Summary of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's The Disordered Cosmos

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The Standard Model of particle physics is the Black child on the school bus. It is the collection of all the things that a Black child is made out of, as a scientist who has reached adulthood.
#2 I enjoy a neatly ordered tale that can come off like a carefully constructed sum of its parts. I enjoy studying systems as they change in time and looking for patterns or predictions about patterns in their behavior. I used to think that absolute predictions could be made if I had sufficient information, but this is not the case.
#3 The quantum world of particles is a strange place. We can never really predict what particles will do, but we can calculate the likelihood that something will happen and the timescale over which we expect it to occur.
#4 The Standard Model is the current understanding of particle physics, and it is largely understood to be experimentally complete as of 2012. It contains three categories of fermions: quarks, leptons, and vector bosons. Everything we have ever seen in the universe that is made out of quarks and leptons has a mass because of the Higgs, a scalar boson.

Sujets

• Physique
• Physical attractiveness
• Astrophysics
• Physics

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 08 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669351658
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's The Disordered Cosmos
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Standard Model of particle physics is the Black child on the school bus. It is the collection of all the things that a Black child is made out of, as a scientist who has reached adulthood.

#2

I enjoy a neatly ordered tale that can come off like a carefully constructed sum of its parts. I enjoy studying systems as they change in time and looking for patterns or predictions about patterns in their behavior. I used to think that absolute predictions could be made if I had sufficient information, but this is not the case.

#3

The quantum world of particles is a strange place. We can never really predict what particles will do, but we can calculate the likelihood that something will happen and the timescale over which we expect it to occur.

#4

The Standard Model is the current understanding of particle physics, and it is largely understood to be experimentally complete as of 2012. It contains three categories of fermions: quarks, leptons, and vector bosons. Everything we have ever seen in the universe that is made out of quarks and leptons has a mass because of the Higgs, a scalar boson.

#5

The Standard Model is a set of particles that make up everything we have seen and heard. It is made up of the electron, the quarks, the leptons, and the neutrinos. It is a powerful thing to be able to name everything.

#6

The theory of quarks was developed by a group of international physicists, who were exploring a sophisticated mathematical symmetry in nuclear physics. They realized that mesons could be explained by organizing them into a model that had new particles in it, quarks.

#7

The concept of symmetry is important in physics. It refers to a system having a property that does not change even if the system is altered. For example, a spherical ball will look the same even if you turn it in your hands.

#8

The Standard Model is an artifice built by particle physicists to explain the universe. It has a number of parts, including quantum chromodynamics, which is used to explain the properties of color charge in particles.

#9

Particle physicists have to deal with the fact that their field is, in a sense, writing the dominant group’s social politics into the building blocks of the universe.

#10

The scientific reductionism of particle physics is what attracts me to the field, but it is also what makes me wonder if the field would be as interesting to me if I weren’t a product of an educational system rooted in Euro-American principles.

#11

tunneling through the barrier made out of the belief that it doesn’t matter if black women are excluded from or assigned to a part of the universe described by colored physics.

#12

The term Latinx is used to describe people who have origins in Central and South America. It is not intended to be a political intervention, but a decision to use a word that is more widely known at this point in time.

#13

Neutrinos are particles that are produced in the radioactive decay of certain elements. They have no charge, and they can travel at speeds close to the speed of light. They are extremely useful in astronomy, as they can carry energy away from decaying matter.

#14

The first evidence for the existence of dark matter was provided by Vera Rubin in the 1960s and 1970s, who used a new spectrograph to measure the speeds of stars in galaxies. She found that the measured masses of galaxies did not match the measured brightnesses.

#15

Dark matter is a reminder of how much we don’t know about the universe. The Standard Model of particle physics can’t explain everything, and we think 80 percent of the matter in the universe is dark matter.

#16

The most obvious question to ask here is why the dark matter particle doesn’t just appear in the Standard Model. The answer is that we don’t get to choose the structure of the Standard Model. We are bound by the limits of the mathematical structures of our theories and by experimental data.

#17

The axion is a hypothetical particle that was conceived as an idea to explain the movements of stars in their galactic orbits. The axion is a good dark matter candidate because it has the basic properties that we think dark matter has, based on astronomical observations.

#18

Axions are scalar bosons, like the Higgs boson, and can display some interesting quantum properties. They are called bosons in honor of Indian mathematical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, who was one of the earliest contributors to theories of quantum mechanics and collaborated with Albert Einstein on developing the equations that describe particles with whole-number spins.

#19

The axion can behave like a BEC, which means that there may be macroscopic quantum waves floating around in space. The axion-like particle is a proposed solution to the missing-matter problem, and it shares the properties of interacting with each other via the weak force and being massive.

#20

WIMPs are not the only alternative to axions. The MACHO, which stands for massive astrophysical compact halo object, is a popular contender. They are essentially ruled out by data, but something similar has recently become a popular candidate again.

#21