Today’s post is for readers with a little science/math background:
Last week, I explained, without technicalities, how the various elementary forces of nature can be inferred from the pattern of lifetimes of the known particles. I did this using an image, repeated below, that organized the particles by their masses and lifetimes. I’ll add more non-technical posts on the Standard Model in the coming days. But today’s post is a tad more technical, using dimensional analysis (a physicist’s secret weapon) (which I demonstrated here, here and here) to explain key features of the image: the red line, the blue line, and the particles at the upper left, as well as why there is a high-energy and a low-energy version of the weak nuclear force.
