Slashdot Mirror
Quark Matter Blamed for Paired 1993 Seismic Events
Ethanon writes "In an article posted by BBC, scientists have suggested that two "unassociated" seismic events that occurred in 1993 were actually strange Quark matter passing through the Earth at a speed of perhaps 250 miles per second. A spec of strange Quark matter the size of a human cell is said to be so dense that it could weigh a tonne! Check it out
"
I thought that if a trio of strange quarks hit any other matter it would convert it into the same?
Who knew Ferengi were so dense?
2000 lbs ?
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I'm almost sure there was an article that talked about this same thing about a year ago. There was one hit in 1993 and... again in 1996???
I think this was posted before.
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
Ouch.
scientists have found that multi-posts of stories on slashdot are due to a quirk matter that passes through the slashdot queue at the high speed of 100 submissions/day.
The Strangelet Article from last May on the same issue.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I have seen fat guys whose cells easliy weigh a ton each.
Getting hit by that random particle. What would it do to you? That's a lot of momentum.
The graphic at the top says that the Oct 22, 1993 particle entered at 09:55:47 and left at 09:56:14. That's 27 seconds.
The article says, "One event occurred on 22 October, 1993, when, according to the researchers, something entered the Earth off Antarctica and left it south of India 0.73 of a second later."
Which is it?
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
>> They searched the world's seismographic records for so-called "unassociated events". They looked at more than a million records collected by the US Geological Survey between 1990 to 1993
Generally when you go looking through enough data, expecting to find something, you do.
An alternate theory, perhaps. Some drunken teenagers kicked the seismographs?
Not that this is something that really matters to anyone, alive or dead, either way.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Oprah.
In other words, the government has finally gotten tired of pesky seismologists discovering their underground nuclear tests and ordered them to quit revealing their secrets.
Hence, this particular chunk of pseudoscience.
--
The is a test, I wonder if I will get away with it?
How could they possibly not have enough evidence to prove their case? Every Monday and Thursday nights the boys and girls of CSI* have done so much more, with much less.
"Hmmm, this is either the remnants of a Bavarian Dung Beetle, or we've had an encounter with the heretofor theoretical quark matter. Quick, back to the lab!"
If this article confuses you, don't worry. It was posted yesterday in a much clearer fashion.
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.
Unfortunately, the seismography data that is not associated with earthquakes stopped being collected by the USGS (or at least, is not archived) since 1993.
:)
I suspect that funding an archive for this data would be far less expensive than the huge particle physics machines that are searching for similar matter
Not to mention - it might just be worth calculating the orbital path of the particles that were (or might be) detected, just to make sure that they aren't coming back. Given the energy they apparently release, this could even be an alternate explanation for the Tunguska explosion in Siberia. (Other than exploding meteorites that don't leave a crater, and a misfire of Tesla's Death Ray.)
Liquor
Sanity is a highly overrated commodity.
Will lining it with tinfoil help?
I called the BBC and they were no help at all.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Anyone have any idea what kind of damage would be caused at the surface of the Earth by something like this? Seems to me that it would be significant, peculiar, and unique.
And in that case, shouldn't they visit the entry and exit points to see if such damage was caused? I don't see anything in the article that suggests this kind of investigation will, or should, be done.
I'm a bit puzzled.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Well...isn't that spectical.
I would have thought overfed would be the better moderation.
I always was hip to the Ferengi's policy for their women requiring to wear no clothes. This article confused me though, as I had never heard Quark or Rom talk about these issues. I suspect this article is talking about some of the Rules of Aquisition that were never mentioned on DS9.
Cheerio. What's all this then?
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
does this mean if we created SQN's on earth we could shoot down incoming asteroids?
Tonne = Ton
Now back to your regularly scheduled rant already in progress...
I think it also caused all of those fight scene animations on the ol' Batman TV series.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
these events were meant to be caused by tiny black holes? At least thats what the last slashdot story like this said. IANAQP
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
And we have the winner in the "Star Trek Technobabble" Contest!!!!!
