A Briefer History of Time – Stephen Hawking
All this seems fairly straightforward, but the remarkable fact is that there are particles that do not look the same if one turns them through just one revolution: you have to turn them through two complete revolutions! Such particles are said to have spin 1/2.
All the known particles in the universe can be divided into two groups: particles of spin ½, which make up the matter in the universe, and particles of spin 0, 1, and 2, which, as we shall see, give rise to forces between the matter particles. The matter particles obey what is called Pauli’s exclusion principle. This was discovered in 1925 by an Austrian physicist, Wolfgang Pauli—for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1945. He was the archetypal theoretical physicist: it was said of him that even his presence in the same town would make experiments go wrong! Pauli’s exclusion principle says that two similar particles cannot exist in the same state; that is, they cannot have both the same position and the same velocity, within the limits given by the uncertainty principle.
The exclusion principle is crucial because it explains why matter particles do not collapse to a state of very high density under the influence of the forces produced by the particles of spin 0, 1, and 2: if the matter particles have very nearly the same positions, they must have different velocities, which means that they will not stay in the same position for long. If the world had been created without the exclusion principle, quarks would not form separate, well- defined protons and neutrons. Nor would these, together with electrons, form separate, well-defined atoms. They would all collapse to form a roughly uniform, dense “soup.”
A proper understanding of the electron and other spin-½ particles did not come until 1928, when a theory was proposed by Paul Dirac, who later was elected to the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge (the same professorship that Newton had once held and that I now hold). Dirac’s theory was the first of its kind that was consistent with both quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity. It explained mathematically why the electron had spin ½; that is, why it didn’t look the same if you turned it through only one complete revolution, but did if you turned it through two revolutions. It also predicted that the electron should have a partner: an antielectron, or positron. The discovery of the positron in 1932 confirmed Dirac’s theory and led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1933. We now know that every particle has an antiparticle, with which it can annihilate. (In the case of the force-carrying particles, the antiparticles are the same as the particles themselves.)
There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you meet your antiself, don’t shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light. The question of why there seem to be so many more particles than antiparticles around us is extremely important, and I shall return to it later in the chapter.
In quantum mechanics, the forces or interactions between matter particles are all supposed to be carried by particles of integer spin—0, 1, or 2. What happens is that a matter particle, such as an electron or a quark, emits a force-carrying particle. The recoil from this emission changes the velocity of the matter particle. The force-carrying particle then collides with another matter particle and is absorbed. This collision changes the velocity of the second particle, just as if there had been a force between the two matter particles. It is an important property of the force-carrying particles that they do not obey the exclusion principle.
This means that there is no limit to the number that can be exchanged, and so they can give rise to a strong force. However, if the force-carrying particles have a high mass, it will be difficult to produce and exchange them over a large distance. So the forces that they carry will have only a short range. On the other hand, if the force-carrying particles have no mass of their own, the forces will be long range. The force-carrying particles exchanged between matter particles are said to be virtual particles because, unlike “real” particles, they cannot be directly detected by a particle detector. We know they exist, however, because they do have a measurable effect: they give rise to forces between matter particles. Particles of spin 0, 1, or 2 do also exist in some circumstances as real particles, when they can be directly detected.
They then appear to us as what a classical physicist would call waves, such as waves of light or gravitational waves. They may sometimes be emitted when matter particles interact with each other by exchanging virtual force- carrying particles. (For example, the electric repulsive force between two electrons is due to the exchange of virtual photons, which can never be directly detected; but if one electron moves past another, real photons may be given off, which we detect as light waves.) Force-carrying particles can be grouped into four categories according to the strength of the force that they carry and the particles with which they interact. It should be emphasized that this division into four classes is man-made; it is convenient for the construction of partial theories, but it may not correspond to anything deeper.
Ultimately, most physicists hope to find a unified theory that will explain all four forces as different aspects of a single force. Indeed, many would say this is the prime goal of physics today. Recently, successful attempts have been made to unify three of the four categories of force—and I shall describe these in this chapter. The question of the unification of the remaining category, gravity, we shall leave till later.
The first category is the gravitational force. This force is universal, that is, every particle feels the force of gravity, according to its mass or energy. Gravity is the weakest of the four forces by a long way; it is so weak that we would not notice it at all were it not for two special properties that it has: it can act over large distances, and it is always attractive. This means that the very weak gravitational forces between the individual particles in two large bodies, such as the earth and the sun, can all add up to produce a significant force. The other three forces are either short range, or are sometimes attractive and sometimes repulsive, so they tend to cancel out. In the quantum mechanical way of looking at the gravitational field, the force between two matter particles is pictured as being carried by a particle of spin 2 called the graviton.
