Comments & Questions
The Standard Model gives a unified description of the strong, weak & electromagnetic interactions and the fundamental fermions (quarks & leptons)
- All known forces are included except gravity
What more can we want to know?
- Are there more generations of particles to come?
- Why is out universe made mainly of matter and not antimatter?
- Why do some of the fundamental particles have mass?
- Do neutrinos have mass? A current question bearing on the universe! (Nobel Prize in 2002)
- Unified “theory of everything”? String theory?
Connections with cosmology.
- If the universe started from a Big Bang, then the first second on the life of the universe were a hot quantum soup of these particles! More about this next time.