Thursday, July 10, 2008
Scientists have found nothing
Well, they have experimental evidence for the existence of a new bottomonium meson. That's a bottom and an antibottom quark pair for the uninitiated. The one they just found evidence for is so vanishingly small that it may as well be nothing. Not so much nothing as say a Neutrino which really is a rarefied piece of nothing but as the lowest energy state for a bottomonium meson its as close to noting whilst still being something as you can get. Now isn't that something!?!
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9 comments:
That makes my brain hurt :S
It made my brain melt...
All I know about particle-splitting these days is that the finer the cut, the more wedge it costs. Find a hadron, cut it in half, spend a billion, find a boson, cut it in half, spend five billion, find a lepton...
All a bit pointless really (no pun intended).
Surely these things just keep reducing in size with fractal monotony, no matter (no pun intended either) how much cash we throw at the itty-bitty f8ckers...
yes and no - This discovery doesn't have much in the way of immediate payoff in they way that the understanding of electromagnetism led to TV's. Quarks are weird They are the fundamental building blocks that make up stuff. They are indivisible in that when they decay it is into energy (photons). So in getting to know them better we are getting closer to the Grand Unified Theory of, well everything. If you heep matter onto a neutron star it can collapse into a quark star - not quite a black hole and a candidate for dark matter - which accounts for 90% or so of the mass of the universe. So if you spend your days looking at your feet then you are correct - it is expensive fundamental research with no likely bearing on the price of fish but if, like me, you want answers to the big questions like what is the nature of the universe then it is important basic research.
Hang on a second, Yoda !!!
There was a time not so long ago when hadrons and even whole atoms were once regarded as elementary particles...but now it's the quark, the lepton and the ultra-convenient guage bosons.
It's a little bit pompous to say we've found the building blocks of the universe yet. If so, what are they made from. And you can't just say pure energy, because energy and matter are interchangeable, so they must be made of something.
Hey, I might be a humble currency trader, but I don't watch Big Brother.
I have The Discovery Channel...
I'm happy to eat humble pie on this one but for normal matter - i.e. not forces but 'stuff' my call is that we've seen the fundamental building blocks. You can squeeze the electrons off atoms, smash nuclei together with the force of the inside of a star, inside a neutron star, even inside a quark star. With quarks if you squeeze them together any harder they collapse and fall out of the universe - a lah black holes. It doesn't make any sense to talk about what makes up quarks.
There are no embarrassing gaps in our understanding of symmetry. There may be Strings - Supper strings etc but they are so small they are below the planks constant for he lowest energy states. So Strings are ad hoc in that you can't experiment with them. Preon theory has been experimentally discredited. As for sparticles, when the LHC comes online with energies high enough to looking at Supersymmetry we may find superpartners to quarks but I'll put a few 330ml Chimay Blue's on it with you that we can't split quarks into anything other than more quarks. When you add energy to try to split a quark the energy creates more quarks! thats it. Here and no further.
That last paragraph indicates that you suspect the quark's smallness to be a physical limit, rather than a measure of sub-atomic size. Say, like the speed of light is to motion. Add more energy to an accelerating object as it approaches 'c' and you don't just get incresaed mass, you still get a tiny increase in speed, don't you ?? Maybe not enough to make the effort practical but it still goes a bit faster. Now stop whining like a bitch, fire up your Large Hadron Collider and bring me the shit that makes up a quark...
They plan to turn on the LHC this year (Aug I think) and should be collecting data before xmass.
I know; it's terribly exciting to think that not only might we find that elusive Higgs boson but that France and Switzerland might be completely destroyed in the process.
Talk about collateral bonuses...
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