few runs it shared this speed between two dimensions and hence appeared to be going slower than 100 miles per hour on  each and every run. Whereas in the initial runs car was travelling in east west direction and all of its motion was confined to one dimension.

Note, just like the impractical single speed car discussed above, speed can be shared between the different dimensions, in the same manner object’s motion is also shared between different dimensions – Three Space and One Time. If an object is sitting still (relative to us) and consequently doesn’t move through space at all, then in analogy to the first runs of the car, all of the object’s motion is used to travel through one dimension – in this case the time dimension. Moreover, all objects that are at rest relative to us and to each other move through time, they age at exactly the same rate or speed. And here’s the leap: Most of our motion is through time dimension and not through space. And this is the reason that relativistic effects are so unfamiliar in the everyday world.

If an object does move through space, this means that some of the previous motion through time must be diverted. Just like the car travelling at an angle, this sharing of motion implies that the object will travel more slowly through time than its stationery counterparts, since some of its motion is now being used to move through space. That is, its clock will take more slowly if it moves through space. This is exactly what we found earlier. We now see that the time slows down when an object moves relative to us because this diverts some of its motion through time into motion through space. The speed of an object through space is thus merely a reflection of how much of its motion through time is diverted.

This framework immediately incorporates the fact that there is a limit to an object’s spatial velocity : “The maximum speed through space occurs if all of an object’s motion through time is diverted to motion through space”. This occurs when all of its previous light speed motion through time is diverted to light speed motion through space but having used up all of its motion through time, this is the fastest speed through space that any object can possibly achieve. This is analogous to our car being test driven directly in the North South direction. Something travelling at light speed through space will have no speed left for motion through time. Thus light doesn’t get old. A photon that emerged from the Big Bang is of same age today as it was then. There is no passage of time at light speed.

I think now you might be having a pretty good understanding of this spacetime thing.

HIGGS BOS...

Please read previous post “THE STANDARD MODEL OF PARTICLE PHYSICS” in order to get better understanding of this post.

If you have any interest in Physics at all, you might have heard of a particle called GOD particle or HIGGS BOSON, sounds interesting but what makes this particle so interesting? Actually, it isn’t interesting at all. The physicist Leon Lederman called it the "God particle" in 1993. He used this name to get attention and support for experiments to detect the particle. Ridiculous thought. However, most scientists do not like this name, because the particle has nothing to do with any kind of God and the nickname might confuse people and you might be one among those. Before discussing about Higgs boson I would like to stress more on Higgs Field which is the plot and grew to the idea of Higgs Boson.

In 1964, a Physicist named Peter Higgs suggested that there is an energy field that permiated the entire Universe. This energy field is now called Higgs field. The reason he proposed this field was that nobody understands why subatomic particles had a great deal of mass while the others had little and some had none at all. The energy field that Higgs proposed would interact with subatomic particles give them their mass. Very massive particles interact a lot with the field while the mass less particles would not interact at all.

FROM WHERE DOES THIS MASS COME FROM?

To better understand the idea, we can use the analogy of water, fish and swimmers. In our analogy water serves the role of Higgs field. A fish being extremely streamlined interacts only slightly with the field and thus can move through it very easily. The fish would then be similar to a low mass particle in contrast a swimmer can only move very slowly as compared to fish through the water. So swimmer is similar to a massive particle which interact a lot with the water.

The lightest of familiar subatomic particles is the electron while in the subatomic particle world the king of mass is top quark. It weight about as much as an entire gold atom, about 350 times more than the electron. I would like to stress that we believe that top quark is not more massive because it’s bigger. It’s not! Infact we believe that both top quark and electron are exactly of same size. Indeed they both have zero size. The top quark is more massive than electron simply because it interact more with the Higgs field. Actually, if Higgs Field didn’t exist neither of these particles wouldn’t have any mass at all.

But most of the time, we have heard of Higgs Boson but not Higgs Field. How are these two things related? The Higgs Boson is the smallest bit of Higgs Field (just an excitation in Higgs Field).  Just like water is made up of countless H₂O molecules. In order to understand this, here H₂O molecule resembles Higgs Boson whereas the whole water act as Higgs Field.

