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Do Strangelets Pass Through Earth?
Weirdolet writes: "Ananova are reporting that ultra-dense, pollen sized strangelets (aka nuggets of strange quarks) travelling at 900,000 miles per hour hit the earth, violently pass through it and have done on at least two occasions already. It's also reported, allegedly, in the Sunday telegraph but I haven't found it there yet :P
Coming to a particle accelerator near you soon ... ?" Another reader has found the story at the Telegraph.
Uplets? Downlets? Toplets? Bottomlets? Charmedlets?
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
For those of you freaking out, here's a link Strangelets are strange but not dangerous
And then ends it with "humans are unlikely to be harmed." We can't make Hollywood blockbusters with those types of "facts." Killer Strangelets from Outer Space needs to have KILLER Stragelets!
Wouldn't a particle moving that fast with that much momentum leave some sort of exit point that could still be seen. Also,"The small size of strangelets means the blast is only big enough to have a very localised effect and humans are unlikely to be harmed." What happens when one of these goes through LA or New york, wouldn't there be quite a few people harmed?
I would really like to see the statistical data of earth quakes, What are the possibilities of that happening just by chance, as compared to stranglets or any other 'unconfirmed' theories.
Sometimes human has the tendencies to take coincidence and correlations as evidence, not that I am saying this is the case.
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Now I know where to get 1.21 jigawatts if I'm stranded in 1993. I'll be saved from listening to REM's "everybody hurts" on the radio all over again!
Then you reach the end of the article and they write "The small size of strangelets means the blast is only big enough to have a very localised effect and humans are unlikely to be harmed." to reassure people and stop them panicking!
Video Game cheats, hints a
How eerie, I just finished reading the section in Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Time where young genius children built a device to capture a quark nugget!
Is this really surprising anyone? Makes me recall my favorite quote "the universe is not only queerer than you suppose, it's queere than you can suppose" and i used to know who that was from, but now i forget. things like this i always assumed, since matter is mostly made of "nothing" anyways (if you believe that nothing can exist), mostly empty space. though that's just me.
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, not just chemistry, reality!
"The small size of strangelets means the blast is only big enough to have a very localised effect and humans are unlikely to be harmed"
I don't disupte that claim, but I do beleive that the writer is basing that presumption off of the likelyhood of a stranglet hitting a human.
Anything that is dense enough to pass through our planet by virtue of its velocity and density is probably capable of killing a human if it hits one directly.
And with that in mind, perhaps there was no thrid gunman on a grassy knoll. Maybe Kennedy was the victim of a stray bit of cosmic matter?
END COMMUNICATION
The speed of light is about 185,000 miles per second, or 11,100,000 mph, so these things are moving at 0.1c. Still not inconsiderable, mind you, considering their mass...
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Considering we have seen (or measured) two instances I wonder when we will see more? Not just with these particles but other such strange or heavy particles.
It's kind of cool - of all the space out there, literally, two (maybe the same one) has come through Earth. Very exciting indeed. I wonder what the implications of an encounter are. Are there anything that such a particle would change?
I wonder though what would happen if it rips through your body, would you feel it? Imagine looking down on the scale in the morning and seeing it explode.
[Karma Whores please reply with good information on Strangelets - Google isn't giving me great sites]
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Where do you get that? Last I knew the speed of light was very approximately 669,600,000mph.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
>Apparently, these things move at 900000mph, or a
>few times the speed of light.
900,000mph is nowhere NEAR the speed of light.
Using the standard 138,000 miles per second approximation, we get about 496,800,000 mph.
-l
From the article: "Just a single pollen-sized fragment is believed to weigh several tons... The small size of strangelets means the blast is only big enough to have a very localised effect and humans are unlikely to be harmed."
"Unlikely" because the tiny blast is statistically unlikely to be near a person, I assume. So any theories on if these would actually damage a human if it DID pass through them?
>Using the standard 138,000 miles per second
>approximation, we get about 496,800,000 mph.
D'oh!
186,000 miles per second, approximately 669,600,000 mph.
My bad.
-l
Heh, I'm an idiot. 60 seconds to an hour, yeah right. Wow, time sure flies!
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Did anyone else think "neutrino" besides me? Who knows, it may be another form of neutrino, since billions pass through the earth every second.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
So any theories on if these would actually damage a human if it DID pass through them?
I dunno. From the article, it "packed the punch of several thousand tons of TNT." If you put several thousand tons of TNT on the head of a pin, would it really matter how many angels there were?
Think back to high school physics.. F = 1/2 mv^2. From the article, if you get several tons up to 900,000 mph, that's going to leave a mark if it hits you...
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Unfortunately, the energy released just from the localized destruction of the tissues would be enough to instantly vaporize any poor soul who were to find themselves in the path of one of these things. Luckily, as noted, the odds of this are infinitesimally small.
Knock wood, I guess. :)
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
As someone else pointed out earlier, light speed is WAY faster than that (138,000 miles per second IIRC), so your whole post is moot.
It's funny how all the replies list different speeds of light in mph..
I understand that life's not fair, just why is it never unfair in my favor?
Given the quote "The small size of strangelets means the blast is only big enough to have a very localised effect and humans are unlikely to be harmed."
Shouldn't we instead say "the strangelets are unlikely to be harmed?"
This reminds me of an experiment back in the 1900's when a man shoved a candle into the barrel of a gun and shot it at a wooden plank. The candle was completely unharmed. Given the softness of wax, it should've smashed down into a pancake, but it didn't change shape in the slightest. It did, however, go completely through the plank, breaking it in half. I would think that if one of these strangelets hit a human being, it would definitely kill them, but not harm the strangelet at all.
But then again, given the chances of one actually hitting a human being on the earth, maybe the original quote is more appropriate.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Opps.. 186,000 miles per second, not 138,000.
The scientists looked through "millions" of records of earthquakes, and find two examples where a disturbance occurs kinda on the other side of the world, approx 20 seconds later.
And from this they are able to determine the speed, size and effects of the particles.
The lack of specific data disturbs me, as does the jumps in logic.
Does anyone have links to anything with more specifics?
11,100,000 mph: 1
669,600,000 mph: 3
496,800,000 mph: 1
667,000,000 mph: 1
we have a winner emerging
Search first, ask questions later.
Based on the (skimpy) description, couldn't it just as easily have been a Neutron Star fragment or a primordial black hole?
Oh yeah, there is also a cool poster -m
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Well they weigh several tons. One article said they would leave a crater. My body typically reacts violently when craters appear in it. (And that hasn't regularly occurred for 15 years now...)
