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Tiny Particle With No Charge Discovered
ZonkerWilliam writes to mention PhysOrg is reporting that a tiny particle with no charge, called an 'axion' has been discovered. From the article: "The finding caps nearly three decades of research both by Piyare Jain, Ph.D., UB professor emeritus in the Department of Physics and lead investigator on the research, who works independently -- an anomaly in the field -- and by large groups of well-funded physicists who have, for three decades, unsuccessfully sought the recreation and detection of axions in the laboratory, using high-energy particle accelerators."
I assume that's 10^-13 seconds. Ten seconds to thirteen seconds would be a very long time as these things go.
This is a bad description. The wake of a bullet going through ballistics gel is due to the electromagnetic force. The axion, in contrast does not experience that force. Like the neutron, it must be discovered indirectly (though it is more difficult to discover than a neutron). A useful part of the article:
So basically, they discovered it by observing the electrically interacting positron and electron pair produced very close to the production with a specialized type of photographic film.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
In the context of subatomic particles, I think "neutron" is as large as they get.
Actually, now that you mention it, wouldn't a neutrino qualify?
This would be very important, if true. However, there's at least one thing that makes me wonder whether it's right:
Jain has used it throughout his career to successfully detect other exotic phenomena, such as the charm particle, the anomalon, the quark-gluon plasma and the nuclear collective flow.
I used to do low-energy nuclear physics research, and although this stuff is at higher energies, a lot of it sets off my B.S. detector. The information I've been able to find about the anomalon makes it sound like it's flaky. The statement in the article also makes it sound as if Jain discovered the other things on the list, but actually I think what it really means is that he participated in experiments, where his contribution was that he did the emulsion technique. From what I know about the continuing work on the quark-gluon plasma, it's not a specific, definite, yes/no thing that can really be considered to have been discovered, and I don't think emulsions have been particularly important in that work, either.
It's unfortunate that the paper isn't available on arxiv.org. However, IOP will let you read it if you set up an account. Well, I'm not a specialist in relativistic heavy ion physics, or emulsion techniques, but the paper doesn't look very convincing to me at all. In figure 4, they claim to see two peaks, one near 7 MeV, and one near 19 MeV. The statistics simply don't look convincing. All I see is a spectrum with some noise in it, where they've picked what look like two big statistical fluctuations and called them peaks. They claim it's significant at the 3-sigma level, which actually isn't a very high level of statistical confidence, especially for such an extraordinary claim.
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Uhm, no. The Big Bang is a theory, but people don't go around trying to create mini universes. Sure you could argue that they "test" it with observational data, but that's not really performing experiments either now is it?
And as a Mathematician, why are you limiting the concept of a "theory" to the land of science? You scientists are constantly being bound by the restrictions of the physical world around you!
Isn't it one of the basic rules of grammar that if you are asking a question, you use a question mark?
So yes, there are 4 fundamental forces and all other forces are developed from these. However, what is the force applied to a mass suspended on a spring with spring constant K and displaced X? Well, it's -KX. Sure, the electromagnetic forces between all the atoms in the spring are what cause the force and you can even use Young's modulus and/or chemical bond theory to find what the "atomic spring" constant is...but that's senseless and pedantic. Similarly, if you want me to describe why that shockwave develops, it is because of momentum. The bullet imparts some of its momentum and energy to the gel, and causes the viscosity of the gel is what causes the wave to propagate, just like when we talk about sound waves in air, or ocean waves. I sure as hell hope you don't resort to electromagnetism to describe those. What I was saying is that using the bullet analogy is stupid because, while technically correct, its completely vacuous. And in fact, particles that have a net neutral charge only interact electromagnetically in distance scales where the separate regions of positive and negative charge are distinct (like atomic nuclei). Two neutral atoms don't interact (electromagnetically, or at all) until their two regions of negative space get close enough together that they begin to have an effect on each other. But you know, that's roughly 8 order of magnitude off of the scale of a bullet, and, again, talking about a microscopic (and quantum!) system in terms of a macroscopic problem is, as I said before, stupid.
It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
Saying that the wake is due to electromagnetic force is like saying that car-crash whiplash is due to seatbelts or bumpers.
The wake is due to the transfer of kinetic energy from the bullet (okay, the bullet as measured from the frame of the gel) to the gel (in it's frame). Electromagnetics is just the medium of this transfer.
A bullet sitting motionless in gel creates no wake... but the electromagnetic force is still there.
Clearly, the wake is not "due" to the electromagnetic force, it is a "product" of said force (and the kinetic energy of the speeding bullet).
I applaud your mischievous wordplay, and I await the potential wrath of your advanced physics knowledge.
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Testable doesn't mean you can recreate it- it means it makes some predictions about how the world is now that can be tested. Big bang predicts levels of background radiation and other things that can be tested for.
String theory doesn't predict anything. Its not testable. Its not science. Its caused some interesting advances in math to solve certain aspects of it, but thats about it.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Wow, you must be fun at parties calling everyone stupid for disagreeing with you. My mention of the electromagnetic force is critical in this discussion because there is no evidence that the axion is composed of charged particles that when superimposed produce a zero net charge. If it had then those particles it could be detected electromagnetically (i.e. even the neutral neutron will bounce off of certain particles due to electromagnetic interactions--though I should note that strong nuclear interactions are also significant for a neutron). And without the electromagnetic force there will not be a wake through a ballistics jell which is the original issue that I pointed out.