Nice troll.
250 Miles per second?
..
now that's what i call a .
QUARK EXPRESS
anything i tell you will cloud your opinion.
Isn't it interesting that data stopped being collected at the same time the last event was "detected". I think the solution lies much closer to home than speeding nuclearites. Before I set the conspirists afire I would suggest taking a look at how expensive it actually was to collect and store data, and who was responsible for the decision to stop.
It has to make you wonder what effect it would have if you had the (mis)fortune of standing on the entry or exit point. Spontaneous combustion anyone?
conundrum11
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
And there is no reasonable argument for the choice of 11 dimensions (1 time, 10 space, 6 compactified).
;)
Are you sure you are a mathematician?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
No shit, Sherlock. We're all aware that /. editors post repeats, and that the problem is getting worse. We see it for ourselves, and we hear about it ad nauseum from twerps like yourself who are looking for a quick, cheap karma boost. Your comment is not insightful or informative. It is irritating and wasteful. STFU already.
And to the moderators: shame on you for falling for such an obvious whoring technique.
Seriously though: can we detect if some civilisation wrecker size thingy is on its way.
These are sneaky bastards: more devious than NEOs come out at us in the direction of the Sun.
And we cannot even drill a nuke into these suckers.
Hmmmm.... that lifeboat thingy (posted yday) grows more pertinent by the minute.
In an article posted by BBC, a scientist has suggested that two "unassociated" seismic events that occurred earlier this afternoon were actually strange Beef matter passing through his GI tract at a speed of perhaps 250 miles per second. A spec of strange Meat the size of a human cell is said to be so dense that it could weigh a tonne! Also, the scientist commented, 'what the fuck do they put in that stuff? It tastes like meat paste, but it's greyish-beige!!? I won't fall for that again."
The only calculations you're doing are the ones that pertain to how much bud you can pack into your pipe.
If this article confuses you, don't worry. It was posted yesterday in a much clearer fashion.
If it was your goal to brain fuck half of slashdot, I think you just succeded.
You just made a spectical of yourself. The word you want is skeptical.
tconnors(UID #91126) posted a link to the original paper, the last time this was posted on /.
:), but this is a fascinating paper. They talk about how Strange Quark Nuggets contain strange, up and down quarks, which makes them stable enough to exist without condensing into protons and neutrons. It also talks about how SQNs are dark matter candidates - so these paired seismic events may be proof of this form of dark matter.
Not to karma whore or anything
This seems like an amazing amount of work - they went through nearly 10 million seismic event records, from 1981 to 1993.
My other sig is also a
I'm "spectical" of your statements. Those words you use are definitely in the English language, except for "spectical", but put together, they make no sense. Perhaps your million monkeys on a million typewriters should keep banging away... Good luck.
Hmmm...and I've never heard of Yang-Chibara manifolds and they aren't mentioned anywhere in arxiv.org.
OK, I've been succesfully trolled.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The sun just had two explosions. I wonder if there are "unassociated events."
have you ever taken a math course?
Quote "I would reject such explanations beforehand without even brothing to check the data"
And thus, we know why you are a mathematician and not a scientist.
Odo: "I plan to investigate the Klingons, the Romulans, Quark, the visiting Tarellians..."
Sisko: "You think Quark had anything to do with it?"
Odo: "I always investigate Quark"
Any good amateur rocket/astronomy folks out there? If you shot something from Antartica opposite the direction of the tip of India at 450km/sec, on October 22, 1993, 09:55:57 GMT, where would it go?
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
http://www.jerkcity.com/jerkcity1143.html
Sure, it's heavy. Sure, it's going really fast. But the impact area is only the size of a cell. It would rupture cells along the path through your body, but the holes created wouldn't be big enough for blood to flow out of, and unless it struck a nerve cell you'd never feel it. The mass is not high enough for it to have any tidal effects. Even if it did hit your brain it probably wouldn't do enough damage to register.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Tonne = Ton
Except, it's not. They're similar in magnitude only. A ton is 2,000 pounds, whereas a tonne is 1,000 kilograms, or something like 2,200 pounds.
