printable periodic table of elements poster

Matter particles come in two main varieties, leptons and quarks. Let’s build up the double simplex from scratch. We have adopted Quigg’s scheme and made further modifications.

He calls his scheme the “double simplex” representation, because the left-handed and right-handed particles of nature each form a simplex - a generalization of a triangle. Quigg’s visual representation shows more of the Standard Model’s underlying order and structure. A New ApproachĬhris Quigg, a particle physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, has been thinking about how to visualize the Standard Model for decades, hoping that a more powerful visual representation would help familiarize people with the known particles of nature and prompt them to think about how these particles might fit into a larger, more complete theoretical framework. And the quadrants of the circle are misleading - implying, for instance, that the photon only couples to the particles it touches, which isn’t the case. While this visualization properly emphasizes the centrality of the Higgs boson - the linchpin of the Standard Model, for reasons explained below - the Higgs is placed next to the photon and gluon, even though in reality the Higgs doesn’t affect those particles. Most attempts are too simple, or they ignore important interconnections or are jumbled and overwhelming.Ĭonsider the most common visualization, which shows a periodic table of particles:

Yet for a framework that encapsulates our best understanding of nature’s fundamental order, the Standard Model still lacks a coherent visualization. The Standard Model is missing a few puzzle pieces (conspicuously absent are the putative particles that make up dark matter, those that convey the force of gravity, and an explanation for the mass of neutrinos), but it provides an extremely accurate picture of almost all other observed phenomena. Together, the equations formed a succinct theory now known as the Standard Model of particle physics. In the 1970s, physicists developed a set of equations describing these particles and interactions. All of nature springs from a handful of components - the fundamental particles - that interact with one another in only a few different ways.

Printable periodic table of elements poster