I don't really care that it bothers you that I have simplified this to the simplest case (but as Einstein would suggest "no simpler"). Sure you can describe the perturbation of a ballistics jell with forces that are composed of special cases of the electromagnetic force but the fundamental point is that without the ability to interact electromagnetically at the lowest level all of those forces result to zero.
If an axion has a zero fundamental charge you can talk about impulses all night long but they still do not mean a damn thing. When you discuss subatomic particles you cannot use the special cases of the forces that we have come to love (because they make our lives simple). Spring constants have no meaning. Pressure has no meaning. Even things like angular momentum take on bizzare new forms that cannot use the classical theories.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
The Vogon I can understand, but why would Galactus want to blow up a perfectly edible, tasty planet?
I didn't call anyone stupid; I called the analogy stupid. And I maintain that it is stupid because a bullet in a ballistics gel is a classical system. I don't know all these advanced physics topics with great levels of intricacy like you do; but I do know that quantum mechanics is based upon statistics and probabilities. When you have a sample that is so large that the statistics of that system can truly be defined as a normal, Boltzmann distribution, you have a classical system. That's why, even though the exact position of an electron in a copper wire may not be known, a current will still flow through that wire if differing voltages are applied at either end. That is one reason why your analogy was not good. I made a grievous error in my initial post by being technically incorrect; however, the message of what I was saying still stands, and it is what I clarified in my initial response.
Your analogy was stupid because it compared apples to oranges. You first make an analogy of a subatomic system to a classical system, and then you yell at me for equating the two. I did the opposite! I said it was stupid to talk about a microscopic system when talking a macroscopic system. I have no quibble with any of the facts you state*. They're all correct. But all your advanced physics knowledge and all these facts are both clouding the issue and your argument. The axions cannot use a regular electromagnetic detector because, like neutrinos (I think; as I have said before, I'm not intimately acquainted with subatomic physics), they interact very weakly with real matter (i.e. they have very little to no electromagnetic interaction, due to being not just net neutral, but fundamentally neutral). The detector that had to be used did indeed detect electromagnetic signatures (photons, I would surmise) because this axion, a fundamentally neutral particle decayed into two not neutral things and these interacted with matter, but the difference between it and the regular detectors is that the interaction site where the axions were created could exist inside the detector. Now, the electromagnetic stuff that this detector is detecting is not like the electromagnetic stuff that ballistics gel is detecting. This is detecting a photon, a packet of electromagnetic energy, an electromagnetic wave; ballistics gel is detecting a wave caused because different pieces of matter are colliding thanks to the electromagnetic force.
The two are different. Quite different. And that is another reason I didn't like your analogy. You obviously know a lot of physics. However, I am surprised that you didn't pick up the difference between an electromagnetic wave and/or photon and a wave of matter that the electromagnetic force mediates.
Now, just one last thing. What I was saying in my previous post was not that you were making things simpler, it was that you were making them more complex. As you said, the special cases (like spring constants) are made to make life simple because they are simpler than having to integrate the electromagnetic field equations over all the particles in the ballistic gel! I was complaining that you were making things way more complicated than they needed to be. That was my last quibble with your analogy.
That all said, I would be glad to hear your response, and again, sorry to have implied that you were stupid. I was complaining about the analogy.
It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
Oif -- couple'a misconceptions ere:
1) The axion is an outcropping of the standard model -- people are looking for it because the standard model says it ought to be there.
[ 1.5) Until it makes predictions for the masses of the elementary particles, it should be called the "sub-standard model" to begin with ]
2) Therefore the Axion cannot possibly be in conflict with string theory either, as string theory is an attempt to derive the standard model from something more fundamental. Wherever the standard model says something, the goal of string theory is to say at least the same thing (and ideally to say something more precise or more fundamental. But certainly not something in conflict with it).
3) If anybody actually ever found an Axion, you'd read about it in Nature. Science. Possibly Phys Rev, and quite likely arXiv. Not New Scientist, which is really more a 'weekly world news of science reporting'. Publishing in New Scientist is pretty much an admission that you have nothing publishable, really.
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I understand that you (and other posters) think that I've been sort of a semantics-nazi during this discussion, but this was not my intention. I just don't want conceptually false analogies to be used that then allow people to make false statements about the characteristics of an axion in the future. In my opinion, understanding how a subatomic particle is detected is critical to understanding what it is. I certainly don't expect everyone here to be able to give a complete scientific description of the properties of an axion, I just expect them not to give misleading statements. If I heard the ballistics jel analogy without knowing better I would ask myself "If an axion can disturb a ballistics jel then doesn't that mean that it is composed of charged particles or is charged itself?" I made a grievous error in my initial post by being technically incorrect; however, the message of what I was saying still stands, and it is what I clarified in my initial response. And I was probably too harsh on my response. I think we all finally understand the basic points that both you and I were trying to make. I should have been a little more explicit in the beginning to have avoided a lot of confusion.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
I had both Jain and Singh as professors. Somehow, I'm gonna doubt the certitude of this one.
Kinda like the SM physicists did with dark matter? "Oh man. These observations don't fit with our theory!" "Quick! Make something that fits!" Dark matter is born.