Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Wilczek's Grid

I'm still trying to muddle my way through Nobel Prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek's latest book about the nature of mass and trying to get clear about his notion of the Grid (and it's distinction from Lattice Quantum Gravity). The basic argument for mass is that the quarks cause a disturbance in the gluon field and that the localization energy it would require to exactly position an anti-quark to zero out the disturbance involves too much energy expenditure, therefore the net nonzero energy involved generates the mass (say, of a proton). The hand-waving necessary in a popular science book (and this is a very well-written one) has to do with

-two suggested explanations of dark matter (which seems to halo all exisiting galaxies) with very light minimally-interacting particles.
- the connection to SUSY and SO(10) and the ways the symmetry theories fold into a master theory of symmetries