Another excuse for not doing my homework -- "The paper was alll finished, but a strangelet killed my hard drive"
If these little guys did in fact come from the Big Band, could it be possible to calculate their trajectories and maybe locate the center of the universe? I imageine these stranglets are just like comets traveling through space with REALLY REALLY big orbits, presumably around the center...?
Or mabye a gravastar pooped them out.
Could these be the long-awaited explanation for spontaneous human combustion? ;o)
-----
"You spilled my egg... I needed that egg."
So many replies... Let me be the first to give the *exact* speed of light in vacuum:
670,616,629.3843951324266284896206... mph
(= 936851431250/1397 mph)
This is exact because the mile is defined in terms of meters, and the meter is defined as the distance travelled by light in vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second.
You left out the ", Horatio," bit. Everyone does, though. I'd say it's one of the most misquoted lines of Shakespeare, next to "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio...". Strange how Horatio gets left out of all the quotes, isn't it?
I have nothing to allude to, and I am alluding to it.
get hit by strangelet on the head.
Now if a nuclear warhead gets hit by a strangelet, well then its the unluckiet way to die for some unlucky city, or state.
I always like how the media always ends a potentially unsettling article by saying "humans are unlikely to be harmed." I think if a human was hit by one of these they would have more than a scratch.
Herrin co-authored this Physics Review paper from 1996 about "nuclearites". aps.org
Interesting, but as a particle physicist, I think that saying that "strangelets" are the most likely explaination for what are basically small earthquakes detected in coincidence is really a stretch. This just isn't very good evidence for something so far fetched.
it wouldn't be so slim if they both arised from the same localized cause. its also relatively rare to get shot, but lots of gun shot victims end up with multiple bullets in them within a pretty short period of time....
"Strangelets were formed in the Big Bang. They are predicted to have many unusual properties, including a density about 10 trillion (10 million million) times greater than lead. Just a single pollen-sized fragment is believed to weigh several tons."
Or approx. the same density as Cowboy Neal, although I'd bet he can't move nearly as fast as these little suckers do.
I posted to
Neat stuff, I've never heard of these before. One thing I've been wondering is when the Big Bang Theory ceased to be a theory. It seems everyone just accepts it as fact now.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
No you dumbass, F != 1/2mv^2. F = ma = dp/dt, etc.
Now, kinetic energy on the other hand = 1/2mv^2
I dont have a
Couldn't these earthquakes be a result from internal shifting within the Earths core? If a small inner-earth bubble/rupture/explosion/quake/etc occured and was slightly off center then the two resulting earthquakes would be a result of this internal verifiable cause. One directly following another. Rather than a mysterious super dense non detectable string of big-bang aftermath.
As they are looking at the effect only, without other data (as far as I saw) this explination fits as well as theirs and doesn't involve unverifiable cosmic strings.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
In the San Gabriel Valley (Southern California), in the mid-1980's there was a strange sort of earthquake. I was on my back on a concrete floor (alone, dammit), and felt it fairly well. It was big enough to be reported on the news, but there was no report of an earthquake from Caltech. Curious!
So the next day I went there and talked with one of the scientists. She said that this was definitely a curious thing, but it was not a seismic event. And would not comment further.
My bad, confusing mph with mps.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Tell the military they can weaponize this. See how long it takes them to allocate the funds to restart the superconducting supercollider. Just fire a negatively charged strangelet at the chinese and watch the entire country dissapear... sure, the entire planet would be destroyed too, but that was the case with nuclear weapons, and it never stopped their deployment.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Simple mistake... mph != mps.
:)
I was going by mph == mps
Let's all have a good laugh at my expense...
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
one of these rips through a nuclear reactor?
No, I get it. Entrance and exit, 26 seconds apert.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And they use this rather sketchy data to make claims about a very extraordinary discovery... an until now completely unknown form of matter.
This isn't the first time I wish a bit more critical thought had been applied by the journalist. Or the reviewer for that matter.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
First of all, some basic particle physics:
There are 6 kinds of quarks (in increasing mass):
up, down, strage, charm, bottom (beauty), and top (truth).
The last of which was experimentally verified only recently.
All matter is made up of combinations of quarks, usually either in pairs (mesons), or trios (baryons).
For example, protons are made up of two ups and one down; neutrons are made up of one up and two downs.
Strange quarks are named such because the particles that contain them are produced fast and decay slow (ie., they have very long lifetimes), which is very odd considering that they are much more massive (heavier things tend to decay faster).
Strangelets now, are an odd beast. They usually contain more than 2 or 3 quarks, and can contain quarks other than strange quarks.
One variety (the more common one) contains a large mixture of up and some down quarks along with the strange, and has a net positive charge.
These are quite safe as they will bond with a pair of electrons and act like an unusually heavy helium isotope.
One that is mostly strange will have a net negative charge, and (I don't quite understand the process) gobble up all the positively charged atomic nuclei that it encounters.
As a side note, strangelets are supposed to only occur in conditions of high pressure and (relatively) low temperature, like inside of a neutron star.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
and
>packed a punch of several thousand tons of TNT
How "localized" is the effect? I mean, I understand you wouldn't get a huge crater or anything, but "several thousand tons of TNT" is equivalent to a tactical nuke.... It could still do a lot of damage if, say, downtown LA were to be hit (of course, the chances of that happening are...well, okay, it's probably too low to even consider).
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Open Source Shirts
If it stayed still for a while, would it engulf something? maybe make the world disappear.
Something similar was published in april in tne New York Times, the article is now archived, but here's some info.
Isn't that statistically a little improbable? Maybe a lot improbable?!
S.
F = ma
KE = 1/2 mv^2
Take out a sheet of paper and number from 1 to 10, class...
Didn't they explain that on CSI last season...next season...Jack the Ripper
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
This explains what happened to my cat :o
I find it odd that they quantify the "punch" of it: Are they talking about the absolute kinetic energy that would have to be released for it to come to a complete stop? Of course the energy transmitted is directly relational to what it hits: If it hits a big ball of pudding, obviously it wouldn't release much energy whatsoever to go through it. On a similar theme, if something like that hit a human, which would "give" very easily (perhaps bursting some cells in between), and it truly is the size of a piece of pollen [I believe about 0.1mm], then I wouldn't imagine it would do much damage whatsoever: Travelling at 900,000mph, it's not like there's much time for it to do thermal transmissions. You might lose a bit of memory if it hits your Quake3PlayingCortex, but I doubt you're going to explode, and it's not going to release the same energy as if it hit a solid Earth crust.
as they tore through Earth at up to 900,000 mph
Formed in the Big Bang and inside extremely dense stars,
Any ideas why anything moving that fast, formed in the big bang would still be important?
