My
Life as a Mythic Detective
As a physics
major, I’ve had an interesting time this semester. As I go through my homework,
I’ve been thinking of the Ovidian stories in the back of my head and have drawn
some interesting parallels.
For instance, I
can be working on my particle physics homework – a subject that Ovid could have
never imagined – and I can make connections to the stories we’ve been reading
in Mythologies. How?
Well, the premise
of most particle physics is figuring out how to understand different interactions
of elementary particles. Richard Feynman was a Cadmus of particle physics, if
you will. He arrived in a place unknown by scientists, taking to the photons
and electrons with a fiery vigor. He fought with integrals and derivatives and
delta functions, bravely questing to conquer the knowledge held by the photons.
He finally vanquished his foe with the invention of Feynman diagrams, planting
the photons in them as squiggly lines, and thus, the field of quantum
electrodynamics was born. But I digress.
One of my most
recent homework problems was on electron-muon scattering.
The first thing you do is draw a diagram
showing the reaction, then label particles with variables that will help us
keep track of them.
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At this point, we
need to check to see if there are any other diagrams. For this reaction,
there’s only one of this type of diagram, so we’re good (at least for only two
vertices). As we add more and more
diagrams, it’s like we’re getting more and more threads to put into the
intricate fabric that is particle physics. Truly, this must be the fabric that
Arachne wove to contest Athena. This tapestry, once fully completed, will
reveal the quantity M, which will reveal to us
everything we could possibly want to know about this reaction.
Then we start
putting in the numbers, and our story turns into Phaethon’s ride…
Oh
goodness. What’s going on here? Where did all of this math come from? I don’t
even know these symbols! Oh god, oh god, it’s getting beyond my control!
Those bispinors - how did they become matrices? Why did I
ever think I could do this?! There goes my physics career – I can see it
crashing before my eyes. Oh, no, what will my father think? WHY ISN’T IT JUST A
NUMBER, IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE A NUMBER. …I broke physics... help.
After more insanity that I ever
thought possible, this turned out to be the final answer. But it’s so simple,
so beautiful; nothing I had ever seen before in physics compared to it after my
struggles with other problems. This equation was something I slaved on, but
then it took on a life of its own; I felt like Pygmalion upon his discovery of
his wife, a wish granted by Venus.
And
thus, I thank the physics gods.
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