It does look like a misspelling, tho.
One passed through me and out the bottom of my latte recently outside Starbucks...
I dont claim to know much more about math than your average pre-calc student, but what the fuck? What is "spectical"? Once used is a typo, twice is a sign of person trying to use words they dont comprehend. I dont mean to be harsh, but you claim to be mathematically inclined, but cant spell basic 5th grade words....
*kisses my kharma good bye*
I, sir, Call you a bullshitter with a math and or science book handy..
I'm a little tea pot.
... call Odo.
The article says:
It was estimated that the strange quark matter might pass through the earth at 400 km per second (250 miles per second), 40 times the speed of seismic waves.
-- and --
The other occurred on 24 November, 1993, when an object entered south of Australia and exited the Earth near Antarctica 0.15 of a second later.
So are Australia and Antartica 37.5 miles apart? Confused.
People blame sub-atomic particles for everything now.
What caused those earthquakes? Quarks.
What destroyed the World Trade Center? Quarks.
Who left the toilet seat up? Quarks.
Its about time people took responsibility for their actions and quit blaming the poor quarks.
Trolling is a art,
Just for that I'm going to slap you with a herring.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Tonne != Ton. Tonne is metric and = 1000 kg!
in preferences, set the 'funny' modifier to -2, set the 'foe' modifier to -2, 'friend' to +1, mark folks that annoy you as foes.
Sometimes we can't remember if this is a duplicate story or not. These "repeat" posts are very helpful in figuring that out.
Besides, he wasn't karma whoring. He took the time to search the last strangelet article, get the url, and link it for us. If he was truly karma whoring, there would be no link. He would have worried about taking all that time getting us a link while giving up valueable time for some other person to post their "repeat" message.
---
Old actors don't die, they just go to Old Navy
Oh, wait. I thought that was for computer scientists. ;)
Super ninja monkeys will one day rule the world!
Larry Niven (or was it Jerry Pournelle, I can't keep the two apart in my mind...) wrote a short story similar to that. It was a murder mystery.
But I don't really believe that, it really depends on how large the particle is in relation to a cell. Most likely it could pass through you, causing no serious or permanant damage. That is, as long as there's no sonic boom.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Ok I'll know I'll get modded down but ...
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.
Maybe this is finally a scientific reason for spontaneous human combustion?
It was Larry Niven. And his microscopic killer was a quantum black hole. And it was the tidal effects of the tiny piece of matter that killed the guy.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
1) Profit.
2) Profit.
3) Profit.
4) Profit.
Or is that Microsoft?
This sounds an awful lot like sci fi to me. Yes, the existence of strange quarks has been confirmed experimentally. But you will _never_ find a particle containing strange quarks that lasts more than the tiniest fraction of a second. At least not in low energies like the ones here on earth. Some speculative theory about what might happen in the core of a collapsed star explains nothing about what happens when strange quarks encounter normal matter (protons and neutrons). That question was answered a long time ago when physicists discovered the basic properties of quarks - this strange matter should simply decay into ordinary matter. If you read the article, you will notice that it is short on scientific understanding and even shorter on expert commentary. There is a single quote, by a scientist who is not even a physicist but rather a seismologist, and this one quote is a prime example of an absolutely noncommital answer. This particular article needed some work.
Lemiwinks, Lemiwinks, your journeys almost done!
(C'mon, I couldn't let that one go, even if it means losing karma points!)
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
each pound of it weighs over 10,000 pounds.
:))
(Yes, this comment is a rip-off, but it's my favorite Farnsworth quote
I thought it would suck to be one of those unlucky sots that get struck by lightening. Can you imagine how much your day would suck if the gods of quantum physics decided to smite you with one of those bad boys.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
If it could actually do damage to you, you'd enter the guiness book of records for being the most unlucky complex of proteins in the universe.