Unless the universe is closed, wouldn't they be further out than anything less crazy?
errmmmmmm ....
...
... more like 0.0014934289c. Barely fast enough to be considered relativistic.
186000 miles/second (the classical Michaelson-Morley speed of light) * 60 * 60 =
6.96e+08 mph
if the strangelets are moving at an average velocity of 1,000,000 mph, they are nowhere CLOSE to 0.1c
utter rubbish
This is not the kind of danger we're talking about. Why they might be dangerous is that a ton of matter going through your brain probably isn't a good thing, regardless of what does or doesn't happen when strange matter interacts with ordinary matter.
I think you'll find that one gram of them wouldn't do much more than one gram of anything.
The only difference is that one gram of strangelet would be so small, that you wouldn't know you were holding it in the first place.
grams are a measure of mass, and the gravitational force an object exerts is relative to it's mass.
Objects with a mass of 1 gram don't tend to make worlds dissapear.
Advanced users are users too!
A pollen-sized grain of anything weighing over a ton and travelling at 900,000 miles an hour would leave a crater so large that it could fit the entire quantity of bullshit pseudo-science that comes out of Southern Methodist University.
Amazing.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
"Two Seismic Evens with the Properties for the Passage of Strange Quark Matter Through the Earth"
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Put identity in the browser.
What would happen if one of those hit someone in the head?
Liberty.
As I grabbed her bottom, she got up, took off her top, gave me a strange glance, then went down on me and charmed ol' one-eye.
The team, from the Southern Methodist University in Texas, analysed more than a million earthquake reports, looking for the tell-tale signal of strangelets hitting Earth.
So they went looking through a huge pile of earthquake data just to find two seismic events that happened soon after the other and blame it on a particle that has been posited but never observed.
Numbers of earthquakes in a year
Citizen Tuttle-R,
You have been selected by, your friend, the Computer to investigate the recent delection of traitor ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h loyal citizen Nevo-U-MND by unclassified physics phonomenon.
Please report to R&D for your phamplets titled "Strangelets & *-U" and "Duck and Cover revision 6.66"
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At least your a good sport about it. =) It's an easy error to make I'm sure...let's just wait and see if more of the socially maladjusted slashdotters take offense to your apparent inferority to physics! =P
"Allez Cusine!"
"Cosmic Separation of Phases".
Imagine a hole through your head that is wide as a grain of pollen. So small, but would still do a lot of damage for sure. There might be an exit wound the size of a pin head, at the largest.
This would be fatal, as the brain would probably just seize until you are dead.
Yet another reason for your insurance company to jack up your rates.
Table-ized A.I.
Since when is a mile defined in terms of meters? You must work at NASA.
The speed of light through a vacuum is about 360,000 miles per SECOND.
900,000 mph is 250 miles per second.
Hmmmm, which is bigger 250 or 360,000?
And light is stilll the winnnner!
Anarchists never rule
I don't think so.
If you shot a bullet at a piece of cloth or paper that was held taught, it would merely put a hole in the paper, not obliterate it.
If you shot it at point-blank, the explosion from the initial firing of the shell would have more effect on the paper than damage caused by the shell itself.
If such a strangelet shot through matter, it would probably do two things (both, not one or the other)...
1. It would create a tiny pin-sized hole in what it was passing through (as the only way matter can go through other matter is to push said other matter out of its way).
It's not like the particle would mushrooom like a hollowpoint round, think of it more as an AP round (DUC maybe?).
If a person gets shot with a depleted uranium shell (at a far enough range with a high velocity) It will merely pass through said person, whereas a hollowpoint (because of the mushrooming) would either leave a big exit wound or bounce around for a little while turn said person's guts into pudding... (no, don't say blood pudding... that's just a bad pun)...
2. A lot of the matter it passes through would be converted to some other form of matter, as the strangelet particle loses/gains other quarks from the surrounding matter it passes through. If effect, passing through something like a planet would probably take half its mass and at least some of its velocity as the energy is expended.
Sure, we'd be using gigameters to measure stuff, and time would need to be completely resorted, but I'm sure it would work out well in the end...
One of my favorite authors likes to measure time in seconds. (He writes far-future science fiction.) His most recent book includes a cheat-sheet in the front mapping traditional units of time (hours, years, whatnot) to seconds. If I remember right, one kilosecond is about fifteen minutes, and one megasecond is just over 10 days. One year is a little more than 30 megaseconds.
I'll stick with days, weeks, and months, if you please.
I wonder what kind of neat science tricks one can do with managable amounts of extreme density matter. The strangelets are one example, the problem of interacting with them has more to do with their speed than with their mass. If we could find a way to slow one down it could be very interesting to study. Perhaps we could magnetically contain it to prevent contamination with "regular" matter. The interesting thing would be to study the interaction of time and gravity. We have lots of things in the world which weigh many tens, hundreds or thousands of tons, however becauseof their more normal density we can not get close enough to the center of their mass to really study localized gravitational effects. With extreme density matter, we should be able to measure intersting things getting much closer to the center of gravity of a significant mass. Matter of this type might make an interesting component of a ground based anti-balistic missile system. The bullet would be microscopically small, but would have incredible mass and could hold significant kinetic energy, suitable for the destruction of a warhead. The energy source for the prime mover could be any typical huge ground based power plant. Because of the microscopic size of the projectile, air resistance would be insignificant relative to the kinetic energy.
Zoot
enough is too much
the article said the impact had the force of several tons of tnt. Small pinhole or goodluck finding any of you?
Liberty.
Only the "gun" uranium fission design works like that, and they are the simplest, most primitive form of nuclear weapon. None of the known nuclear powers uses these any more (the Hiroshima bomb worked like this, but not Nagasaki, and the only other use since was allegedly in South Africa's covert nuclear program because all they were interested in was a proof-of-concept). Implosion designs (the basis for later fission weapons and fusion-boosted designs) rely on multiple chunks of uranium and plutonium to be forced together by precisely-shaped bits of chemical explosive into a superdense, supercritical mass. If they don't go off in precisely the designed pattern, they don't explode.
Therefore, I'd expect the bomb to be turned into molten slag rather than explode.
IANA Nuclear Physicist, so I could be horribly wrong :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Sorry to burst your bubble but it is. You could of course just consider it pegged to the speed of light but not as cleanly as the metre.
its an interesting question.
It depends how much energy those things will release inside your body. That basicly depends how much you slow it down.
If you slow it down even a litlle bit ud probably evaporate right then and there.
But maybe beceuse it is so damn small and fast and humans are nice and soft, it will just cut trough you without changing its speed at all and then you may get lucky. (of course you wil have to worry about the seismic event when it hits the ground).
