Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword: an apology
- 1 The beginning of the journey to the small: cutting paper
- 2 To molecules and atoms
- 3 The magical mystery of the quanta
- 4 Dazzling velocities
- 5 The elementary particle zoo before 1970
- 6 Life and death
- 7 The crazy kaons
- 8 The invisible quarks
- 9 Fields or bootstraps?
- 10 The Yang-Mills bonanza
- 11 Superconducting empty space: the Higgs-Kibble machine
- 12 Models
- 13 Coloring in the strong forces
- 14 The magnetic monopole
- 15 Gypsy
- 16 The brilliance of the Standard Model
- 17 Anomalies
- 18 Deceptive perfection
- 19 Weighing neutrinos
- 20 The Great Desert
- 21 Technicolor
- 22 Grand unification
- 23 Supergravity
- 24 Eleven-dimensional space-time
- 25 Attaching the superstring
- 26 Into the black hole
- 27 Theories that do not yet exist…
- 28 Dominance of the rule of the smallest
- Glossary
- Index
14 - The magnetic monopole
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword: an apology
- 1 The beginning of the journey to the small: cutting paper
- 2 To molecules and atoms
- 3 The magical mystery of the quanta
- 4 Dazzling velocities
- 5 The elementary particle zoo before 1970
- 6 Life and death
- 7 The crazy kaons
- 8 The invisible quarks
- 9 Fields or bootstraps?
- 10 The Yang-Mills bonanza
- 11 Superconducting empty space: the Higgs-Kibble machine
- 12 Models
- 13 Coloring in the strong forces
- 14 The magnetic monopole
- 15 Gypsy
- 16 The brilliance of the Standard Model
- 17 Anomalies
- 18 Deceptive perfection
- 19 Weighing neutrinos
- 20 The Great Desert
- 21 Technicolor
- 22 Grand unification
- 23 Supergravity
- 24 Eleven-dimensional space-time
- 25 Attaching the superstring
- 26 Into the black hole
- 27 Theories that do not yet exist…
- 28 Dominance of the rule of the smallest
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
The problem of permanent quark confinement became more and more intriguing to me during 1973 and 1974. What we knew was only that the color forces on the naked quarks at small distances are relatively small compared with the forces between dressed quarks at larger distances from each other. This was the ‘negative screening effect’ I mentioned in the previous chapter. It seems plausible that if this is extrapolated to larger distances, the color forces among quarks will continue to increase. The forces could easily become so strong that they keep the quarks permanently together. But is this really what happens? The essential difficulty was that because the forces are so great, calculations are nearly impossible. The only thing we are good at is performing calculations on particles that move in approximately straight lines. This is certainly not what quarks do when the forces are so strong. So the question became: is there a fundamental reason why quarks will remain invisible forever? Why do the field lines in a color theory form sausages, as in Figure 14, without spreading apart as in ‘ordinary’ electric and magnetic fields? If this could be explained, perhaps a calculational scheme could be devised to explain the properties of hadrons. I tried all sorts of things to find an answer.
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- Information
- In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks , pp. 96 - 100Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996