SPLENDID JOB DONE BY PARTICLE ACCELERAOR IN DETECTING HIGGS BOSON

The field itself is undetectable, but if you could somehow detect the corresponding Higgs particles, you could assume the existence of the Field. And this is where the Large Hadron Collider comes in. The job of a particle accelerator is to convert energy into matter, via the formula e=mc2. By accelerating particles – like protons – to huge velocities, they give them an enormous amount of kinetic energy. In fact, in its current configuration, the LHC moves protons to 0.999999991c, which is about 10 km/h slower than the speed of light.

When beams of particles moving in opposite directions are crashed together, it concentrates an enormous amount of energy into a tiny volume of space. This energy needs somewhere to go so it freezes out as matter (thanks Einstein). The more energy you can collide, the more massive particles you can create.

And so, in 2013, the LHC allowed physicists to finally be able to confirm the presence of the Higgs Boson by tuning the energy of the collisions to exactly the right level, and then detecting the cascade of particles that occur when Higgs bosons decay.

On 12 December 2011, the two teams at the Large Hadron Collider looking for the Higgs Boson, ATLAS and CMS, announced that they had finally seen results which could suggest the Higgs Boson particle existed however, they did not know for certain if this was true.

On 4 July 2012, the teams at the Large Hadron Collider declared that they had discovered a particle which they think is the Higgs boson.

On 14 March 2013 the teams had done much more testing, and confirmed the new particle was a Higgs boson. And Peter Higgs awarded with Nobel Prize for 2013. Great work with great appreciation.

  

FROM WHERE DID THE IDEA OF HIGGS FIELD EMERGED?

Before the Higgs Boson was discovered, the standard model of particle Physics was incomplete. The original Higgs idea was proposed to answer an important question. It was in 1960s, Physicist took an effort to unify weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. One side there is electromagnetic force with infinite range and weakens as square of distance between two charged objects. In contrast, weak nuclear force doesn’t have an infinite range rather it seems to work for distances about one-one thousand that of a proton. Yet scientists were saying that these two forces were one and the same thing. That didn’t make any sense until Higgs Field was discovered. Higgs Field gave mass to the particles that transmit the weak force (i.e. W and Z Bosons) and didn’t give mass to the particle that transits electromagnetism (photon). So this is how Higgs fit into the theory, it gave mass to all the Bosons (gluon, W and Z Boson, photon). Then what about quarks and leptons or we can say fermions which make up most of our matter. From where does these subatomic particles get mass? The original Higgs Field Theory proposed in 1960s gave mass to only Bosons but what if it give mass to fermions too. So the question is does Higgs Field also give mass to Fermions ? Higgs Boson interact more with heavy particle, that is more often you have heard of. But the correct and the better way to say that is the particles that interact more with Higgs Field and Bosons get more mass (point to be noted). It is the interaction with the field that comes first and mass is the consequence.

And that’s how all this Higgs thing came and we understood mass not just as a property of an object rather came out as a consequence. This takes us one step closer in exploring our universe or might be multiverse. Let’s just leave whether it’s a universe or multiverse, above all we got a better and new way of understanding mass. And now HIGGS BOSON is one of 17 fundamental particles of STANDARD MODEL That’s all for this post, soon coming up with more posts. Thank you for reading this post.

THE STANDARD MODEL OF PARTICLE PHYSICS

From the tiniest speck to the massive galaxies, something is there from which they all are composed of and something which binds the small fundamental particles together. The standard model is the name given in 1970s to a theory of fundamental particles and how they interact. I'm going to start with the very beginning, from the earliest ideas of building blocks of matter.

How can it be possible that steam, water and ice are actually the same thing? Though they seem to have totally different properties. Essentially the question can be boiled down to what are the ultimate building blocks of reality and what are the rules that govern them. Questions like these have perplexed humanity for so long. And of course, these questions have come up with answers, with varying degrees of sensibility.

In the study for fundamental particle from the four elements- fire, water, air and earth to the modern ideas of chemistry (periodic table). However for the last 100 years or so we have come up with very rapid progress in the study of fundamental particles. Indeed, our modern understanding of the universe can explain phenomena from the behaviour of atoms to how stars burn. We have name for such understanding as STANDARD MODEL OF PARTICLE PHYSICS.