...than that would mean that the only thing it couldn't permeate would be a Mac running OS X :)
------ What's sadder than realizing you've filtered out your own comments?
"Check it out:"
Augghh! Two pieces of quark matter passed through my screen right after "Check it out", obliterating two pixels in a eerie colon-like formation. Confound you, Slashdot!
I don't think there'd be a sonic boom. Something the size of a cell isn't going to displace much air.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
These guys could use some help. Here's my idea: Put the information on line, distribute a client to analyze it. Surely the possibility of a quark collision is at least as good as finding an intelligent signal from another planet?
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
6 of 10 spatial dimensions are "compactified" and only exist on the sub-atomic scale.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
... duck!
We're not talking about Pamela Anderson, are we?
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Everyday,there is something new to learn about ferengis.
an Earth shattering KaBoom!
That pesky Earthling has stolen my Strangium-238 Space Modulator!
Seriously, any one read David Brin's Earth?
Maybe they only winged us.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Yeah, imagine if it were to hit a person, or a plane, or imagine if it hit a nail, just so, and drove it all the way to China.. Can you imagine that? Unimaginable!
You should imagine all you want, but stop just short of posting. You might have a vivid imagination and all, but when you post, you come across as an idiot.
And to think, I burned my last mod point this morning. Pity.
I find it difficult to formulate a serious theory about an event by relying on exotic (hence unproven) strangelets surrounded by electrons (which is what these so called nuclearites are/should be/may be), going on little more empirical evidence then activity on seismographs. I do not accept that SQM (strange quark matter) baryons, should they even exist, would have slammed into one side of the Earth and came booming out of the other with little more evidence then slight quakes.
JFK, RFK, and Marilyn killed by strange quarks. Teddy's car knocked into water bay a quark. Missing Watergate tapes. Dangling chad.
Since they are remastering the JFK does Dallas film, maybe the we can do like they do on CSI: zoom in by a billion and see the quarks.
Dunno - A friend in college had the best conspiracy theory yet - Teddy found out John and Robert were sleeping with Marilyn. When she turned him down, he had all 3 killed.
"A spec of strange Quark matter the size of a human cell is said to be so dense that it could weigh a tonne!"
The same can be said for neutrons or protons or anything else that isn't an atom. Because, as we all (should) know by now, atoms are mostly empty space.
Nothing to see here, move along...
In other news, Slashdot fanatics are slaving over the data trying to find a link between the catastophy caused by these strange quarks and Microsoft.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
he's using 11th dimentional math where you just make up whatever the fuck numbers you want. It's said that even U.S. school students pick up math pretty easily there.
How much is 2200 US pounds in British pounds?
Good thing I dont live in Antarctica! Ill stay here in good 'ol safe US of A! Keep them quarks south of the equator.
Maybe this is finally a scientiffic reason for spontaneous human impregnation?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
6 of 10 spatial dimensions are "compactified" and only exist on the sub-atomic scale.
I was aware (thank you Michio Kaku) but it was just a funny (incorrect) way of writing it out.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
is it compatible with OS X yet?
ba-dum-dum!
thank you - good night!
RTFM; please, I beg you.
So, they know an approximate mass, they can guestimate how fast it is moving, and from the location of the Earth at that time, they know a relative position in the solar system.
Is this thing moving at an 'escape' velocity from our solar system? Is it in orbit around the sun like a comet? Can we calculate that orbit and see if it might hit us again?
If these things are so common that they found 2 events in 3 years worth of data, why don't we see buildings occasionally cruble as if hit by a missile?
Oh, wait. I thought that was for computer scientists.
Fen would be so proud...
I remember that day! I stepped on a scale, and just for a second the dial spun rapidly before it settled down. It must have been a quark passing through me! I think it may have left an extra 20 pounds behind too!
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
"Quark Matter Blamed for Paired 1993 Seismic Events"
Quark visited Earth in the 40's, not the 90's. There's no way he altered history in such a way that it'd cause seismic events 50 years later!
