Mario Livio Quote

The forces of nature are color blind. Just as an infinite chessboard would look the same if we interchanged black and white, the force between a green quark and a red quark is the same as that between two blue quarks, or a blue quark and a green quark. Even if we were to use our quantum mechanical palette and replace each of the pure color states with a mixed-color state (e.g., yellow representing a mixture of red and green or cyan for a blue-green mixture), the laws of nature would still take the same form. The laws are symmetric under any color transformation. Furthermore, the color symmetry is again a gauge symmetry-the laws of nature do not care if the colors or color assortments vary from position to position or from one moment to the next.

Mario Livio

The forces of nature are color blind. Just as an infinite chessboard would look the same if we interchanged black and white, the force between a green quark and a red quark is the same as that between two blue quarks, or a blue quark and a green quark. Even if we were to use our quantum mechanical palette and replace each of the pure color states with a mixed-color state (e.g., yellow representing a mixture of red and green or cyan for a blue-green mixture), the laws of nature would still take the same form. The laws are symmetric under any color transformation. Furthermore, the color symmetry is again a gauge symmetry-the laws of nature do not care if the colors or color assortments vary from position to position or from one moment to the next.

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About Mario Livio

Mario Livio (born June 19, 1945) is an astrophysicist and an author of works that popularize science and mathematics. For 24 years (1991–2015) he was an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Hubble Space Telescope. He has published more than 400 scientific articles on topics including cosmology, supernova explosions, black holes, extrasolar planets, and the emergence of life in the universe.[1] His book on the irrational number phi, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number (2002), won the Peano Prize and the International Pythagoras Prize for popular books on mathematics.