Elementary Particles

Elementary Particles was the last speciality elective I took this year (the others I took were Life in the Universe; Active Galaxies and Cosmology).

In second year you do a bit of particle physics, lots of people like this bit of the module because it is quite easy. The third year speciality elective has some similar elements, but begins to introduce some trickier concepts. If you don’t particularly like maths I’d recommend this module, because it involved very little maths. I know next year their is a module that gets into the mathematics of particle physics called Quantum fields which I plan to take.

Overall I found this module very interesting, some of the concepts you are introduced to are so counterintuitive you really have to stretch your imagination to get a glimpse of what they are describing.

Here’s a video on one of the things I learned about in this module: virtual particles.

“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which ‘are’ there.”

-Richard Feynman