It's a good thing I watch a lot of TV, I could have wasted time reading that stupid article.
"Derp de derp."
What about a bullet wound?
.22 of an inch projectile at near light speeds. The projectile will not expand and thusly will not release much energy. Merely punch straight through both sides and continue on untill the engery runs out.
Small and clean going in.
Big and messy going out.
Ok first of all a bullet is designed to expand and release it's engery in the form of expansion. Thusly thats why they have little holes going in and big holes going out as the bullet expands and releases alot of it's energy. Bullets that have a full metal case do not leave big holes at all.
The other thing is like many other people have brought up that this is smaller than the size of a cell and has the mass of of aprox 1 ton. I do not know how fast it is going but I saw a post that said 400k/sec. If it does not have enough frontal area or expansion ability (very small very dense) it will squish in and snap back on the surfance and thusly cause vibrations but the hole it would leave would be extremly small. It would also produce vibration as it traveld through the object and came out the other side but agian probably not do much damage.
Like that weapon they had in the movie "eraser" was total BS. It fired a
If I'm wrong please feel free to correct me/discuss it.
Vote early. Vote often. Vote CowboyNeal.
" As a mathematician I'm usually very spectical of ..."
"Usually there is some problems..."
Whether or not you're a mathematician is debatable, but I'm pretty sure you'll never get confused with an English major. You have some "specticalular" problems with subject/verb agreements...
"There is almost no experimental proofs for quantum field theory."
Psst! You're a mathematician. You're supposed to be satisfied when the equations work out. Experimental proof is something done by... well... physicists.
"And there is no reasonable argument for the choice of 11 dimensions (1 time, 10 space, 6 compactified)."
Forget the funky math you just did, if you made up new math functions as often as you made up new words ("compactified?"), you'd be the next Newton.
"can by explained much easier due to the fact that several cohomology groups of the Yang-Chibara manifolds are simple and the remaining ones freely generated."
Dude! Paramount is looking for you! They need you to help write the next Star Trek series!
"The other well known phenomena of earth core oszillations"
We're off to see the wizard! The wonderful Wizard of Osz!
Dunno about his arguement, but the 6 compactified ones would come out of the 10 spatial dimensions (think of them as dimensions rolled up like tiny straws, so that you have very restricted movement within them).
:)
That gives you 1 time & 10 space (6 of which are compactified).
OTOH, how do we have 4 spatial dimensions now? I thought it was 1 time & 3 space. Heh, I guess I do understand that crack about being a mathematician, heh
He ain't heavy, he's my boson...
When you get hit by a bullet, you absorb most of the kinetic energy carried by the bullet, so it tends to rip you apart. Your body structure is too dense for a bullet to pass through without energy loss, not true for a quark. If this quark had slowed down signifigantly or stopped in the planet, then it's energy would've been transfered into the planet, resulting in a 50kt blast (i.e. Second Impact, har). But it sailed right through, so we didn't feel much.
Well, now that we know where the blame lies isn't it time to take action? Has anyone alerted president Bush or at least drafted some bills that could prevent this from happening in the future? Shouldn't we at least take the now-standard precaution of stripping citizens of their liberties at least until a more oppressive solution can be devised?
ôó
You say 11k +23m where k is a natural number and m is a positive integer. Wouldn't a math major know that natural numbers are, by definition, positive integers and word that statement appropiately? This is a very basic definition that many high school students are familiar with and any first year math major will know by heart.
If you want to try to impress people with vocabulary you don't understand, you should start by using the vocabulary that most people know correctly.
Damn Chi-Comms!
--
But then again I thought VCR+ was a stupid idea and would die a quick death--so what do I know?
I looked at the headline and it looked like
"Quake Matter Blamed for Paired 1993 Seismic Events"
Man, they're blaming videogames for everything these days
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
they make some funky shit
Yang-Chibara are 6 dimensional entities that I believe arise from superstring theory...
If I remember right=P
Nick Lange nick.lange@SPAMTASTIC.hushmail.com
shifting a planetary body into another space time dimension so that it would pass through the earth.....