As a way of comparison imagine cutting a tomato with a fast swing of a supper sharp japanese sword - the tomato wont be damaged much (aside from being cut in half) now if you try that with a dull knofe you will have one bruised up tomato.
But this is a very interesting question and i dont think the answer is trivial.
i thought it was a mosquito bite.
four-oh-four
Huzzah - Go Light!
Uh, a mile is 5,280 feet. 1 Mile == 1,609.2655 meters, hardly a "defined in terms of", much more a later conversion.
How did they know at what angle the stranglets hit the earth at?
Ripping through the earth at what angle makes a large difference. Imagine 2 stranglets hit NY NY at the same time. One is comming from a north west direction and the other is comming from south east. The one comming from north west will exit the earth thousands of miles from where the south east one will...
This tells me that the scietists just looked for any seismic activity that resembled the first (entry) hit. Seismic measurment tools are not all that precise, especially equipment 10 years ago (I had a 486 10 years ago just to give you an idea) and the fact that they are looking for the impact of a particle that is 1/10 of a hair in size. There "proof" relys on the fact that in the past ten years there were two seismic activitys on different parts of the planet that were similar to eachother. Not much proof if you ask me....
Funnily enough, living in a country that's totally metric (Australia), I don't need keep up to date with recent kludges applied to an outdated measurement system. Anyway, you can convert any distance measurement to any other distance measurement but it still doesn't mean that one is defined in terms of the other.
Well, I'm hardly an expert, but off hand I'd say it's worth seriously asking whether you would even notice?
Obviously these carry huge kinetic energies and it would only take only a small percentage of that energy to totally fry a human being. The real question is how much of the energy can a human actually absorb?
These things have enormous amounts of momentum, and keep in mind that the whole EARTH isn't enough to stop one of these. How much could the soft tissues or even the bones of a human really do to stop one? Passing through at 900,000 mph, these would certainly leave a pollen grain sized hole straight through your body, but how much does it disrupt the surrounding tissues?
I have been told (though perhaps someone can verify this?) that exit wounds decrease in size as a) bullet size decreases, b) velocity increases, c) less tissue is disrupted along the bullet path. In fact, IIRC exit wounds are larger primarily because of fragementation of the bullet and fragments of bones that get carried out with it. Entry wounds of course just reflect the cross-section of the bullet.
So a very tiny, very massive, and very fast projectile might well have an exit wound of similar size to the entry wound. In which case the soft tissues of the body might just fill in and you'd never actually know that a pollen grain hole had been made through your body.
Strangelets in the night....
</Sinatra>
It's OK, I was just leaving anyway.
Anyone with the density handy want to cobble up the Schwarzchild radius of one of these puppies and see if it fits inside?
In case you need it,
r = 2 G m/c^2.
c = 2.998e+08 m/s
G = 6.672e-11 N m^2/kg^2
--Blair
What?? _Poland_ sized strangelets travelling at 900,000 miles per hour hit the earth... ??
oh, wait... that's "pollen sized"... whew.
You might want to check your math yourself.
If it left some matter behind, wouldn't that matter expand once it turned "normal"? And wouldn't said "materialization" of 500kg of ordinary matter in a tiny spot actually cause more damage as the passage itself?
Say no to software patents.
In fact, IIRC exit wounds are larger primarily because of fragementation of the bullet and fragments of bones that get carried out with it. Entry wounds of course just reflect the cross-section of the bullet.
:) I would worry about compression shock though, which would result in having a lot of bones break and lungs collapse and what not. Very mysterious death, I would say.
I'm sure you have heard the expression "Hollow Point" in regards to ammunition rounds. The way that most ammo works is it mushrooms as it makes contact. Having a hollow point round means it mushrooms larger, and you also have rifling (which causes the bullet to spin) in some cases. This is the primary factor in exit wound sizes. The amount of tissue damage that is done is directly associated with the compression (force of the bullet, hydrostatic shock is what it is called, IIRC) of the bullet moving through, and the current size of the round (remember, after it makes contact it expands.)
Most bullets do not fragment, unless they are designed to do so. I knew someone who had rifle rounds that had tips that were designed to break into eighths after contact with a hollow point center. The reason why I wouldn't worry about a pollen-size object travelling 900Kmph is because it's entrance and exit wounds would be nearly identical, because it's A) Going very fast, B) Very dense and C) theoretical
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
your sig makes me laugh every time i see it... whats it from?
IIRC, c is the speed of light as it travels in a vacuum. It's slower when passing through the atmosphere or water. So can we assume that if strangelets pass through the crust, core and mantle of the earth at 900,000 mph, they probably travelled even faster before reaching Earth?
Not quite sure, but from reading that it looked like they looked for earthquakes on exact opposite sides of the earth. If they just looked for earthquakes within a few seconds of each other, they would find hundreds, most likely.
Wait a second. Who says the stragelet has to hit Earth at a 90 degree angle?
Although I bet it would look VERY cool if it just skimed the surface of some city.... suddenly theres holes in the walls and a trail in the air, a few random people fall down.. would be very good for hollywood...
Einstein was not a handsome fellow
Nobody ever called him Al
He had a long moustache to pull on, it was yellow
I don't believe he ever had a girl
One thing he missed out in his theory
Of time and space and relativity
Is something that makes it very clear;
He was never gonna score like you and me
He didn't know about
Quark, Strangeness and Charm
Quark, Strangeness and Charm
Quark, Strangeness and Charm
I had a dangerous liaison
To have been found out would've been a disgrace
We had to rendezvous some days on
the corner of an undiscovered place
We got sick of chat chat chatter
And the look upon everybody's face
But all that doesn't anti-matter now
We've found ourselves a black hole out in space
And we're talking about
Quark, Strangeness and Charm
Quark, Strangeness and Charm
Quark, Strangeness and Charm
Copernicus had those Renaissance ladies
Crazy about his telescope
And Galileo had a name that made his
Reputation higher than his hopes
Did none of those astronomers discover
While they were staring out into the dark
That what a lady looks for in her lover
Is Charm, Strangeness and Quark
And we're talking about
Quark, Strangeness and Charm
Quark, Strangeness and Charm
Quark, Strangeness and Charm
"You're just scared like a little white pussy. I'll fuck you till you love me, you faggot!"
AFAIK it's closer to 186,000 miles/per sec.
:).
Unless the physical "constant" has changed recently
Hmmmm, maybe this explains spontaneous human combustion? I don't believe that people can spontaneously combust, perhaps they are just being hit by these strangelets...???
Talk about an excedrin headache
Also, if the only evidence is two earthquakes separated by a few seconds, wouldn't we expect some of those merely by chance? What additional evidence is there for strangelets?
