Physics & Astronomy Colloquium

3:30 PM, Friday, September 11, 2009
Room 155, Chem-Phys Building

Dr. Stuart Raby
Department of Physics
Ohio State University

"The Puzzle of Charge and Mass''
Beginning with the seminal work of Rutherford, Geiger and Marsden in 1911, physicists have investigated the atom using particle beams (alpha particles, and protons) as probes. They developed new detection methods; the geiger counter, scintillators, cloud and then bubble chambers. This new paradigm for probing matter and new detectors led to many discoveries.

To make a long story short, by 1974 the chaos of discovery lead to the Standard Model describing all observed particle phenomena in terms of three fundamental forces (4 including gravity) and the fundamental building blocks of matter, quarks and leptons.

Only now, after the dust of this chaotic discovery settles, are we able with hindsight to recognize the underlying principles which define the theory we call the Standard Model. It is these principles and their logical extension which I will attempt to describe in this talk.