Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine
There’s a fascinating article at The Long Now Foundation, “Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine,” by Danny Hillis. It’s a fun look into the interactions of two of the most interesting scientist/engineers of the last 40 years.
i’m always interested in accounts about richard feynman but i’m confused by the reference to quantum chromodynamics (which i had always understood to involve assigning colours such as red, green, blue, anti-red, anti-green, and anti-blue to quarks in order to keep them from violating the pauli exclusion principle) rather than quantum electrodynamics (which feynman wrote a book about called “QED: The strange theory of light and matter”)…
Assigning colours to quarks is about the strong force – this is the one they mean in the article since it mentions internals of particles such as protons.
Light and matter is about the electroweak force.
ah, thanks for that – that one statement explains a lot more about qcd (or perhaps what falls under that heading) than i was ever able to find in my highschool library back when i was really looking into such things…