This is probably true. As your body doesnt offer much of a resistance it probably will be qute unaffected. Unless it pass directly throuh your brain or spine and manages to cut off some small but important neural pathway, that is.
But then agan, when the little bugger impacts with the ground a fraction on a spilt second later, which absorbs a helluva lot more energy than you, it will probably wreck some minor havoc. The quakes and craters that these things supposedly have caused were not major, but you would actually be in the very epicenter of it. And I sure wouldnt recommend that...
...um...like...a sig...
So are you saying that throwing bullets cause more damage than using a gun?!Wow, hey Israel and Iraq, start chucking bullets at each other instead now!
I wonder what is special about 900k mph -- that's 1/745 the speed of light.
It looks to me like they looked for earthquakes spaced apart at that distance-time proportion, and then concluded that such earthquakes were caused by the strangelets. Unless I am mistaken, that implies that our earth would be moving at 1/745 through whatever field caused the strangelets to form.
Now, I could see the case made for looking at particles travelling at a significant sizeable fraction of the speed of light, but this is nowhere close to that. Why, then, 900kmph? Does it have to do with their mass and stability, and if so, why do they assume that 900kmph particles will necessarily be a strangelets as opposed to a different kind of particle?
This science doesn't look well-explained -- or if well explained, doesn't look valid.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Unfortunately the world hasn't been flat for quite some time and neither are most humans. Your calculations are correct for strangelets hitting the earth at a perpendicular angle.
However, chances of getting hit are much higher if you take into account strangelets hitting the earth from all other angles, like the ones just missing the earth's surfice and hitting you in the head.
You will just be in your garden, minding your own business, when WHAM!, you get hit from behind by one of those sneeky strangelets. They are evil, I tell you, evil!
(You may now panic.)
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
Use "quoted search string" to get an exact match.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Oooh, I'm sure the authors of the scientific paper had a tough bunch of high-energy-particle physicists at The Sunday Telegraph reviewing their submitted paper :-)
I mean, it's nice to see something having to do with physics make the Sunday Paper (at least I'm not listening to the Joe Jackson song that disparages that media) but shouldn't we have slightly higher standards for something to make the Slashdot front page?
slower when passing through the atmosphere or water.
Light slows down when passing through matter.
So can we assume...strangelets...travelled even faster before reaching Earth?
No. Matter doen dot slow down when passing through matter. A particle can actually go faster through matter than light can. It is exceding the reduced speed of the light, which is not a violation of exceding the normal speed of light.
When a particle does this it generates a light cone, like the sonic boom a supersonic jet makes. (Hmmm, a photonic boom?) This is called Cherenkov radiation.
The strange matter in the article is going fast, but still far short of the speed of light, so I doubt the issue actually comes up.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
arg, didn't notice my typo:
Matter does not slow down when passing through matter.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
you'd never actually know that a pollen grain hole had been made through your body.
:)
:)
While I agree the damge would be quite loalized, I'm sure you'd notice it
You'd certainly hear it throught the air, and I can't imagine not feeling something from the internal shockwave.
My advice is to avoid Antartica. These are strange particles, and that seems to be the only place they hit the Earth
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Considering that a strangelet passes through thousands of kilometers of stone, without significantly slowing down implies that the interaction of strangelets with "ordinary matter" is close to nil. I think that being hit by a strangelet will be more like being hit by a bunch of neutrons; most of them pass through your body without doing any damage. Atoms are mostly empty space.
A mile is therefore also 1760 yards, which is easy to remember because there are 1760 sectors on an Amiga OFS floppy.
Good point. In fact, you can get hit from strangelets from *any* angle, even from strangelets coming through the Earth and striking you at your feet. Ouch. The odds are still quite small, though.
I think I would notice something like that.
Xaotik Designs
The problem with your estimate of the damage caused by a strangelet to a human being is that it is based on theories that only apply to projectiles made of normal matter. Strangelets are both extremely dense, and charged. To a strangelet, a human being would present a target as insubstantial as the foam in you bathtub is to you. However, any charged particles (electrons or protons) orbiting the strangelet would be stripped off, which would result in a huge potential difference between the strangelet and most of your body. In other words, you'll get electrocuted, and your body will be ripped apart by the rapidly changing electric and magnetic fields.
This reminds me of an old Wired article that talked about the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. In the article they discuss some of the possible "down sides" to the experiments... "In theory, RHIC could trigger the runaway formation of a poorly understood breed of subatomic particle known as a strangelet, which 'eats' all matter it encounters, a chain reaction that would consume everything everywhere."
Then comes what I think is one of the funniest quotes of all time. "MIT physicist Bob Jaffe says that the chances of RHIC-induced Armageddon are 'exceedingly rare' bordering on nil, but as he admits, 'you never know.'"
That's comforting Bob. Glad to see that we aren't all about to be eaten by runaway particles, but hey... you never know.
"Chances of RHIC-induced Armageddon are exceedingly rare, but... you never know." - MIT Physicist Bob Jaffe
... you tell us all this neat stuff and then don't mention his name?!
for those not in the know: Vernor Vinge. Most famous for his essay on the Singularity.
google: +vernor +vinge +singularity
nalfy
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --
and his extremely strange, hole-ridden theory that piracy is a huge problems but the CPDTPA will not harm a living soul.
Ad luna, Alicia! Ad luna!
Of course, that's in a vacuum. It propagates slower in a medium (which is why you have refractive effects at surface bounderies, and optical lenses work).
You could've hired me.
Sounds like somebody is running out of grant money.
I'm all for supporting pure science, in all its many forms, but this story just whispers to me: "desperate attempt for funding" ;)
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
From www.whatreallyhappened.com:
"...the 7th paragraph reveals why scientists connected to religious institutions are often not very scientific. The scientists looked for Strangelets that produced two signals as they pass through the Earth, "one as they entered Earth and the other as it left." But this only works if the Earth is hollow. Any dense object passing through the Earth is going to produce a single continuous signal from entry to exit."
