Matter-Antimatter Bias Seen In Fermilab Collisions

ubermiester writes "The New York Times is reporting that scientists at Fermilab have found evidence of a very small (about 1%) average difference between the amount of matter/antimatter produced in a series of particle collisions. Quoting: '[T]he team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of ... muons ... slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.' This finding invites theorists to explain why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe, when the Standard Model suggests that there should be equal amounts of each." Here is the paper as submitted to Physical Review (PDF). The DZero team is looking forward to getting detailed data from the LHC once it ramps up operationally.

Comments

How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[valros]

Wasn't this the previously supposed hypothesis? That the big bang held a slight matter bias. Its great that we can recreate it now. Also, how has antimatter responded to this bias?

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[JoshuaZ]

That is a hypothesis used by cosmologists but it isn't part of the Standard Model. The Standard Model predicts particle behavior, not as much the macroscopic stuff. For most purposes the Standard Model agrees with the cosmological observations. This is one example where the Standard Model may be missing something or need tweaking.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps the "anti" in "antimatter" is dominate over the "identify matter" in "antimatter" and it sometimes acts as antiantimatter. so it isn't the universe giving a bias towards matter, it's antimatter being biased against itself.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[DavidRawling]

The antimatter is very upset at the bias, and is petitioning for full recognition and the payment of reparations.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[francium de neobie]

However, he died in a suicide bombing attack soon after he filed the petition, so the petition no longer matters.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Sehnsucht]

As there were no next of kin, reparations defaulted back to the matter governing body.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[silentcoder]

>Also, how has antimatter responded to this bias?

Antimatter has declared the bias to be a clear-cut case of discrimination and has applied for status as a protected minority.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[nacturation]

Wasn't this the previously supposed hypothesis? That the big bang held a slight matter bias.

Slashdot has known this for more than a decade. After all, this isn't "news that anti-matters".

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I just dislocated my brain..

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Trepidity]

To be fair, Slashdot has known both the affirmation and negation of nearly all propositions.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[somersault]

That wasn't a suicide bombing, that was him trying to hug his girlfriend. While both their houses were alike in dignity, it turned out that their physical differences were too much for even love to overcome.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[antifoidulus]

Including that one?

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

...so the petition anti-matters.

FTFY

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Antimatter3009]

Also, how has antimatter responded to this bias?

We demand equal representation!

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[T Murphy]

This is one example where the Standard Model may be missing something or need tweaking.

Or the universe may be missing something and need tweaking. Don't rule out possibilities too early.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Rocketship Underpant]

In other news, late-night comedy pundits acknowledge that reality has a slight anti-antimatter bias.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using what we learned from slashdot we should be able to buy a troll-matter detector, although I fear it'll suffer the same fate as the sarcasm detector.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

Including that one?

Don't be absurd, not until now.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Gravitron 5000]

The universe is missing a whole freaking lot of anti-matter.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Goaway]

Remind us again, which crackpot theory is it that you're blindly supporting?

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[mopower70]

Seriously? An anonymous coward posts with no indication of his national origin and your response is a generalized, stereotyping lambast against an entire country? Obviously your understanding of science is broken beyond repair if these are the kinds of conclusions you draw from a single unsubstantiated data point.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[sdpuppy]

The universe is missing a whole freaking lot of anti-matter.

Uh -sorry, I'll return it in the morning.

Didn't think anyone would miss it...

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Wasn't this the previously supposed hypothesis? That the big bang held a slight matter bias. Its great that we can recreate it now.

Some leftist parties don't think so. Instead they suggest an affirmative action in order to give matter and antimatter equal opportunities.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Colonel Korn]

This is one example where the Standard Model may be missing something or need tweaking.

Because good theories always make fundamental predictions that need to be contradicted by reality and then tweaked later in an ad-hoc fashion without ever revising their underlying principles. That's great science! Ah well, whatever gets you grants and funding right? In that case, status quo it is! We must always be openly hostile to all competing theories, refuse to publish them so they can be peer-reviewed, etc. That's progress.

In a generic sense it's a quite easy to publish a new, competing theory. That's the kind of thing most encouraged by the current peer review culture, as long as it's self consistent and matches observations.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[oscarwumpus]

The universe is missing a whole freaking lot of anti-matter.

