Does anyone here know of a good account (something I could read, preferably) suitable for someone without much knowledge of modern physics of how the Standard Model came to be constructed on the basis of experimental evidence?
Most descriptions of particle physics that I have encountered begin right away with an enumeration of the different types of particles, and the statement that some of them are composed of various combinations of quarks, but don't include (at least not without investing some hours of my time) any indication of how these things are observed, what set of data this model fits, what is the nature(if any) of a quark independent of the hadron in which it is a constituent, what are the laws governing quarks that cause these particles to arise, etc.
I don't feel I'm learning much of anything by just memorizing the names of all the members of the particle zoo. But it seems I must spend some hours doing this before I can gain any understanding of what particle physics means, or how particle physics is done?
The book "Fields of Color" is short, math free, and largely organized by the historical progression of discovery.
> any indication of how these things are observed
In the last 50 years or so, the bulk of the evidence has come from particle accelerators, but there's been meaningful results from other experiments as well. Sean Carrol organizes the current state of physics into two broad categories: intensity experiments, like the LHC, which are attempting to reach energy concentrations we haven't probed before, and sensitivity experiments, which observe natural but rarely produced or interacting particles, like neutrino detectors.
> what set of data this model fits
All the data. The standard model is the best model we've found to explain all experiments observed in the history of physics.
> what is the nature(if any) of a quark independent of the hadron in which it is a constituent
Quarks and Gluons are bound together in the nucleus by the strong force. This force is, as its name indicates, very strong, however it falls off with distance sharply. The way it works out, the force is such that if you try to pull two bound quarks apart, the energy you add is sufficient to create new quarks. So lone quarks never appear, they're always bound into a composite of two or three, and if you try to pull them apart, you just end up making a second composite when they separate.
> But it seems I must spend some hours doing this before I can gain any understanding of what particle physics means, or how particle physics is done?
The blunt truth is fully understanding the standard model requires a lot of non trivial mathematics. I can't work with the math, but I've read through enough textbooks I've got some intuition for the big picture now. This isn't a topic where you can swoop in, spend 15 minutes, and suddenly understand it all. It's not going to just take some hours, it'll take much much more time than that.
Some topics cannot be simplified into a tidy summary that can be skimmed in a couple hours.
> All the data. The standard model is the best model we've found to explain all experiments observed in the history of physics.
This isn't the full story. The Standard Model does not explain neutrino mass (which we know exists from neutrino oscillations) or dark matter & dark energy. These are very big open questions!
Yeah, poor wording on my part. That's why I said "best explanation", but I should have emphasized we do know the standard model is incomplete. There's just no simple path forward at this point.
To understand gravity you don't need to build super-expensive devices to find the particle-interpretation of this wave force. The Higgs makes no sense outside the standard model. Studying the wave-interpretation as attracting force is easier and also alignable with general relativity.
Explaining an wide-reaching attractive force as particle really makes no sense at all (outside QM), as Heisenberg also complained.
> The Standard Model does not explain neutrino mass
Not as originally formulated (because back then neutrinos were thought to be massless) but it's straightforward to extend that original version to include neutrino masses, by giving leptons their own equivalent to the quark sector's CKM matrix [1], the PMNS matrix [2]. In modern parlance, "Standard Model" means this updated version.
Granted, if you do just that, you make neutrinos Dirac spinors (just like the quarks) and there is no obvious reason for why they should be so much lighter than the other fermions. Giving them a Majorana mass induced by a much heavier (GUT-scale) equivalent to the Standard Model Higgs would provide a natural explanation for that mass hierarchy through the seesaw mechanism [3], and that would be true Beyond the Standard Model physics.
The introductory chapter of "Introduction to Elementary Particles" by David Griffiths. It doesn't require much knowledge of physics but tells the story of how the theory came to be over the 20th century (based on experimental evidence and the theoretical work happening in parallel).
Yes I agree that he has a full semester+ of undergraduate/early graduate "course work" in his books... but the first chapter of his particle physics book has almost zero math -- it's just a great story.
His elementary particles book - I say having skimmed and the not bought it, so a I may be wrong - looks a good place to start by virtue of both containing a full introduction to the phenomenology behind particle physics and also an introduction (but only an introduction, compared to (say) Weinberg) the mathematics behind it.
Most descriptions of particle physics that I have encountered begin right away with an enumeration of the different types of particles, and the statement that some of them are composed of various combinations of quarks, but don't include (at least not without investing some hours of my time) any indication of how these things are observed, what set of data this model fits, what is the nature(if any) of a quark independent of the hadron in which it is a constituent, what are the laws governing quarks that cause these particles to arise, etc.
I don't feel I'm learning much of anything by just memorizing the names of all the members of the particle zoo. But it seems I must spend some hours doing this before I can gain any understanding of what particle physics means, or how particle physics is done?