"Ananova" is a "news of the weird" site, not a science site. The "Telegraph" is also attempting to sensationalize the story. However, the story at "Ananova" is essentially the same story that I read a few days ago. I don't remember the source of the story I read--probably the "Dallas Morning News"--and I can't find any links to the story on the Web. However, here is a brief blurb about the researcher at SMU:
h tm
"Teplitz"
"over the past three years has collaborated with Olness, Rosenbaum, Scalise, Stroynowski, Vega, two graduate students, and an undergraduate student, within the Department, and, outside the Department, with workers from SMU geology, JPL, William and Mary, Virginia Tech, the University of Texas, MSU, Maryland, Tel Aviv, Southwest Research Institute, and Oklahoma. His work, in this period, falls in three categories: exotic matter (6 papers); other particle physics (4 papers); and solar system physics (2 papers). Recent work of note includes: explaining the MACHO events with mirror matter; detailing possible searches for SIMPs - new neutral, stable, strongly interacting massive particles (on the basis of which an accelerator mass spectrometry experiment is underway at Purdue); searching for seismic evidence of ton-sized nuggets (about the dimensions of a red blood cell) of strange quark matter passing through the Earth; and computing finite density corrections to energy loss into Kaluza-Klein modes in astrophysical plasmas."
http://www.physics.smu.edu/~web/research/index.
It is odd that Google can't find half these articles (that Altavista can), and Altavista can't find the other half (that Google can). I'm a bit surprised and not very happy that a major news story that I saw in print is not showing in either search engine.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
You're absolutely right. Thanks. My only defense: it was far, far too late to be posting on Slashdot.
File that one under "guess what I'm thinking."
Spontaneous human combustion
Seriously, couldn't this actually be the explanation?
Amazing magic tricks
In my laboratory where I experiment with all kinds of materials, and usually came up with something.. umm... interesting (read: my kitchen), I have found that when made of eggs past their "Best Before" date, Omelets pass through my body very quickly. It doesnt take long after I have put it to my mouth, before the stuff wants to come out from the opposite side of my body.
But I'm calling BS on this. Just seems a little way out there. Anyone else find any articles like this elsewhere?
Perhaps this is a cause for the "spontaneous human combustion" phenomenon? It would leave no evidence as to what started the fire and would certainly appear quite spontaneously.
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
Generously assuming a 10-ton strangelet moving at 900,000 MPH, that strangelet has a kinetic energy of approximately 1.75 x 10^14 Joules, roughly equivalent to 25,000 tons of TNT.
The story goes on to state that the entry impact released "several thousand tons of TNT" worth of energy. Let's be conservative here, and say that surface conversion was 3,000 tons of TNT. in the top 50 miles of the earth's crust.
The strangelet would never have exited the earth, having expelled all it's energy on the interior!
Unless I'm overlooking something pretty significant, either those strangelets must be moving at a bit faster clip, or must be quite a bit more massive to cause the sited effects.
Now.. concidering these things are small. My question is how much of an effect would this have? You don't feel radiation hitting you... So for the earth a partical of this mass but so small and traveling so fast should have minimal effect. So how strong where these earth quakes?
Also such a massive partical wouldn't it cause a great deal of gravitational effect? Should those grav wave detectors have been more useful to detect such things?
Nevertheless, current international standards define all the imperial units in terms of metric ones, so a mile is, by definition 1.609 2655 metres (or whatever it is). There is no standard mile, foot, inch or yard any more. The metre is defined by reference to the wavelength of a specific type of light amd the second by reference to the speed of light and the metre.
I think this post points to the need for a new set of moderation comments.
I mean, folks are whipping out statistics, back of the envelope calculations, and all kinds of wacky definitions -- I don't think any one person would be able to go through and verify all the claims made by posters, expert or not.
I propose "Yeah, I'll Buy That," "Sounds Good to Me," or "I Think I Read That Once Too." Whether they're +1 or -1, I leave up to other folks...
GMFTatsujin
Perhaps... unless one of these things hits you in the head... methinks you'd have at least a walloping headache (at the minimum). I'm partial to my head, so I don't think I want one of these things hitting me.
you can convert any distance measurement to any other distance measurement but it still doesn't mean that one is defined in terms of the other
but in this case, the inch is, in fact, officially defined in terms of centimeters. i don't know when that happened, but it was years ago.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- A.E.
A whole new class of excuses for bad driving is born:
- You Honor, i didn't willingly pass the red-light, a stranglet hit my car and pushed it through. I'm sure the microscopic size hole can be found.
According to Prof Herrin, the two events agree with predictions for strangelet impacts, which are expected to occur about once a year. He added, however, that finding more would be difficult, as seismic databases now automatically remove all signals not linked to earthquakes. He said: "To find more events we need to get at the data before that happens."
In other words, various governmental sources have gotten tired of seismologists finding underground nuclear testing and told them to quit revealing the secrets. And they did.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Except when they hit a Slashdot moderator. Now we have a explanation for some of the crazy moderation around here. ;)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Another reason not to worry: we exist. Had lots of these things been hitting the earth, killing of bits of life or civilizations here and there over the eons, we wouldn't be here.
Give serendipity a chance.
Now if any instances of SHC were always at the time of an earthquake, you would have something!
If light did travel around the earth 7 times in a second would it go back in time (Star Trek) or would we go back in time (Superman) ?
graspee
Yeah, that might explain those mysterious earthquakes that alway coincide with SHC cases!
well, it could be that the hsg cases occurred from strangelets that passed within a few feet of the earth and hit a human but not the earth... good point though.
Amazing magic tricks
spontaneous combustion?
Thoughts for the weird...
Imagine one of these particles crashing into a human and the force that it would have. Ka-blooey there goes Fido on fire.
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
Biggest mystery that is ever documented in all four-corner of this earth, is the spontaneous human combustion. Next would be Tesla's coil and the urgent bowel movements.
Some of you may recall eerie pair of boots with charred stumps of the legs stick out. Of the ones I've seen photos of are: in front of the toilet in Appalachian Mtn, at the base of the maple tree (somewhere in Europe), and oddly, Ural mountain camping retreat by the gate entrance.
this particle would explain LOTS if they actually perform quantum-level micro-thermonuclear chain reaction explosion around celluar clusters.
Because they are much more common and my turn your DNA into cancer. When you close your eyes and see random flashes of light - some of those are cosmic rays and some are just misfirings of nerve cells.
Probably not... but they could very well explain the mystery of spontaneous human explosion.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
And a foot is defined as 12 inches, and an inch is defined as 0.0254 metres. :-)
Incidentally, this gives a mile as being 1,609.344 metres, but I think we can put that 7.85cm down to rounding errors
As mentioned in the Telegraph article: "Strangelets - sometimes also called strange-quark nuggets - are predicted to have many unusual properties, including a density about ten million million times greater than lead. Just a single pollen-size fragment is believed to weigh several tons." If the density of lead is: 11340 kg/m3 The mass of a spoonful of these strangelets would be (let's say the volume is 0.001m3) the density of the material times the volume. Let's also suppose this small quantity of strangelets is half a meter away from you. Using the formula for force of gravity by newton (F=G*m1*m2/r), the force exerted on me would be F=(6.672 x 10-11 * (70) * (11340 * 10,000,000 * 1,000,000 * 0.001) / (.5) = 1, 059, 246.720 Newtons Like someone putting 108, 086.4 KG over you. Its 119 tonf US. That's the problem, what would happen to you if it stayed still? You don't even have to hold it, but when you hold it, the distance between you and the strangelets tends to be zero, so the force exerted on you tends to infinity.
to dig a hole to china... To those who thought it was silly when bugs bunny tried... who's laughing now???