Uh -sorry, I'll return it in the morning.

Didn't think anyone would miss it...

You've got it?! What am I supposed to put on my cereal until then?

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[sdpuppy]

Get some Stevia no calorie but all natural (cough) sweetener.

Probably will taste about the same as that anti-matter swill that you've been using.

Plus it'll be somewhat healthier as you wouldn't have total annihilation going on in your digestive tract so you wouldn't need to eat as many Tums afterwards.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[iris-n]

His manner of speech is utterly american. And it's not the first time I see this kind of rant. See the countless angry posts that appear every time global warming is mentioned.

Also, I don't claim that my conclusions about americans are scientific. It's hard to do reliable sociological experiments about these kind of things. Is just a gut feeling, antipathy, or if you prefer, rant.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Myopic]

Mmm hmm. And your manner of speech is utterly jackass.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

he had nuclear arms

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[cpricejones]

Moreover, these particles would prefer to be described as probaryonic from this point onwards.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[jefu]

You are correct in that.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[jefu]

That is not true at all.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

His manner of speech is utterly american.

And your is utterly European. That arrogant/smug attitude gives it away every time.

Ya, I'm trolling the trolls this morning.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[kvezach]

But if the big bang had a slight antimatter bias, we would have called what we now call antimatter, matter, and vice versa. We'd still say the big bang would have a slight matter bias, because our planet, sun, etc, would be made of "ordinary" (common) matter -- to the eyes of our alternate selves.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[vlm]

Some leftist parties don't think so. Instead they suggest an affirmative action in order to give matter and antimatter equal opportunities.

Forced integration. Implying that's not going to end well would be highly politically incorrect.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the Standard Model take into account the proximity of matter/anti-matter? If the theory is that there should be equal parts of both, do they necessarily have to occupy the same, or even adjacent, space ( or time )? Also, is it possible that the fact that the experiments are carried out near this huge mass of matter we call Earth could affect the results?

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a theory that corresponds better to reality than the standard model, publish... surely you'll win the Nobel prize.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[vegiVamp]

Yes, and no.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing wrong with your model that 200 mg of Haldol couldn't fix.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[gstoddart]

The universe is missing a whole freaking lot of anti-matter.

The Universe has exactly what it needs.

Our interpretation of what it should have obviously needs tweaking -- or at the very least, we need better observations.

If your model doesn't match reality, it's not your reality that needs fixing. :-P

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[fifedrum]

electric universe? Hologramatic universe? Time cube?

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Bigjeff5]

It's a safe bet, given that it's an American website and most of the posters are American.

If it were a French website, it would be a safe bet to replace "Americans" with "French" in the statement.

Frankly, all the European assholes can go fuck themselves for all I care.

The cordial Europeans are free to stay. ;)

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Bigjeff5]

We've known for a long time the Standard Model is wrong, it never fit the large-scale observations well even though it fits the small scale observations almost perfectly. This just confirms that it's the model that is wrong - that matter and antimatter should be created in equal amounts - and not our interpretation of the observations - that there must be a matter bias, or the universe would not exist. The trouble is we still don't have anything better than the Standard Model to describe these relationships, and yet another patch is going to be made to fix the part where it doesn't work. This limits its ability to predict currently un-observed behavior. It might predict something, but you can't be at all confident in the prediction until you can actually observe it.

Also, unlike other truly successful models of reality, the Standard Model is extremely obtuse and complicated. To write the equation out by hand requires several pages. Compare that to the relationship of matter to energy and the foundation for general relativity - e=mc^2 - which is all of five characters long (including the equal sign). That equation describes just as much about the physical universe as the Standard Model, yet the Standard Model is a thousand times more complicated.

A lot of scientists have this nagging feeling that there is an equation just as simple as Einstein's to describe sub-atomic particle movement, it's just that nobody has found it yet.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy, do you suck at it.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

This one:

Earth has 4 corner simultaneous 4-day TIMECUBE in only 24 hour rotation.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[osu-neko]

But if the big bang had a slight antimatter bias, we would have called what we now call antimatter, matter, and vice versa. We'd still say the big bang would have a slight matter bias, because our planet, sun, etc, would be made of "ordinary" (common) matter -- to the eyes of our alternate selves.

