Scientists at CERN observe three "exotic" particles for first time

[xocetaceans]

17. Overloading like that had to be a challenging but rewarding experience....

Physics can be pretty insular. No one I knew took physical chemistry. I'm not sure that anyone ever paid attention to the departments outside of physics with the exception of paying attention to the math department.

Several years ago, I just started looking at various books at a used book store and came across a few by Peter Atkins: one was a popular science text and the other was his physical chemistry text. The text looked like it would have been great to have studied before taking statistical mechanics. Experiencing that material in the lab would have been great, I think, specifically at enlivening the calculations of stat mech. (I'm not current on that material at all now, though, so I would have difficulty discussing it.)

It would probably be hubris to suggest that one could just drop into a third-year course like PChem. How dependent was that course on prerequisites? Would a one-year freshman chemistry sequence with laboratory be enough to take that course successfully? Or are there second-year courses that are needed also? (FYI: This is an idle wonder for me.)

My chemistry knowledge is severely limited, but I am curious about organo-metallic chemistry research. What does that apply to in the world around us? What size molecules exhibit properties that would fall under that sort of investigation? What phase is under consideration? (These could be very naive questions.... I'm guessing experiments would have to be done in solution, but maybe they could be carried out by mixing gases?)


One other thing about particle physics that ought to be mentioned is the topic of Feynman diagrams. They are important to doing calculations. I mentioned what I did before because that gives one a way to understand how modern particle physics is often described in public - the SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) idea. To understand what comes out of scattering experiments (which is exactly what is being done at accelerators like the LHC), one needs Feynman diagrams, a good introductory book for that is:

Introduction to Elementary Particles by Griffiths

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Introduction+to+Elementary+Particles%2C+2nd%2C+Revised+Edition-p-9783527406012

That book has been around for a while, so there should be plenty of allied material on the internet. It gives a general overview of how particle physics came about, briefly discusses special relativity and groups, and then gets into showing how to start to deal with Feynman diagrams in computations in simple "toy" theories. Complex analysis, group theory and tensor analysis (or tensor notation) sort of float around under the surface of what he is discussing. Anyway, I just wanted to throw that in to the discussion in case you ever want to pursue looking further into modern particle physics.