This has no mass of its own, so the force that it carries is long range. The gravitational force between the sun and the earth is ascribed to the exchange of gravitons between the particles that make up these two bodies. Although the exchanged particles are virtual, they certainly do produce a measurable effect—they make the earth orbit the sun! Real gravitons make up what classical physicists would call gravitational waves, which are very weak—and so difficult to detect that they have not yet been observed.
The next category is the electromagnetic force, which interacts with electrically charged particles like electrons and quarks, but not with uncharged particles such as gravitons. It is much stronger than the gravitational force: the electromagnetic force between two electrons is about a million million million million million million million (1 with forty-two zeros after it) times bigger than the gravitational force.
However, there are two kinds of electric charge, positive and negative. The force between two positive charges is repulsive, as is the force between two negative charges, but the force is attractive between a positive and a negative charge. A large body, such as the earth or the sun, contains nearly equal numbers of positive and negative charges.
Thus the attractive and repulsive forces between the individual particles nearly cancel each other out, and there is very little net electromagnetic force. However, on the small scales of atoms and molecules, electromagnetic forces dominate. The electromagnetic attraction between negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons in the nucleus causes the electrons to orbit the nucleus of the atom, just as gravitational attraction causes the earth to orbit the sun. The electromagnetic attraction is pictured as being caused by the exchange of large numbers of virtual massless particles of spin 1, called photons.
Again, the photons that are exchanged are virtual particles. However, when an electron changes from one allowed orbit to another one nearer to the nucleus, energy is released and a real photon is emitted—which can be observed as visible light by the human eye, if it has the right wavelength, or by a photon detector such as photographic film. Equally, if a real photon collides with an atom, it may move an electron from an orbit nearer the nucleus to one farther away. This uses up the energy of the photon, so it is absorbed.
The third category is called the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for radioactivity and which acts on all matter particles of spin ½, but not on particles of spin 0, 1, or 2, such as photons and gravitons. The weak nuclear force was not well understood until 1967, when Abdus Salam at Imperial College, London, and Steven Weinberg at Harvard both proposed theories that unified this interaction with the electromagnetic force, just as Maxwell had unified electricity and magnetism about a hundred years earlier. They suggested that in addition to the photon, there were three other spin-1 particles, known collectively as massive vector bosons, that carried the weak force.
These were called W+ (pronounced W plus), W– (pronounced W minus), and Z° (pronounced Z naught), and each had a mass of around 100 GeV (GeV stands for gigaelectron-volt, or one thousand million electron volts). The Weinberg-Salam theory exhibits a property known as spontaneous symmetry breaking. This means that what appear to be a number of completely different particles at low energies are in fact found to be all the same type of particle, only in different states. At high energies all these particles behave similarly. The effect is rather like the behavior of a roulette ball on a roulette wheel.
At high energies (when the wheel is spun quickly) the ball behaves in essentially only one way—it rolls round and round. But as the wheel slows, the energy of the ball decreases, and eventually the ball drops into one of the thirty-seven slots in the wheel. In other words, at low energies there are thirty-seven different states in which the ball can exist. If, for some reason, we could only observe the ball at low energies, we would then think that there were thirty-seven different types of ball!
In the Weinberg-Salam theory, at energies much greater than 100 GeV, the three new particles and the photon would all behave in a similar manner. But at the lower particle energies that occur in most normal situations, this symmetry between the particles would be broken.
W+, W–, and Z° would acquire large masses, making the forces they carry have a very short range. At the time that Salam and Weinberg proposed their theory, few people believed them, and particle accelerators were not powerful enough to reach the energies of 100 GeV required to produce real W+, W–, or Z° particles. However, over the next ten years or so, the other predictions of the theory at lower energies agreed so well with experiment that, in 1979, Salam and Weinberg were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, together with Sheldon Glashow, also at Harvard, who had suggested similar unified theories of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces.
The Nobel committee was spared the embarrassment of having made a mistake by the discovery in 1983 at CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research) of the three massive partners of the photon, with the correct predicted masses and other properties. Carlo Rubbia, who led the team of several hundred physicists that made the discovery, received the Nobel Prize in 1984, along with Simon van der Meer, the CERN engineer who developed the antimatter storage system employed. (It is very difficult to make a mark in experimental physics these days unless you are already at the top!)