To understand it we need to recall our Chemistry class where we have learnt that all the matters is made up of about 114 elements of periodic table or simply atoms. However near a century ago physicist realised atom isn't the final word (atom is not the smallest particle for building matter which was discovered by ancient Greek philosophers). Physicist discovered nucleus of atom is made up of proton and neutron. And electron revolve around the nucleus. The discovery of electron was a pretty impressive achievement because even now electron is one of the fundamental particle in standard model. In early 1950 Isochronous cyclotron was built in University of California, Berkeley which was used for experiments in nuclear and particle physics. Physicist discovered around 80 more subatomic particles in experiment using particle accelerator. In later 1960s physicist realised that the familiar proton and neutron are made of smaller objects still. These smaller objects are called quarks.

There are 6 kinds of quarks- up, down, Charm, strange, top and bottom. Up and Down quarks are present inside proton and neutron while others are necessary to explain vast number of discoveries made in particle accelerator. In addition to quarks there is another class of subatomic particles called leptons. The most familiar lepton is electron, although it turns out that where are 6 leptons as well. Three of these leptons have electrical charge (electron, muon and tau).  The other three are neutrinos which are electrically neutral. These quarks and leptons include every particle that we know of. The up and down quarks and electron are building blocks of Cosmos. The other 9 particles are observed in our particle accelerator.

DISCOVERY OF QUARKS

In the 1960s, when scientists shooting electrons at matter saw them veer off in different directions, seemingly for no reason. Looking at how and when the electrons changed direction, scientists concluded that the nucleus had to be made up of smaller parts, some of which the electrons were "running into." These parts were smaller than the protons that the scientists knew were in atomic nuclei. The parts, they realized, had to be inside the protons themselves. This was good news for scientists who had been trying to simplify what had come to be known as a ''zoo'' of particles. In the early part of the decade, two different physicists, George Zweig and Murray Gell-Mann, first speculated that the particles weren't elementary, but were made up of different particles that carried either one third or two thirds the charge of either particle. Both came up with the idea of three very basic elementary particles that would make up many of the particles that so profoundly proliferated in physics. Zweig named the particles ''aces.'' Gell-Mann called them ''quarks,'' after a read through of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and the poem, ''Three quarks for Muster Mark.''

POETRY OF QUARKS

This new theory worked very well in explaining charge, spin, and mass. Two different combinations of quarks could make up a proton or a neutron just the way two different combinations of hydrogen and oxygen atoms could make up a water or an acid.  The force that pulls them together in pairs or threes grows stronger as they move farther away from each other, like an elastic band. Only incredibly high energy events can separate them for even a short time. Quarks can also change "flavor." While no one to this day has ever "seen" a quark on its own, experimental results and observed properties of particles match up so perfectly with the theory of their existence, and don't match up as well to any other theory, that scientists are satisfied that they exist. They explain too many things too well not to be in there somewhere.

Quarks

Name	Symbol	Antiparticle	Charge (e)	Mass (MeV/c2)
up	u	u	+ 2⁄3	1.5–3.3
down	d	d	− 1⁄3	3.5–6.0
charm	c	c	+ 2⁄3	1,160–1,340
strange	s	s	− 1⁄3	70–130
top	t	t	+ 2⁄3	169,100–173,300
bottom	b	b	− 1⁄3	4,130–4,370

As said before, quarks aren't found on their own. They roam in pairs, and certain pairs always team up. The pairs are as follows, up and down, charm and strange, top and bottom. The first quark mentioned in each of these pairs had a charge of two-thirds of a proton unit of charge. The second quark in each pair has a charge of negative one third. In the original theory, two up quarks and a down quark add up to make a charge of positive one - or a proton. Two downs and an up have charges that add up to zero, and make neutrons. But if three quarks have positive two-thirds charges and three quarks have negative one-third charges, then why aren't there just two quarks total? What's the difference? Each of the quarks have just slightly different masses. This is why protons and neutrons, when studied, were found to have slightly different masses. The different combination of quarks gave them a different mass. This combination of charge and mass, as well as a few more esoteric qualities, make up the ''flavor'' of each quark. As to why they can't just be called ''types'' — perhaps we should ask James Joyce.

LEPTONS

A lepton is an elementary, half-integer spin (spin 1/2) particle that does not undergo strong interactions. Two main classes of leptons exist: charged leptons (also known as the electron-like leptons), and neutral leptons (better known as neutrinos). Charged leptons can combine with other particles to form various composite particles such as atoms and positronium, while neutrinos rarely interact with anything, and are consequently rarely observed. The best known of all leptons is the electron.

