Review: November 2008

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Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek’s latest contribution to the literature of popular science deals, not surprisingly, with the “deep structure of reality,” the mathematical regularity that underlies the complex and changeable face of the universe. Surprisingly, however, its point of departure is a simple question: why do things have mass? If you remember even a shred of high-school science, the answer seems obvious: things have mass because everything, from atoms to galaxies, is made of matter, and mass is a fundamental property of matter. To question any further would be as futile as asking why a circle is round or why a square has four sides. You just can’t separate the property from the object itself.

Or can you? As physicists in recent decades have probed the atomic nucleus, a regime that Wilczek calls the “micronanocosm,” they have found that matter can pick up mass as easily as a wool sweater picks up lint (unlike a circle, which can’t somehow pick up roundness). When two particles are smashed together in a giant accelerator, for instance, they often disintegrate, but not into smaller component parts. Instead, they produce showers of particles far heavier than the total mass of the particles that produced them. “It’s as if,” writes Wilczek, “you smashed together two Granny Smith apples, and got three Granny Smiths, a Red Delicious, a cantaloupe, a dozen cherries, and a pair of zucchini!”

Where does that extra mass come from, and how is it added to the original particles to create new ones? Wilczek’s answer is a nonmathematical primer on the current state of particle theory, beginning with the basics of quantum mechanics and proceeding through the well-established theory of quantum chromodynamics to more speculative ideas such as supersymmetry.

As with most nonmathematical books on highly mathematical subjects, you have to keep a measure of faith that Wilczek’s invocations of Granny Smith apples and cantaloupes are apt metaphors for what particle physicists are really getting at. If you can do that, you’ll come to understand that the mysterious mass that particles pick up when smashed together comes from the energy imparted to them by the particle accelerator that accelerated them to close to the speed of light. The extra mass is a manifestation of an equation everybody knows: E=mc², where E is the energy of the particles’ interaction, c the speed of light, and m the resulting gain in mass.

Now, since particles have mass even when they’re at rest in a vacuum, and since that implies the manifestation of energy, it is possible to infer that space is not an empty void, but rather a rich quantum playground of interacting fields whose “embodied energy” (Wilczek’s term) is what we call mass. This nonempty vacuum is Wilczek’s “deep reality,” an underlying quantum universe that he refers to as The Grid.

Read Wilczek’s book, however, not for the details—that would require more mathematical sophistication than most of us can command—but to share some of the excitement and enlightenment that he and fellow particle physicists experience as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) goes into operation in Switzerland. The mammoth accelerator, 16.8 miles in circumference, is expected to produce an as-yet-undiscovered resident of The Grid called the Higgs particle, and put the physicists’ vision of a deeper reality to the test. “Unless our ideas are somehow very wrong,” says Wilczek, “the LHC should be up to the job.”