12 comments

  3. Matter. Because you always have to go with the side that lets you eat bacon. Which is made of matter.

  4. Sparticles. And if you’re dubious about supersymmetry, I like ambiplasma. Say, equal amounts of electrons and positrons, rippling with Alfven waves and 511 Kev gamma rays…

  7. Jeff Kooistra, whom you’ve read in Analog, made a good suggestion when I posted a link to this thread on Facebook. “Vortex knots.”

    http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~menasco/Knottheory.html
    In the nineteenth century physicists were speculating about the underlying principles of atoms. In 1867, Lord Kelvin put forward a comprehensive theory of atoms which, through heuristic reasoning, seemed to explain several of the essential qualities of the chemical elements. Kelvin’s theory conjectured that atoms were knotted tubes of ether. (To a topologist a knot in 3-space is any closed loop having no self-intersections and a link is any collection of non-intersecting closed loops.) The topological stability and the variety of knots were thought to mirror the stability of matter and the variety of chemical elements.

    Kelvin’s theory of vortex atoms was taken seriously for about two decades. Maxwell thought that “it satisfies more of the conditions than any atom hitherto considers”. This theory inspired the celebrated Scottish physicist Peter Tait to undertake an extensive study and tabulation of knots in an attempt to understand when two knots were “different”. (The later stages of this study were in collaboration with C. N. Little.) Tait’s intuitive understanding of “different” and “same” is still a useful notion. Two knots are isotopic if one can be continuously manipulated in 3-space (no self-intersections allowed) until it looks like the other. The accompanying diagram shows a portion of Tait’s study—an enumeration of knots and links in terms of the crossing number of a plane projection. If Kelvin’s theory had been the correct foundation for the classification of the chemical elements, then Tait’s knot table would have been the basis for a periodic table of elements. But Kelvin’s theory was fundamentally mistaken and physicists lost interest in the Tait’s work.

  11. Go here http://www.particlezoo.net/

    Jordin just had a birthday and I bought him by request the Higgs Boson. I myself prefer the Strange Quark. (I also got him the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, but that’s not a particle.)

    MKK

  12. Sorry, MKK. Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation IS particles. They are photons that have red shifted to be in the microwave band. There remains dissent over primordial neutrinos, WIMPs, and Gravitons.

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