In the Dark

After yesterday’s holiday it was back to teaching full-time this morning with the first lecture of my module on Particle Physics. I just about managed to get everything ready in time for the teaching session at 1pm which, because it was an introductory lecture with lots of pictures, I decided to do via powerpoint rather than my usual chalk-and-talk. That didn’t get off to a very good start because the podium PC in my room had decided to do a Windows update just before I started and I had to wait for that to finish before I could show my slides. I suppose that happened because this was the first day of teaching after a lengthy break so nobody had used the room recently.

Most of the lecture was devoted to introducing natural units, which I intend to use throughout the module, like I have on previous occasions I have taught this sort of material for reasons I explained here. The last time I taught particle physics was some 15 years ago, so I had to update some things, especially the picture of the components of the standard model to include the Higgs. After extensive research (by which I mean looking at wikipedia) I found the above; the Higgs is on the right. Unfortunately the particle masses – which reveal themselves if you click on the image above – are not given in natural units, but have pesky factors of c-squared in them. You can’t have everything.

The bit I’m looking forward to most is doing the Dirac Equation which, years ago when I was at Sussex, was once the subject of a cake:

That particular cake was a lemon drizzle cake which unfortunately is not one of the flavours represented in the standard model.

This entry was posted on February 4, 2025 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Biographical, Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags Dirac equation, Maynooth University, Natural Units, Particle Physics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.