Well, yes, precisely. The mystery isn't that the bias is for matter rather than antimatter; that's a given, given what you just said. The mystery is that they aren't produced in precisely equal quantities with no bias at all. Why is there a more common form and a less common form at all?

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[DrGamez]

A lot of scientists have this nagging feeling that there is an equation just as simple as Einstein's to describe sub-atomic particle movement, it's just that nobody has found it yet.

Is this nagging just the human need for simplicity and order though? As much as I would like the universe both large and small to be governed by one simple equation; we are talking about *everything* at once - it might just be really complicated in this universe for no 'good' reason.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[shadowbearer]

  Occasionally, even wisdom ;-)

SB

  PS - Belated thanks on your sig, got the book and read it. Great read, nostalgia maxed. Whether my post led to my PS or my PS led to my post I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

Does it really matter?

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[geekoid]

I've seen similar rants from people from all over the worlds.

Basically anyone who foolishly believes in things that are wrong.
Homeopathy, anti-vaccine, etc. There is nothing 'American' about his view.

Idiotic, yes.

Plus your wording seems to imply all Americans don't understand science. In fact, it's mostly a loud minority of people who don't even know there own theology that complain about science.

Or people who think magic is real.

And that Applies to EVERY country.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Trepidity]

Re: the postscript -- excellent, glad you liked it! I took a class from that prof. a few years back which was excellent, and feel the book deserves a read outside of academia, so I've had it hanging out in my sig.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[shadowbearer]

  Oh, yeah. Huge nostalgia for me, back in the early-mid 80s I made a small living fixing them. Still do, once in a while... cheap soldering irons still have their uses ;)

  I'd give much to sit in that class you took. We are all getting older, nostalgia lost ;-\

  Cheers,
  SB

 

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[nacturation]

But everything would still taste like anti-chicken.

Re:How has antimatter responded to this bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple things:

Compare that to the relationship of matter to energy and the foundation for general relativity - e=mc^2 - which is all of five characters long (including the equal sign)

Firstly, that's Special Relativity, and is the short form of Einstein's relativistic energy-mass-momentum equivalence:

E^2 - (pc)^2 = (m_0c^2)^2

which is not an equality but an equivalence that says that as its apparent velocity (momentum) approaches that of the speed of light, an object's apparent resistance to any acceleration is equivalent to its relativistic mass.

E=mc^2 is a special case in which p (momentum) is 0; that is, the resistance of a given object to an initial acceleration from being measured at perfect rest is proportional to its rest mass, or equivalently, that its rest mass is proportional to its energy.

There is also E=pc for an object which has zero rest mass (a photon, for example), where its momentum is proportional to the object's energy.

Where p and m are both nonzero, then c is a proportionality constant among energy, momentum and rest mass.

Importantly, Special Relativity only deals with objects which have a constant measured velocity (i.e., they are not experiencing accleration). General Relativity is needed for systems in which objects experience accelerations, including that attributable to gravitation. Since everything we know about experiences gravitation, we must either decide to ignore it (because the acceleration is small) or move from Special Relativity to GR.

General Relativity uses Einstein's Field Equations, which are much less simple than the special case of the mass-momentum-energy equivalence in SR.

The compactest form of writing them down while retaining conventional units is:

G_{\mu\nu} = {8 \pi G \over c^4} T_{\mu\nu}

where on the right G is Newton's gravitational constant, and T_{\mu\nu} is a stress-energy-momentum tensor which accounts for the metric expansion of space, and on the left is the Einstein tensor.

The tensors in question are beyond the scope of this message, but the latter incorporates the p and m_0 terms from SR, as well as pressure and shear terms, decomposed into density and flux (e.g. it accounts for the movement and acceleration of mass-energy).

Putting it simply, (8 pi G)/c^4 is the proportionality constant between the density and motion of an object at a point in spacetime and its experience of gravitation. Since the G_{\mu\nu} tensor in SR is geometrical, one can also think of (8 pi G)/c^4 as a proportionality constant between the curvature of space-time at a point and the behaviour of the mass-energy at that point.