I was showing a friend how to turn the fan backwards and reverse the airflow in his power supply.
Liberty.
It would make an awesome Movie... "The Strangelets", by say, Stephen King :)
Nevrar
CowboyNeal!
--Mike--
ok, so they've supposedly recorded two of these "events" within a 10-year period. So, over the entire lifetime of the earth, we're talking about hundreds of millions of these events. So tell me. In the entire history of geology, has any geologist ever dug up a rock that had a tiny unexplained hole punched through it? I thought not.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
There's no need for the "+" in your Google search. Google always returns results with all of the terms (except for "simple words")
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
Thing is, its not like a building. In a building, the mass is distributed all over the building (you can calculate the centroid, but it is much father away than this stuff). I was talking a physics teacher at school, when he saw this he said there's nothing we have right now to contain this stuff.
Am I the only person who saw that and instantly relished the thought of having a handheld weapon that uses strangelets as its projectiles? After the awful thought of "that must be painful!", of course.
Dibs on placing my bet that this will be the next popular weapon in a FPS or Descent clone.
"What this world needs is a five dollar strangelet weapon!" -
Nathan's blog
No. Geez, doesn't anyone watch "South Park" anymore? It was explained quite clearly that the cause of spontaneous combustion was holding farts in.
Nathan's blog
Speed of light is miles per second, 186,000
I did not see any "believed" Earthquakes with 26 and 19 second differences (respectively) listed on either day at the National Earthquake Information Center. I'm sure it's possible they weren't recorded by NEIC, although I suspect it would/should be. From reading the Professor's web page, it appears the data would have been taken from the source above, yet I didn't see it there. (Who know's, maybe I just missed it)
The story still seems suspect to me although Dr. Eugene Harris does appear to be focused on exactly this type of research.
I think more details are necessary to please the /. crowd.
Snowdog
All of those "earthquakes" probably coincide with the time of the aerobics class at the nearest Fat Farm.
[ ]
Also of interest may be the "Oh My God Particle" from 1991. The research on this seems to be quite extensive, and pretty damn funny too.
Check it out at:
Oh My God Particle
Snowdog
They claim that this is not dangerous to humans. But, it's enough impact to be the equivalent "of several thousand tons of TNT." So, what are the chances that this is the real explanation for spontaneous combustion?
----------
perl -e 'print(pack("H*","646176652e7761676e657240676d616
Yet we never see a case where an SHC event is accompanied by mysterious dammage to nearby buildings. Hmm... I think I'll still go with the "wicking" explanation.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Scientists at the SNO facililty have reported that their detector has sprung a leak!
Keep in mind that the planet earth has an awful lot holding it in place, while us fragile humans don't suffer that same benefit. Therfore when a stranglet hits a person it's not like hitting a tightly held sheet of paper. However, we're mostly water, and to a strangelet we're interchangable for water in terms of how easily it can pass through us. Unlike water though we can't just fill in the hole it bores through us, and bone might be sufficently dense enough to cause an exchange of energy.
I'm thinking that a stranglet would transfer enough force to shatter any bone it passed through, as well as make a microscopic hole through any organs it passes through.
Based on this article I'd say it's safe to assume that any damage caused by a strangelet would entirely depend on how much force it could transfer into the body while making any holes, especially while hitting any bones. Since obviously the two recorded strangelets transfered a sizemic force the size of several thousand tons of TNT. If that much force was transfered into a human all at once the only image that comes to mind is that of a paintball grenade exploding.
Hopefully though since the earth's crust is miles thicker and much more dense than a human that the amount of force applied at any given moment would only be slightly more than the amount needed to make a hole.
BTW, does anyone else here wonder if the person who named this was chewing a pack of chicklets when trying to think up a name?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
If you look at high-speed photographs of rifle bullets passing through ballistic geletan, you'll see that fragmentation, mushrooming aside, high projectile velocities can still wreak serious damage on tissue through propagation of shock waves. A bullet only .30 inches in diameter fired from a rifle at close range can rupture arteries and connective tissue in a 6" diameter path.
If you've ever seen the Zapruder footage, you know what I'm talking about.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The article seems to indicate that strangelets passing through the earth would be barely slowed down at all, so they would exit the other side and continue on their way. What size mass would a planet/star have to be in order to capture a strangelet in its gravitational field, and what would be the consequences?
Obviously, if scientists were to create and contain a strangelet in a lab, it would be bound by Earth's gravitational field. What if one got loose, and fell through the planet, without the energy to exit out the other side? Do these things decay, or would it continue gobbling up material? Scary stuff...
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Also, these events intersected the volume of the Earth. Neither surface area nor cross section. As we don't care much about damage done inside the Earth we are not particularly concerned with the chance of a certain cubic centimeter being hit (such as the exact center). So the chance of the entire surface area of the Earth being hit, at any angle, is a reasonable approximation.
We also don't particularly care about the damage done inside a person, as any impact can be considered significant, so use the surface area of a person and calculate the ratio between impacts per Earth surface area to impacts per person surface area.
As surface area increases fractally with decreasing scale of measurement, the surface area of a circle and the surface area of a cylinder are suitable.
Do not cover the Earth with the additional volume of a person and try to calculate based on that, unless you really care about the chance of either you or the Earth being hit.
Now go back the the back of your envelope and continue the exercise.
Seismographs can detect the shock of broken rock, and can detect the echoes of that shock bouncing off underground formations. But they aren't designed to hear the cone-shaped shock wave produced by something moving through molten rock at supersonic speeds. Much as a microphone above a stage can clearly hear an arrow hitting the stage floor, but has difficulty hearing the arrow flying through the air...unless it happens to be near the microphone.
I anticipate that scientists who get interested in such events will design different instruments to detect the passage shock. I wonder if those will also hear any of the mantle convection currents.
"Ananova are reporting that ultra-dense, pollen sized strangelets (aka nuggets of strange quarks) travelling at 900,000 miles per hour hit the earth, violently pass through it and have done on at least two occasions already."
Damn, now I feel crappy about yelling at my wife about the cracked windshield...
I wouldn't be too worried about being hit in the feet from below. A multi-flavoured quark enema would be more troubling to envisage.
