John Carlos BaezPions were a revolutionary discovery in the 1930s — among the first animals in the ‘particle zoo’ — but here I’m explaining them as a way to work toward the math and physics concepts needed for the Standard Model.
As soon as the neutron was discovered in 1932, Heisenberg invented the idea of ‘isospin’, and the idea that the proton and neutron are two different isospin states of a single particle: the nucleon. This is why I explained the math of spin-1/2 particles in earlier videos: in order to talk about isospin.
Three years later, Yukawa came up with the idea that the force holding nuclei together is carried by a new particle. Even better, he predicted the mass of this yet-unseen particle!
Later, the pion was discovered: in fact, three kinds of pions. Heisenberg realized how these were connected to the 3 Pauli matrices, and this was a big step toward the modern theory of gauge bosons.
(For mathematicians: pions are a basis of the Lie algebra 𝔰𝔩(2,ℂ). 🤯)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7K7SFDNK0&list=PLuAO-1XXEh0Zy7uUbyrTc2SIz3dB-bcfR
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