{"id":501,"date":"2006-08-16T10:59:35","date_gmt":"2006-08-16T10:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/16\/particle-physics-wants-graphic\/"},"modified":"2006-08-16T10:59:35","modified_gmt":"2006-08-16T10:59:35","slug":"particle-physics-wants-graphic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/16\/particle-physics-wants-graphic\/","title":{"rendered":"Particle Physics Wants Graphic Designers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Cosmic Variance, JoAnne is soliciting ideas for graphics<\/a> to explain the Higgs Mechanism<\/a> and Supersymmetry<\/a>. If you understand these processes, and have a flair for graphic design, go over there and help her out. She’s going to take the best ideas to a workshop on this topic at SLAC, so this might be a path to fame, of a sort…<\/p>\n

I’ll offer some miscellaneous thoughts about the example graphics she provided, below the fold.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Here are the existing Higgs boson graphics:<\/p>\n

\"i-c8eca413ebc367c8ea7eea8e8bd84656-higgs_graphics.jpg\"<\/p>\n

(This is a collage of four different graphics from different sources– JoAnne’s post has the original links.)<\/p>\n

As stand-alone graphics, the bottom two are terrible. The table is familiar to physicists, but the fuzzy Higgs blob in the background is completely mysterious. And the potential curve on the bootm right is equally opaque. As illustrations to go with an article in Physics Today<\/cite> they might be fine, but for a more general audience, they’re crap.<\/p>\n

The top two are a good start, though. The one on the left is a little too abstract, and the one on the right is a little too busy, but they both have the advantage of conveying something about how the Higgs mechanism works: particles acquire mass through interactions with the Higgs field, almost as if they were dragging a cloud of other particles along with them. I think a cleaner version of the top right figure could be a really nice way to go.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure quite how to do that, but that’s why we have people with artistic talent.<\/p>\n

Here are the attempted supersymmetry figures:<\/p>\n

\"i-d8e308f101cb9c4fb670c7d7492d909f-susy_graphics.jpg\"<\/p>\n

(Again, it’s a collage, and JoAnne has links to the originals, two of which are in foreign languages (one of them in Korean, if I’m remembering my Asian scripts correctly).)<\/p>\n

In my opinion, all four of these suck. The hand-holding particle men are silly, the ball-and-stick pattern seems to imply that there’s some physical connection between particles and their partners, as if each electron was bound to a “selectron,” which isn’t right, and even after someone explained the mirror thing in comments, it still doesn’t make any sense. The only one that has any redeeming qualities at all is the shadow dancers, and that’s still sort of mysterious– are they supposed to be dancing with each other? If so, why do they not appear to be dancing to the same tune? Are they dancing with invisible partners? If so, that has the same problem as the top left picture– it suggests a kind of pairing of particles that is unrealistic.<\/p>\n

It’s really hard to suggest any improvements, though, largely because I don’t have any clear idea what the supersymmetric partner particles are for<\/strong>. I mean, I know that the theory says that every particle we see in ordinary matter has a super-symmetric “partner” particle with a painfully dorky name and a different set of properties (the “partners” all have higher mass, and the opposite quantum statistics, so real fermions are partnered with hypothetical bosons, and vice versa), but other than adding mathematical elegance to the theory, I’ve never heard a clear explanation of what they do<\/strong>. They get invoked as “virtual particles” to explain higher-order corrections to things like gyromagnetic ratios and electric dipole moments, but that’s the only concrete physical use I’ve ever seen for them.<\/p>\n

In the absence of some idea of what, if any, role these particles play in determining the properties of existing particles, or explaining observable phenomena, it’s really difficult to suggest a way to represent their importance. If they’re just an elegant mathematical contrivance, well, I think you’re going to have a tough time coming up with a meaningful figure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Cosmic Variance, JoAnne is soliciting ideas for graphics to explain the Higgs Mechanism and Supersymmetry. If you understand these processes, and have a flair for graphic design, go over there and help her out. She’s going to take the best ideas to a workshop on this topic at SLAC, so this might be… Continue reading Particle Physics Wants Graphic Designers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}