Maybe you didn't mean gram, but meant a small volume.
Who are you? Hercules?
Even if you could support the weight, your skin wouldn't be able to handle it, it would rip right through your hand and you would have a stupid look on your face. "Hmmm, Bugger"
Firstly, the velocity of a projectile travelling through a body or object would be determined by the density, weight, shape and size of the object,in relation to the aerodynamic influences that impede or digress it's direction (i.e., slow it down/deflect it's path of travel). If the stranglete has truly travelled across time and space from the big bang, then that means that an incalculatable amount of influences have interacted with the 'object' since it's journey of 13 (odd) billion years to Earth. However, after all this time, it would still be somewhat influenced by the Earth's gravitational effect and that of the 'hard' particles that surround us. The density of the human body will matter little in the scheme of things if struck by an object travelling at 900,000mph. I would expect the person would not even get a chance to ponder the impact on their life. They are likely to not notice at first. The body would hardly register the particle passing through the body. But the heat from the object may very well vaporize the body immediately post-impact. So, entry and exit wounds and possibly path of travel passage through the body would be relative to the size of the strange quark nugget. They could be apparent (i.e. you could look through the entry hole, through the body along the path of travel and out the exit hole) for about a second before the heat energy has any effect (vaporization begins). I hope that this long-winded response sheds light on this interesting subject!
Previous poster:6 &cid=3509 320
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3250
Basically the other poster said that any body being hit would be electrocuted and then ripped apart by magnetic and electrical forces.
Sounds fun, I want one.
I'm pretty sure one of these ate my homework in 1976 and I failed Russian history because of it.
Another great mystery of the universe is now cleared up and the dog is absolved of all wrongdoing.
Need Mercedes parts ?
It all depends on the cross section of the said strangelet. If, it is the size of a quark, it will probably just pass through your body without touching anything!
The reason is of course, that an atom is 99% ( maybe more) empty space. All the mass(okay, most) is concentrated at neucleus, and so the possibility of a strangelet just passing through would be very high.
However, if a collison did occur,it would just push the colliding atom out of way and continue on its path. Not much will happen.
So my thinking is, nobody needs to bother about strangelets hitting them.
That said, I feel that todays particle physics has too many particles, and that is sign that something is wrong with our theories. Of course, this has no basis at all.
When in doubt, use brute force. -- Ken Thompson
are given their momentum, if not in fact created, in some major stellar process like a neutron star explosion or maybe even the Big Bang.
What sort of things would you look for to try to find a source of such objects? How would they radiate or change fields through which they pass?
What would a strangelet storm (tm) look like? Perhaps a wave of them would look like a gravitational field moving at relativistic speed?
What about looking in the neighborhood of our own
solar system for strangelets passing through perpendicular to the ecliptic? You might think they would interact with the Sun's surface and atmosphere, and create effects in high resolution images.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2F news%2F2001%2F09%2F07%2Fnba07.xml
Oops. Now that the link to the entire paper has been found, I see that it was indeed the supersonic shock wave which was used for detection. My seismographic tech knowledge is out of date.
I believe in the US, the mile is defined in terms of feet (1 mile = 5280 feet), feet defined in terms of inches (1 foot = 12 inches), inches in terms of centimeters (1 inch = 2.54 cm exactly), centimeters in terms of meters, and the meter is defined (since the early 80's, I believe) in terms of the second and the speed of light. The second is defined in terms of the frequency of hyperfine transitions of cesium-80, if I remember correctly.
My answer is a resounding "sort of." I first note that this article cites no scientific publication or conference presentation as its source, only the Sunday Telegraph. By contrast, the Related Story "Cosmic laws may need revising, claim astrophysicists" refers to a Phys Rev Letters article published last year. So it is impossible (or at least hard) to check up on this story. On the other hand, strangelets are a respectable, is speculative, concept in Quantum Chromodynamics.
While the basic equations of QCD are pretty well established, it is an exceedingly difficult theory from which to do low-energy calculations, such as for bound states of quarks (baryons or mesons). For example, no one has been able to caclulate why the neutron is heavier than the proton, or why their mass is what it is. Nonethless, some QCD models claim that quark matter containing roughly equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks may be meta-stable or even stable, or even may represent the "true ground state" of strongly interacting particles. Such strange quark matter (SQM) could exist on a large scale (some have suggested that neutron stars may actually be SQM stars) or in small "strangelets." Atlthough such calculations are hardly robust, this motivates people to look for such "stranglets," either in accelerator experiments, in cosmic rays, or in astophysical observations.
With a little searching I found a couple of review articles that address this question (together with other related ones), which I attach. The first is one written by several highly respected physicists (both experimenter and theorists) to address concerns that the high energy nuclear collisions at RHIC might somehow produce states of matter or of the vacuum that would destroy the earth or the universe. Production of strangelets of a particular type are among the scenarios they address. The second is a review from some conference that directly addresses astrophysical implications of the existence of strange quark matter, and what bounds we can put on the existence of SQM based on observations (section 6). Here they note in passing that earthquakes might be used as a signature for stranglets.
Thus it is plausible that a group at SMU has, indeed, examined earthquake records to look for evidence of strangelets hitting the earth. Without seeing their paper I cannot judge whether this is believed by them to be a "positive" result or merely a "non-negative" one. Experience shows that in searches like this, and in cosmic ray experiments in general, there have been many observtions of new phenomena that later turned out to be very real and important, but also at least as many sightings that turn out not to be real. I wouldn't conclude that strange quark matter has been observed based on this article, but this is not obviously crack-pot nonsense either.
******
Here are the articles he cites: one, two.
When you think about matter being dense enough to have a teaspoon full weigh
thousands of tons, you realize how 'empty' normal matter is at the subatomic
level -- there's a lot of empty space between the protons, neutrons and electrons
in our body.
So, my theory is that while it would happen fast, it would be no more destructive
than slowly pushing a long, very thin needle through your body. You might feel it, but
the surrounding tissue would close up pretty quickly.
Think of a high pressure water jet cutting a steel plate -- the adjacent material
isn't disrupted much.
And, because your body and the rest of the 'normal' matter that makes up the
earth is so porous/light/empty there really wouldn't be enough to absorb much
energy/create much heat from this tiny thing passing through your body.
So, have a Molson and blame your headache on that damn nugget that just zipped
through your head.
Although as I was thinking about it last night, if one of those 'nuggets'
passing through the earth is disruptive enough to be measured on seismographic
equipment, perhaps it would be a bit more disruptive to the human body than
I first thought.
We need a physicist to explain the gravitational and nuclear effects of
something that dense instantaneously passing through 'normal' matter.