...then why doesn't the Earth whistle as it spins?
Two reasons:
1. It's in a vacuum. It may be whistling, but you just can't hear it because there's nothing to transmit the sound.
2. Would you feel like whistling if you'd just had a hole punched through you?
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
How do they know it's quark matter? Why not micro-black-holes or a chunk of neutronium? They may be right, but I'm just curious as to how they narrowed this peculiar effect down to this even more peculiar cause. Large quarks are, to my knowledge, no more or less theoretical than micron-level singularities or thimble-sized pieces of neutronium.
Dyolf Knip
ha ha ha
Think of the probability bell curve. If we can have such quark matter of that size pass through even once a millennium, we should have enough smaller samples per hour that we can detect with all the equipment looking at the skies. The giant Kamiokande and Sudbury detectors would surely detect even tiny quantities of quark clumps, should I dare say single quarks? No the skies have been clear of such powerful thingies unless a single quark can cause earthquakes, THEN we can say the chances of them hitting the earth are so small, that we only had one in 93.
Secondly there have been enough earthquakes in earth-quake recorded history that we can expect almost simultaneous quakes sometime. The source that emitted even one quark of that much power towards us is likely a stellar event, sending more than one of these quarks or quarklumps. We should have had a series of earthquakes just like the leonids.
Thirdly, as I imagine tiny centers of enormous gravity, me thinks it should really break the rigid structure of rocks and other crystal-like things. Say we have one tonne of mass, on how much area should we put it to have enough pressure to crush rocks?? I think a little under a square inch. Therefore a little circle of this ballpark size can be discovered (assuming the material was about a tonne's worth of mass. If more, we get lucky with a bigger powdery circle). The circle would be dark with a burn and so easily noticed. Then again, shockwaves would move enough earth (if the can cause an earthquake)to form little mound circle.
This is just one of those junk pieces of news that get media attention since the physics behind it is so beautiful and believable. The publics appetite is wet for major scientific discoveries after a centurys bullish discoveries and a decade's slump.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
It's like saying f'(x) = df/dx is 0 because df is almost zero... you are neglecting the very important fact that dx is almost zero too.
Not really, he is saying that while the things have a hell of a lot of momentum (3e11 Newton seconds) it's impact area would be incredible small (smaller than a hydrogen atom in diameter) so it would just blast through a person without transfering its momentum to more than the cells it went through. So when it exits the individual it has left a wake, but a small one because of its incredible velocity.
This isn't billiards, where a ball transfers all its momentum to another, and it isn't like an ice burg where the oil station must be obliterated for passage. At 3e8 m/s it would pass through a meter of flesh in 1/3e8 seconds transfering energy to a few cells with very little mass themselves.
That's why he didn't think it would significantly damage a person. The Earth was both dense enough and large(volume) enough to take the blast.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Archimedes Plutonium?
Is that you?
"You could tell them it, and they'll remember as long as it's in their short term memory, but a few seconds later, it'll be gone, because the fruit naming call-up function got crushed by a blood clot."
This is what happens when you don't model the objects correctly.
Personally, I'd use struts in this case to implement the MVC design pattern
i could just iminagine
george w. saying
"wow isnt toy story great, i wish i had a gun like woodies. dick i want a pistol like woody but it has to be the most powerfull pistol EVER."
and behold some scientists in area 51 making g.w. a strange qurark matter gun.
so slashdot whats more dangerous guns in the hands of children, or guns and missles in the hands of ol' g.w.
to those cool spiders in British Columbia.
this all sounds like the theory of how TWA flight 800 was brought down, though that was by a meteor people say. http://twa800.com/news/twa800-news.htm
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
My cousin got hit with one of those. Knocked him flat on his tail and left him talking silly ... but not much worse than before he got hit.
Why did their records of "unassociated" events cease in 1993? Is "'unassociated' event" their euphemism for "possible nuclear test"?
