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 "

Comments

Is that a particle in your pocket

[DShard]

I thought that if a trio of strange quarks hit any other matter it would convert it into the same?

Imagine..

[|<amikaze]

Getting hit by that random particle. What would it do to you? That's a lot of momentum.

Re:Imagine..

[Arcturax]

Yes but it would only impart a tiny bit if that energy into you as it struck. It would for the most part just pass right through you and do little to no damage that you could notice in the process.

After all, if it dumped all its energy right then and there, it would create an energetic event equal to an asteriod hitting the planet.

While it does dump 50kt worth of energy on its way through Earth, think about how thick the Earth is and then calculate how much damage is done per square centimeter. Not a lot really.

So yes it has a lot of energy, but it loses it only a bit at a time as it zips through objects. It will have to zip through a lot more very large objects before it ever could be stopped (or hit with a huge enough repelling force which would require enormous amounts of energy to generate).

More BBC 'science'..

[stratjakt]

>> 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.

Re:More BBC 'science'..

[stratjakt]

>> Sounds like good scientific practice to me. Granted, "'We can't prove that this was strange quark matter, but that is the only explanation that has been offered so far,' Herrin says."

Sounds like bad scientific practice to me. These guys started with a conclusion, then went poring over millions of millions of pages of data to find something to support it.

I thought the scientific method worked the other way.

And noone's come up with a better explanation of where my car keys went than aliens from outer space, so that must be true too, right?

Re:More BBC 'science'..

[krlynch]

Generally, when you go looking through enough data, expecting to find something, you do.

You only find it if you aren't doing your job right; when looking for events that match a certain profile, you also have to take into account the number of events that match the profile but that would be generated by different processes. Those other processes are called "background" processes. If you don't expect to see any background events, and you do see events, you have support for the foreground hypothesis. If you do expect background events, and you see exactly the number you expect to see, you don't have support for the foreground hypothesis.

This is a vast simplification of the process of teasing foreground from background, or course, not doing justice to the amount of work you have to do to understand what you are talking about ... and you aren't assured of getting it right, of course. However, the statements that this hypothesis has some support in the data was based on this exact type of analysis, and are clearly not of the "look at enough data you'll find what you want to" kind. You probably have to go to the original source article to find the details (the foreground/background analysis was most of the paper, if I remember correctly).

Your alternate theory, once properly formulated, would also make a prediction as to the number of events of this kind that are expected ... go make that prediction, and then we can test it :-)

Re:More BBC 'science'..

[tgv]

They found *ONE* occurrence. On *filtered data* (filtering causes strange biases in expectations of probability). The existence of strange matter is not really generally accepted. No-one knows the size or mass of this thing (it was estimated post-hoc on the basis of this theory). And small things, even with lots of energy, cannot produce (seismic) events with that much effect, since it's in essence just a very strong needle prick: it will cut right through everything with great damage to the environment. Plus, coincidence still exists. So, your prerequisites (take into account the number of events that match the profile but ...) cannot be met.

And, as the original poster said: if you're looking for just one random event, given enough data, it's likely you can find it.

Now, if they would have found a whole string of correspondences, that would be something. But this is -- at best -- a hypothesis that needs to be watched over a very long time to become more probable.

Occam's Razor

[conundrum11]

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

Re:Surface Damage?

[RomikQ]

I think everyone here is overestimating the size of those things. They are really very very very small. There would be no visual evidence of the impact, not even microscopical - the particles would just rip through, and then the material they went through would collapse back onto itself.

Either my Math or Geography sucks

[Pr3d4t0r]

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.

Jealous he beat you to it?

[helix400]

We're all aware that /. editors post repeats..., and we hear about it ad nauseum from twerps like yourself who are looking for a quick, cheap karma boost.

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

Re:Not a whole hell of a lot.

[product byproduct]

Actually we can do the math pretty easily:

article quote: "a one-tonne spec would release the energy of a 50-kilotonne nuclear bomb, spread along its entire path through the Earth."

So the energy released is something like 50 kilotonnes / 10,000 km
= 5 tonnes of TNT / km
= 5 kg of TNT / m
= 0.5 kg of TNT / 10cm

So this thing traveling through your skull would be like detonating a pound of TNT inside of your head. The brain damage would definitely register. :)

Re:Not a whole hell of a lot.

[grandpohbah]

Taken from a company selling ammo better designed to kill...

Unaltered Ball Ammo -- Military ball ammo tends to provide extremely poor, unpredictable terminal performance for edible game and varmints on all but head shots. The pointy bullet will either slip right through the animal (producing little tissue disruption), or tumble (producing massive tissue damage), and is easily deflected by even small bones. The result is very unpredictable performance. It is inhumane and unsportsmanlike to use such ammo except for head shots. Therefore, the effective hunting range of ball ammo is the approximately 1-2" diameter head shot kill zone. For most military rifles, that will severely limit the usefulness of the weapon.

Why is it unhumane? Simple, because it won't kill the animal, only wound it. An interesting note on this (though a quick google search didn't give a good source), is that militarized ammo is specifically designed to not kill, but only wound(a wounded soldier removes not only the wounded from battle, but also the do-gooder care taker). Ammo outside of the military, including all hunting ammo and that used by most law enforcement agencies, is designed to kill.

Re:Not a whole hell of a lot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dividing by the ratio of densities (about 3) is probably the right correction. Even if you divide by 100 you still get 5 grams of explosives in your head.

Re:Doesn't add up...

[Liquor]

Where are they getting this 400 Km/s number?

Well, if you make the reasonable assumption that such strangelets are NOT generated in the solar system, then there is a minimum speed (somewhere in the ballpark of 50 Km/s) that is determined by the combined escape velocities of the earth and sun. Anything coming from interstellar space out of the planetary plane canno arrive traveling slower than this. Anything much over 10000 Km/s is probably not going to be detectable as 'traveling' by the researchers' criteria, because it will seem instantaneous (i.e. less than a second - how well are the clocks calibrated?) to the relatively sluggish seismic monitors. So that would be the range they would be able to look for traces in.

Then they find a trace, and the speed is then measured (using the time delay in the seismic record) to get the speed of 400 Km/s - and the above figures just sanity check this as a plausible value.