There are six types of leptons, known as flavours, forming three generations. The first generation is the electronic leptons, comprising the electron(e) and electron neutrino (ν­­_e); the second is the muonic leptons, comprising the muon(μ) and muon neutrino (ν_μ); and the third is the tauonic leptons, comprising the tau(τ) and the tau neutrino (ν_τ). Electrons have the least mass of all the charged leptons. The heavier muons and taus will rapidly change into electrons and neutrinos through a process of particle decay: the transformation from a higher mass state to a lower mass state. Thus electrons are stable and the most common charged lepton in the universe, whereas muons and taus can only be produced in high energy collisions (such as those involving cosmic rays and those carried out in particle accelerators).

Leptons have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, spin, and mass. Unlike quarks however, leptons are not subject to the strong interaction, but they are subject to the other three fundamental interactions: gravitation, electromagnetism (excluding neutrinos, which are electrically neutral), and the weak interaction.

For every lepton flavor there is a corresponding type of antiparticle, known as an antilepton, that differs from the lepton only in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign. However, according to certain theories, neutrinos may be their own antiparticle, but it is not currently known whether this is the case or not.

The first charged lepton, the electron, was theorized in the mid-19th century by several scientists and was discovered in 1897 by J. J. Thomson. The next lepton to be observed was the muon, discovered by Carl D. Anderson in 1936, which was classified as a meson at the time. After investigation, it was realized that the muon did not have the expected properties of a meson, but rather behaved like an electron, only with higher mass. It took until 1947 for the concept of "leptons" as a family of particle to be proposed. The first neutrino, the electron neutrino, was proposed by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to explain certain characteristics of beta decay. It was first observed in the Cowan–Reines neutrino experiment conducted by Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines in 1956. The muon neutrino was discovered in 1962 by Leon M. Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, and Jack Steinberger, and the tau discovered between 1974 and 1977 by Martin Lewis Perl and his colleagues from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The tau neutrino remained elusive until July 2000, when the DONUT collaboration from Fermilab announced its discovery.

Name	Symbol	Antiparticle	Charge (e)	Mass (MeV/c2)
Tau	τ−	τ+	−1	1,777
Tau neutrino	ν τ	ν τ	0	< 15.5
Muon neutrino	ν μ	ν μ	0	< 0.170
Electron neutrino	ν e	ν e	0	< 0.0000022
Muon	μ−	μ+	−1	105.7
Electron	e−	e+	−1	0.511

However, while the building blocks of nature are important, we have forgotten an important point. the important point is force, without force these particles however around the Cosmos without interacting with each other if something does not stick quarks and leptons then there would be no atoms and consequently no us, fortunately which doesn't happen. We should be thankful for that.

We know of four different forces. First is Gravity which is weakest force among all. And we don’t understand how it works in quantum level. However, other three forces are very well understood. Electromagnetism which is responsible for electricity and magnetism and in terms of building matter, this force binds electron to the atomic nuclei and makes atoms. The other two forces are less familiar. First is strong nuclear force, it is this force that ties quarks inside protons and neutrons. And the weak force is responsible for some types of radioactivities.

Gravity and Electromagnetism have a very long range whereas weak and strong nuclear force sparingly affect at long distances, at distances bigger than an atom these forces don’t exist.

FORCE	STRENGTH
Strong Force	1
Electromagnetic Force	10-2
Weak Force	10-5
Gravitational Force	10-40

This weakness of Gravity is basic reason that we can’t study it at particle accelerator and is a huge mystery. We don’t understand why gravity is so much weaker than other forces. Though currently gravity is not a part of standard model.

Now the question is how do these forces interact at quantum level. At quantum level forces are caused by exchange in particle. In a nutshell, all forces work by exchanging different kind of particle at some atomic level. Particles are gluon (G) for strong nuclear force, phorton (𝛄) for electromagnetic force and bosons (W,Z) for weak nuclear force. So this is the standard model of 12 particles of matter governed by 3 forces that are caused by exchange of 4 different particles. From all these building blocks, we can make recipe for anything in this universe.

It is not just a theory but the experiments of particle accelerator has completed our understanding with standard model with amazing precision. Though standard model is the most successful theory ever devised till now but still it is not the end to the questions that we still have to explore. Standard model also include a particle called higgs boson which is thought to give mass to all the particles. We still need to learn the origins of mass which I will explore in my next post...