We are sorry for the confusion, but it turns out it was just my mother-in-law that caused this.
We can all go home now, nothing to see here.
Then how come it shakes the earth when it passes through? I think you would definitely get mangled!
The planet saturn is so dense it could float in a tub of water if the tub was large enough. A neutron star otoh the size of a tennis ball weighs the planet of the earth.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Um, the particle is moving at ~450km/hr. Light is moving ~300,000 km/s. Anywhere you look in the sky, that is gone now. That was there many thousands or millions of years ago.
Not to mention the fact that we don't know what gravity forces it was exposed to outside of our solar system, and if they are even relevant.
I think you mean Calabi-Yau manifolds. Typically 6D Calabi-Yau manifolds are used to describe the 'compactification' of 10D manifolds down to 4D in Superstring theory.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
El Niño was getting sick of being the scapegoat.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
What theoretical physicists are willing to propose for funding
If this were the case, then a bullet would only leave a bullet sized hole in things. Even shooting an empty paint can with a .22 leaves a MUCH bigger hole on the way out.
I'd guess with that amazing amount of mass (F=M*A) it's mess you up pretty bad. Like gooey pile of what used to be you bad.
The so-called strange quark matter is so dense that a piece the size of a human cell would weigh a tonne.
My college physics is rusty, but here goes. If the radius of the nugget is 1 micron, and its mass is one tonne, then I calculate the surface gravity to be 66700 m/s, or 6670 gees
It seems to me that a gravitational acceleration that large would do a lot of damage to you, as the nugget passed through your body.
Ok, so where's the 4th spatial dimension?
The results were not pretty. Suffice to say that Spinal Tap now has a NEW drummer.
Why did the USGS stop measuring these uncorrellated events after 1993? It seems like a good source of interesting information to me...
DFossmeister
No Not Again! Its whats for dinner.
Given that Antarctica is about the *only* thing south of Australia, there is a very good chance that the quark entered *and* left from Antarctica. :)
Maybe in some quirk of physics and multidimensional quantum physics doohikory it entered and left the SAME PLACE at a different time. Or wqas it the same time at a different place?
Where's my cat? is it alive?:)
In 1993 the US Geological Survey stopped collecting data from "unassociated events."
Mulder: Gee Skully, we're getting close to the truth, all we need is one more piece of data from an unassociated event and we can prove aliens are pulling the strings that ultimately control the earth's major climatological events and in effect control us all.
Skully: Don't be ridiculous Mulder these events are simply random firings of strange Quark matter that shoot through the earth at 400 km/sec without leaving a trace.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Sounded funny to my until I got all my records out and looked at them, a hole exactly through the center of every one of them!
Given its past location, velocity, and heading, we could get a rough idea of what its orbit is like. Then, someday, when the second Dark Age ends and Science is rediscovered, we can launch an array of SQUID (superconducting quantum interference devices) sensors to find it.
Why didn't I use the preview button???
What is the frequency of these beasts?
Is there a danger to a human? And if so, how would we be able to detect it was a strange quark and not any other cause?
what happend to Mr. goat.se
Table-ized A.I.
I think it would be comparable (on a small scale) to a toothpick going through a mapletree
er, no - it would be comparable to something rather very much smaller than a quark going through a mapletree, i think.
I'm neither a mathematician nor a physicist, but I study mathematics, and I can tell you that "compactified" is a real math word, that real mathematicians use.
Your other technical dismissal is also foolish. You shouldSearch
The
Fucking
Web
Just becuase you don't understand it doesn't mean that it's bullshit.Really there was no point in rolling back time at all, with the accuracy we're talking about it seems obvious that this ancient quark traveler would likely have been guided toward us by the graviational lens that is the mass of the LMC. That, or some unknown process in the LMC could conceivably have generated the strange stuff. Of course at a velocity of only .0015c it would have passed the LMC around 120 million years ago.
It seems pretty hard to say where it came from especially with this one piece of information, but we might very well be in for some surprises if we get enough seismic data in the future to plot against the COBE map!
