Concealing A Hadron III: I'm Sparticle!

Everything is made up of fundamental particles. You have the
leptons: that’s the electron, muon, tau, and their ghostly
neutrinos that help us to conserve momentum. You have the quarks,
which make up all of the hadrons. The up, down, and strange
quarks: and their heavier cousins, the top, bottom, and charm
quarks. Mixing quarks can give you baryons, like the proton and
neutron. It can give you mesons, like the pion particles.

But you also have four forces.


There’s gravity, which pulls on everything with mass. There’s
electromagnetism, which pulls on everything with charge. There’s
the weak nuclear force, which is involved in the decay of
neutrons and other particles, and it’s also how the ghostly
neutrinos interact. And, finally, there’s the strong nuclear
force: which binds the protons and neutrons together in the
nucleus, and binds the quarks within each proton and
neutron.

It turns out that the final part of the Standard Model is
associated with these forces. Because, although we can imagine
force fields that extend throughout space like Maxwell did, it
turns out that forces have ‘carriers’. In some sense, when one
particle exerts a force on another, another particle jumps
between them to spread that influence. These force carriers are
bosons.


In this episode, we'll complete our picture of the Standard Model
by adding the force carriers and the Higgs Boson into the mix.
And then, we'll dive into the terrifying world of BDSM - BeyonD
the Standard Model.


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