I’ll start by saying; I’m not making any of this up(my friends have bullied me into referencing my stuff so everything will be fully referenced in the next week or so) and it really does seem that sometimes scientists can do some pretty odd stuff. Personally I find the levitating frog thing a demonstration of this but the logic behind the title is probably weirder still. It is true though, penguins are really inconvenient.

Admittedly they aren’t the kind of penguin you’re familiar with (the bird kind) but are in fact a particular kind of quantum mechanical interaction displayed by a ‘penguin diagram’. Despite not actually having anything to do with the avian kind of penguin, the reason behind the name is still pretty cool. The upshot of it is, a scientist lost a drunken bet to include the word penguin in his next paper. He then got pretty high and decided to call the diagram of the interaction he observed a penguin diagram. It doesn’t really look like a penguin normally, it’s just that if you draw some lines a bit more curvy and put some at funny  angles it kind of looks like one. I guess this would have worked for a dog or a narwhal, but penguins it is.

This is what the diagram looks like when you want to pretend it looks like a penguin.

I mean it looks like one if you’re really trying to see it Oh scientists.  They are still pretty interesting though as they illustrate how our current understanding of physics can’t be the whole story as they are an example of something called CP violation.

The words C and P stand for (charge parity) don’t really give the whole picture but it means the physics of the standard model (the model used to describe particles and their interactions with the exception of gravity) doesn’t work if everything was backwards. If CP violation were false then  if everything in space was a mirror image of its current self, for example the writing on the screen you’d be reading from would be back to front, and every particle was swapped with its antiparticle  the physical description of these particles should remain unchanged. It would also mean that as a result of the big bang, matter and antimatter would be created in equal quantities. We know both of these things to be false, the latter by the fact we exist (if they were created in equal quantities the matter and antimatter would have annihilated and no massive particles would exist) and the former by experiment. Now this is where the penguins come in.

The interactions illustrated by penguin diagrams are one of the interactions that prove CP violation is in fact true. The maths behind it all makes my head hurt but put simply, the interaction couldn’t happen if the particles were swapped with their antiparticles (kind of what we were looking for). As I mentioned, this CP violation is a big problem because the standard model doesn’t predict it. This is because all the particles that you swap when checking if CP is violated are described by the standard model, therefore an example of CP violation is a blow for the standard model description of the universe, and as this is the best model we have to describe the universe, it still looks like there are still a few things that need ironing out before we can explain everything we know so far (most obviously being that we still need to figure out how gravity works).

I’m sure Daniel would disagree with me but I’m sure I’ve convinced you that this kind of penguin is far more interesting.

Max

Sources:

Origin of the Penguin Diagram

CP Violation

Standard Model Info