Some interesting links here.
...Simpson, he had a crayon stuck up his nose & he's fine.
Yeah, if you live in your parent's basement with nothing else to do.
Does anyone know why this has to be strange quark matter, rather than a small black hole passing through the Earth? Is it because a black hole that small would explode from Hawking radiation?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
OK, so you can figure out how much energy per kilometer, then per meter, and you can estimate the seismic energy released as it passes through your body -- perhaps 1/10th or 1/3rd of a meter.
50 kiloton / 12,756 km diameter = 3.9 Ton/km
3.9 Ton/km / 1,000 = 0.0039 Ton/m
0.0039 Ton/m * 2,000 pounds/Ton = 7.8 pounds/m
7.8 * 0.1 = 0.78 pounds of dynamite per 1/10th of a meter.
So if it hits only 1/10th of a meter of you, it's like three-quarters of a pound of dynamite.
But that is seismic energy, the energy of movement. That will tell you the effect of the shock wave due to moving faster than the speed of sound in your bag of dirty water, and a little of that will be a push against you. Although a shock wave inside you is interesting, if you look at the research report, you see that seismic energy is perhaps 0.01 of the energy released (maybe a larger fraction) -- the rest is heat. You might get burned rather than just shaken, as the heat energy will be more than that 0.78 pound of seismic energy.
The energy released as it went through your head would be more than that of one pound of dynamite. Shock wave and heat. Possible effects are left as an exercise for the reader.
If these strange quarks are so dense would I be right in thinking that a relatively small collection would generate a significant gravitational field? And, if so, could you - theoretically - coat the bottom of a space station with them thus creating artifical gravity? Or is that just silly - I am not a physicist after all...
No, she just hums happily all day.
I think there wouldnt be much damage, if it passes thru the earth it goes thru a couple of km of rock, if it passes thru your head it goes thru 15cm of squishy easly moved stuff.
I dont think it matters that much what damage it causes, its ether neglagable or its totaly killer. if its neglagable so what? if its totaly killer your not going to notice....
I wnat to knoe!
"I'm neither a mathematician nor a physicist, but I study mathematics, and I can tell you that "compactified" is a real math word, that real mathematicians use"
Just because mathematicians happen to use a word doesn't make it "real." Mathematicians have the nasty habit of making up new words in order to make equations easier to read out loud.
If you make something smaller, you compact it, not "compactify" it.
The average density of the Earth is 5.5 g/cc (http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/earth-pl _TheGeologicEarth.asp) and assuming that flesh is around that of water (1 g/cc) it would be easy to say that there is a 11/2 ratio.
But this does not realy work out correctly. The energy transfer is not based on mass, but on friction. This has more to do with number of particals that bump into one anouther.
The question should be how many atoms will this Strangelet push out of the way as it travels through something. The best way to think of this is a one ton atom (the size of a cell) playing supersonic bowling with all the other atoms in its path.
Yes, that would have to be the best way of describing it. Take a one ton wrecking ball, shrink it down to the size of an amoeba, and fire it out of a gun at supersonic speeds. anything soft and squishy would instantly be vapor as every atom in its path gets accellerated beyond Mach 1.
If you make something smaller, you compact it, not "compactify" it.
Compactification adds points to a space, but makes it compact, which is a technical term quite distinct from "small."
If the *story submitters* would do the research and the searches before they even clicked the Submit button, the editors wouldn't have to deal with repeats. But of course, we all hate the editors (don't we?), so we must blame them instead!
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
does anyone remember the omega substance from startrek voyager?
karma: ouch!
Heh. (So much for "empathic" physics).
SEWilco - I screwed my head back on now - thanks for the enlightenment.
yes, we have no bananas
> Is there any hope for me? Am I just thick? Does anyone remember the :-)
> Rubiks Cube, it was easier!
I found that the Rubiks cube and Linux are alike. Looks real confusing
until you read the right book.
-- seen on c.o.l.misc, about the "Linux Learning Curve"
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