David Tong, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge, is excited about solitons. And he wants to share that excitement with you, and he’s willing to climb in a bathtub to do it.
Baths and Quarks: Solitons explained
It’s a fun video, produced by the Institute of Physics. David’s interest is really in the issue of quark confinement in QCD, one of the Clay Millenium Prize problems. But we get there by thinking about bubbles and vortices and smoke rings. Worth a look.
Great lecturer and science communicator, is David Tong. His lecture notes are always worth a study:
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html
Missing a minus sign in that QCD action, though…
I want to echo #1 above. David Tong’s lecture notes are second to none! (Especially his string theory lecture notes. They’re like everything important from Polchinksi Vol. 1 except very easy to read and follow.)
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“Us” physicists?
Us Tareyton smokers would rather compute than switch.
Plus, what’s with all the errors in pi at the bottom of the big chalkboard?
But if you smack a proton hard enough the quark does leave, only it makes a little friend to keep it company. He seemed to be implying it’s impossible to ever remove a quark.
Maybe quarks do not really “exist” at all?
Just a formal description working well
to describe the deep nucleon interaction?
1/3 elementary charge is very suspicious!
Do electrons “exist” within an atom, or are they “created”
when I ionize an atom? This question is borderline
for electrons, but maybe the analogon is closer
to truth for quarks.
Georg
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