Unfortunately the hitch in the Einstein stress-energy-momentum tensor is that in order to say anything about the evolution of space-time, one must know some details about the objects embedded in it, and there is a circularity problem wherein very small and very high-energy particles dramatically curve space-time locally but the Standard Model Lagrangians cannot explain how those particles will move through space-time whose curvature is non-negligible on the scale of the particles themselves, and the evolution of the Einstein tensor really requires knowing that.

To write the equation out by hand requires several pages

The Lagrangians (in flat space-time) are actually pretty simple, and in the electroweak limit you only need two lines.

This is not terribly surprising, since the Standard Model aims to be as reduced and parsimonious a system as can reproduce nature reasonably in Minkowski space-time. The problem with the Standard Model is that the universe is more obtuse and complicated because it does not behave like Minkowski space-time at all (in particular, the universe is expanding, and filled with areas of low gravitational potential in which oscillators tick more slowly than in inter-galactic-cluster space, which among other things means maintain

Sample Size?

[ScaryMonkey]

How do they project statistics like that? I'm trying to imagine what kind of sample size you'd need to represent, well, everything in the universe.

Re:Sample Size?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I'm trying to imagine what kind of sample size you'd need to represent, well, everything in the universe.

Sample size and significance calculations are generally done assuming an infinite population from which to sample, so "everything in the universe" is actually as close to perfect agreement between the math and the reality as you can get.

Re:Sample Size?

[dcollins]

For christ's sake, the way inferential statistics works the size of the population is fundamentally irrelevant. If anything, larger is a bit better. Stop being a dumbass.

One more time -- "That's the single dumbest thing you can say about polling results." http://angrymath.blogspot.com/2009/02/interpreting-polls-angrymath-meditation.html

Is 1% significant?

[gman003]

For some experiments, 1% might be attributable to error. I've never done practical particle physics, though. Does this fall under experimental error, or is stuff like this usually re-creatable to seventeen decimal places?

I may not know much science, but I do know that margin of error is important.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[WarJolt]

depends on the instruments used. 1% can be a lot with sensitive enough equipment.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[crescente]

Their error, as stated in the linked abstract, is less than 0.3%. So, if you believe they're doing statistics correctly, yes, the signal is greater than the noise. More importantly, even, say 1.0 - 0.3 = 0.7% is HUGE: the common estimate of matter-antimatter asymmetry at the big bang was merely a billion-and-one to a billion. (linky: http://livefromcern.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antimatter/academy/AM-travel02c.html). And that extra one in a billion is all the matter we have today.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[FrangoAssado]

Well, if they wrote a paper and submitted it to Phys Rev, you can rest assured they considered this (and it will be checked by many other physicists).

The abstract in the linked paper says the result they got differs by 3.2 standard deviations from the prediction given by the Standard Model. That's not conclusive, but it's significant. Surely they (or someone else) will keep looking in other data (from LHC, for example) to see if they can increase confidence.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[Trepidity]

Assuming that what the conclusion (p. 21) reports as "like-sign dimuon charge asymmetry of semileptonic b-hadron decays" is the number we're looking for, they do give a margin of error that's smaller than the asymmetry observed. They report the asymmetry as:

A = -0.00957 +/- 0.00251 (stat) +/- 0.00146 (syst)

I believe the two errors are there because they breaking out the statistical margin of error (due to sampling) and systemic margin of error (due to accuracy of apparatus and setup).

Re:Is 1% significant?

[tylersoze]

Given the calculated ratio of photons to fermions during baryogensis the asymmetry is suppose to be even smaller than that, something like 1 extra particle of matter per 100 million if I remember correctly.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[Anonymous Coward]

For some experiments, 1% might be attributable to error. I've never done practical particle physics, though. Does this fall under experimental error, or is stuff like this usually re-creatable to seventeen decimal places?

I may not know much science, but I do know that margin of error is important.

