small flightless bird

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

up the down quark

It looks like some crazy artist got together with some crazy particle physicist and decided to generate some pretty nifty images of sub-atomic particles. Of course, they're not actually photographs. Photographs are images made up of captured photons - and one of the particles depicted is the photon. In fact, these particles are much too small and wave-like for the terms "shape" or "appearance" to have any meaning. So really, they're just arbitrary representations, but there's some logic behind them and a whole rationale of why the specific geometric features were chosen. Pretty nifty.