““One success of noncommutative geometry is that it leads directly to the standard model of particle physics. As Alain and his colleagues discovered, if you take Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and write it on the simplest possible noncommutative geometry, out pops the Weinberg-Salam model unifying electromagnetism with the weak nuclear force. In other words, the weak interactions, together with the Higgs fields, show up automatically and correctly. Recall from chapter 2 that one way to tell whether a particular unification is successful is that there is immediately a sense that the idea agrees with nature. The fact that the correct unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces falls out from the simplest version of Connes's idea is compelling. It is the kind of thing that might have happened with strong theory but didn't.””
