Particles, Fields and Forces

This book provides unique and comprehensive conceptual explanations of quantum field theory and the standard model of particle physics. How can fundamental particles exist as waves in the vacuum? How can such waves have particle properties such as inertia? What is behind the notion of virtual particles? Why and how do particles exert forces on one another? Not least: What are forces anyway? These are some of the central questions that have intriguing answers in Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Unfortunately, these theories are highly mathematical, so that most people―even many scientists―are not able to fully grasp their meaning. This book untangles these theories in a conceptual non-mathematical way, using more than 190 figures and extensive explanations and will provide the nonspecialist with great insights that are not to be found in the popular science literature. This fully revised and expanded second edition adds remarkable insights into the transition from quantum to classical world using the concepts of quantum decoherence, while also explaining “collapse of the wave function”, tunnelling and quantum computing.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 Particles or Waves?

3 Fields and Waves Making Up Reality

4 What Is a Particle If It Is a Wave?

5 The Potential of a Field’s Elasticity

6 A Wave of Relativity

7 Quantization of Fields

8 Energy in Waves and Fields

9 Symmetry and the Origin of Force

10 Propagators and Virtual Particles

11 Renormalisation of Fearful Infinities

12 Is the Cat Dead or Alive? How Quantum Decoherence ‘Digitized’ the Universe

13 Spin Makes Up Bosons and Fermions

14 Conservation of Charge and Particle Number

15 Particle Zoo

16 Electroweak Force in the Early Universe

17 Symmetry Breaking and the World Was Never the Same Again

18 The Strong Force: Quantum Chromodynamics

19 Gravity as a Field

20 Further Reading

About the Author

Wouter J.M. Schmitz, born in 1970, studied physics in Amsterdam. He worked at CERN for an assignment at the Spin Muon Collaboration (SMC) and later as a summer student at a LEP experiment. He graduated at Nikhef Amsterdam in 1994. He has subsequently worked in IT and also holds an MBA degree. Today, Wouter works as a leading digital architect, retaining nonetheless a deep and informed interest in conceptual problems in physics.