Penguin diagrams

I thought I would presage the return of the penguin, if he indeed does return, with an apposite homage; the penguin diagram. These are Feynman-like diagrams which show complex interactions brtween sub-atomic particles invoved in the decay of, among others, the beta-meson and which show how a quark changes 'flavor, 'bottom' into 'up' for example, by releasing a 'W' or a 'Z' 'particle. The Feynman diagrams look very much like a 'stick-penguin' without the head as below:

These diagrams are useful in examining the mechanisms which underlie charge parity (CP) violaion. CP symmetry states that a particle, in certain aspects, should have the same properies as its anti-particle, eg an electron should have the same charge value as the accompanying positron except that its 'sign' ('+' or '-') is reversed and that the same properties apply whether it is right-handed or left-handed, essentially in all important aspects, a particle should be a mirror image of its anti-particle.

One of the weirdest things about quatum mechanics is that although the equations seem to work to a high degree of accuracy, and the net effect of all those probabilty amplitudes is the reality we all perceive through our senses as something tangible and very real, the reality at that level seems not to be tangible, real.  If an electron only has a probability of 'being there' at any given time, in what way can it be considered as having a reality separate from the brain that 'sees' it. Things get little better with string theory as we humans don't cope very well with one-dimensional objects, vibrating or not, and the folded up extra dimensions prove to be impossible to grasp except in refined matthematics of Hilbert space.

I have been inclined to think for many years that 'matter' is just energy which is able to crystallise out from an energy field for a period of time but is not necessarily fixed for all eternity. However, there is a problem with this view because it implies that as matter crystallises out of the energy field, particles and their anti-particles should form in equal numbers; you create an electron/positron pair from pure energy just as annihilating the pair in a collision forms pure energy. However most of the apparent stuff in the universe appears to be matter; there is not enough of the expected anti-matter to balance it if particles and anti-particles are always formed in pairs. The CP violation goes some way in resolving the issue but it is too weak and occurs relatively rarely to account for such a stark imbalance.

With the netry of a candidate for the much speculated Higgs boson, the standard model is largely complete and yet still deepquestions remain. Perhaps what is needed if a revolutionary new way of looking at the world, some insight which owes no debt to the twentieth century, great as those achievements were. I do not expect it anytime soon.