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Quark Stars
BigGar' writes "Astronomers seem to have discovered a new type of star. It would lie between a neutron star and and a black hole in the hierarchy of stars and consist of quark matter. Further observations with the Chandra X-ray telescope will be needed to confirm the results."
Does anyone know if all up quarks are the same as all other up quarks and if all down quarks are the same as all other down quarks? There might be a billion different slight variations of the two kinds. We don't have the equipment to define a quark past a certain level.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Something that one gets used to in science is that you don't know anything in the absolute sense, but you probably do "know" things to the degree that you're willing to base your life's work off of them. On the other hand, if you spend too much time around philosophers, you might end up wondering if the world really exists, or if your senses are accurate, etc.
Doubt goes hand in hand with wisdom. Once one accepts that there is room to question absolutely everything, then you just have to accept the attitude of estimating what is the most likely truth and working from there. In my (admittedly biased) estimation the laws of physics, as currently understood, are almost certainly a good approximation of truth, though certainly not the last word.
In science, careers are made by showing that the established beliefs are wrong. There are lots of people itching to overturn current theories. Sometimes there is resistance if the evidence is weak or the argument complicated, but in the long run scientists are often more likely to admit their mistaken beliefs than the public in general.
If there really is a right answer to the universe then an independant thinker should arrive at similar conclusions to the ones we already have. Unfortunately no man ever born could even learn all the science we have now, so it's nigh impossible to believe that any single person could have the capacity to independantly arrive at more than a very small part of what has already become established doctrine. On the other hand, Ramanujan did quite well, and without being shunned or killed.
If some day we do contact an intelligent alien race, that would be other best chance to study an independant notion of science. However, I doubt that they'll offer too many surprises among the areas of science that have been studied in detail.
Well, there is no revealed truth in science, so we don't ever know absolutely that something is real. It has happened before that a theory turns out to be based on a house of cards. Most of that time, in retrospect, it can be seen that the theory got way out in front of experiment and so was improperly constrained. That is, the less we've studied an area, the more likely the theoriest are wrong. As facts come in, theories get revised or strengthened.
On the other hand, remember that in physics, most "revolutions" change our understanding of how things work but do not invalidate existing theories in their realm of applicability. For example, relativity didn't kill Newtonian theory. Indeed, that's still where we start today in physics education. Why didn't it? Because at human-scale speeds, with human-scale masses, objects obey Newton's Law pretty well... that's the region in which the theory was derived and it fits the experiments there. At the very fast, it breaks down, and then relativity is needed.
Now, we insist the Universe is "really" relativistic at all speeds, so in that sense the new theory wiped out the old. But we also insist that for slow objects relativity must reduce to Newton's Law (and it does). So the earlier theory reamins a useful, if admittedly inadequate, tool.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I did a PhD on pulars, which everyone thinks are neutron stars. At one point I found a paper which suggested that instead they might be "strange matter" stars - and it's always intrigued me how difficult it is to distinguish between the two.
The cool thing about finding strange matter stars is that it suggests there's a lower-energy state of matter than our normal up/down quark pairings. No one's really sure because QCD is so hard to get numbers out of.
Every time they build a new accelerator someone harps on this, worrying about whether we'll ram particles together hard enough to create a meta-stable bubble of strange matter. If there is a net saving in energy due to expanding that bubble (drop in energy due to increasing volume of lower-energy-state matter, increase in energy due to increased surface tension on the surface), the bubble will tend to expand and gobble up everything in its path - like the Earth, for example.
That's the common worry, though it's easily allayed by noting that particles with much higher energy than anything we could create in an accelerator are hitting our atmosphere all the time, and none of them have turned our planet into a jiggling mass of strange matter.
Anyway, interesting idea.
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.