S26-0330A, The Search For The Smallest Thing, Part 2:

For thousands of years, people have wondered what the Universe is made of and if there is a “smallest thing” from which everything else is made. Today, we call this area of science “Particle Physics.”

In the late 19th and 20th centuries, research led to major new understandings of the way atoms work. In the process, hundreds of new subatomic particles were found. But the way in which these particles behave is often very strange.

This course is the story of these discoveries and understandings, which led to the development of quantum physics and the standard model of particle physics. We’ll meet lots of interesting people and explore their experiments and see how the current understanding of what the smallest thing is began to develop.

Presenter: Mark Dodge
Mark Dodge received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California Berkeley and earned his master’s degree in engineering physics from the University of Virginia. He worked as an engineering scientist at IBM and then became a high school physics teacher, teaching for 24 years. He has been educating LLI members on various scientific subjects for the past six years.

LLI Coordinator: Jo Anne Renton