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New Particle Found, the Bottom-Most Bottomonium
PhysicsDavid writes "Collaborators on the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center have detected and measured, for the first time after a 30-year search, the lowest energy particle of the 'bottomonium' family, called the eta-sub-b. Bottomonium consists of a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark bound together by the strong force. The discovery fills in a missing piece of quark physics that will help reveal the nature and behavior of the quarks and the strong force."
They exist in groups of two or three that create a neutral color charge. For example, a particle can consist of red, green, and blue or of blue and anti-blue.
I'm not surprised that I can't tell the difference between a proper description of quantum mechanics and the ramblings of a drunken madman on the street. What surprises me is that particle physicists have trouble with that as well. The best way I've heard it described, we're used to relating to things on a human scale. We're used to matter at about our size, moving things about with our own hands, seeing physics operate on a human scale. This is what we're used to, this is what we've come to expect, all is fine. But things outside of our natural environment are very odd. Being in space produces very odd results. We can eventually wrap our brains around it but those things are still odd. At the QM scale, things go from odd to perverse. We can experimentally validate that our seemingly addled theories are correct but it doesn't make any kind of neat and proper sense. The classic scientist saw an exploration of nature as a discovery of the working of the mind of God, a mind we of course imagine in the ideal of our own human mind. Stars on their courses, planets in their orbits, everything neat and prim and orderly. No wonder so many bright scientists reacted in disgust when they looked at the implications of QM. If this is a picture of the mind of God, he's a bloody nutter.
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I'm not surprised that I can't tell the difference between a proper description of quantum mechanics and the ramblings of a drunken madman on the street.
I don't mean to sound like I'm ripping on you, but QM isn't really that fundamentally "weird" or difficult to understand, or "odd" at this point in history; it's not any more complicated to wrap your brain around than classical mechanics, or E&M, or automobile maintenance. The "romance" that QM (like Relativity) is "hard" is, I think, a remnant of early popularizations of cutting edge research in the 1920s and 1930s, when a coherent theoretical framework was under construction for the first time, and physicists didn't really know how far down the rabbit hole went. Popularizers were desperately flailing around, looking for analogies that a much more rural and less technically sophisticated public could understand, and to whom they had trouble relating (the "they're all bumpkins" fallacy). We physicists were pretty inept at doing so then, and have been particularly inept at eradicating those early and incorrectly popularized notions from our public interactions to this day.
Today, we should know better ... most of QM is robust and mature enough that it's an engineering discipline, for cripes sake. Hopefully, the popularizations will catch up with the reality at some point, and we won't keep subjecting generations to the "QM is so weird you can't possibly understand it unless you're a genius" meme.
Just because their wave functions look like one is the time reversed version of the other, doesn't mean they actually move in different time directions.
First of all, drop the "it's so simple a child could understand it" attitude. In a room full of geniuses (ie 120+ IQs), maybe half can have this stuff explained to them on a better than absurdly simplified level. Get deep into the mathematics and you're down to about 5%.
Secondly, "what the hell is so weird" about what you just talked about?
Gee, I dunno, how about the fact that you have to combine things that can't exist to get something that can?
Yes, I realize that mathematically, manifesting energies in various forms makes wonderful sense. To the casual observer, however, much of QM is anti-intuitive and difficult at best to understand. To the average Joe on the street, most of physics is completely impossible to understand, unless you're going to dumb it down to 4-year-old terminology (and lose all nuance and consequence along the way).
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."