It's extremely significant given some models show that a 1% bias would account for the Universe as we know it. Dead even, no Universe. A 1% bias and we get our Universe. 1% may not seem like much but it's massive when you are talking about the origin of the Universe. As far as experimental error 1% is a pretty massive error in particle physics. Add a few zeroes, 0.0001%, and it'd still be interesting but a full 1% is pretty massive on the scale we are talking about.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[Anonymous Coward]

It probably is. If they think it's worth a publication, they can most likely back it up statistically.
I've studied a physics myself for a few semesters and done experiments and about the first thing I learned at uni in physics in contrast to school physics was that error calculation was mandatory for analyzing experimental data and drawing conclusions. Actually it was the first chapter in my physics book, so my point is, it's safe to assume that those physicists know what they are doing. ^^

Re:Is 1% significant?

[ConfusedVorlon]

Particle physicists deal almost entirely in probabilistic measurements, so they get pretty good at understanding their error bars.

1% could be enormous, or tiny depending on the sample size.

The fact that this has been published in Physical Review gives a strong implication that they have done and checked their sums.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes you wonder what would a universe that swung the OTHER way look like? If there was a 1% bias towards antimatter, would we still have all the things our universe has? Would gravity still work the same way? What about magnetism? Man that blows my mind.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[Anonymous Coward]

1% of a value extrapolated to approach infinity really can be an all or nothing difference.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[buchner.johannes]

Your post is nice, but I just wanted to say that that finding is huge! </Kayne West>
I hope they can reproduce the result elsewhere.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[Anonymous Coward]

More importantly, even, say 1.0 - 0.3 = 0.7% is HUGE...

Seconded. I felt my jaw drop a little when they called 1% small. That the Standard Model implies a much lower fraction means that it is far, far from being complete.

This is big news. It's like saying that of boolean logic, 1 has a special property that 0 doesn't. All bits in nature are however qbits, so this research might provide further insights into quantum entaglement.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[FTWinston]

Makes you wonder what would a universe that swung the OTHER way look like?

Exactly the same. Gravity wouldn't be affected at all by a reversal of electrical charge. EM would be the same, but the other way around (not that we'd notice, as all our points of reference would be the other way around), and the strong and weak forces would still work just like you'd expect.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[Smallpond]

Their error, as stated in the linked abstract, is less than 0.3%. So, if you believe they're doing statistics correctly, yes, the signal is greater than the noise. More importantly, even, say 1.0 - 0.3 = 0.7% is HUGE: the common estimate of matter-antimatter asymmetry at the big bang was merely a billion-and-one to a billion. (linky: http://livefromcern.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antimatter/academy/AM-travel02c.html). And that extra one in a billion is all the matter we have today.

That ratio means that the energy of the big bang was much less (100 / 1,000,000,000) than what it was previously estimated to result in the matter we see today. Kind of a large difference.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[nedlohs]

I'm sure the scientists who wrote the paper never even considered that before submitting the article for peer review.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[bunratty]

They should hire professional statisticians to look over the work before making claims that have such staggering and widespread implications for the universe! I'm looking forward to Watts Up With That's debunking of all this sham science.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[sdpuppy]

While I would agree with you, isn't there more than electrical charge being reversed - like quantum numbers.

Also while it seems quite reasonable to expect that gravity to be unaffected going from matter to anti matter, has it ever been demonstrated experimentally?

Nature always seems to have surprises to mess with out theories and our minds :-)

Re:Is 1% significant?

[Myopic]

You make a fair point, but assumed in a scientific statement such as the one made by sdpuppy is "...according to everything we know about the universe..."

Sure, everything we know might be wrong, but not so far as we know.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[FTWinston]

Until an experiment demonstrates otherwise, or a convincing theory persuades me, I'll continue to suspect that an antimatter universe would appear identical to a "normal" matter universe, macroscopically at any rate. Provided that we didn't poke it too much. C-symmetery is likely close enough.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[c 0xFF]

Except in that universe, the + and - on circuit diagrams would actually make sense.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[steelfood]

Lends credence to the idea that the matter we see probably isn't all there is.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[Steve Max]

They submitted a paper saying that they see a difference of around three sigma from what the SM predicts; they claim nothing more than that. Besides, we need to see the whole picture here: previous experiments agree with the SM prediction within 1-sigma, which is as good as it gets, while their result is a bit off. Their best fit disagrees more with the current combined BaBar/Belle best result than the SM prediction does to the BaBar/Belle numbers. This, combined with the fact that we've seen even bigger signals on the "b" sector simply die after some more data was collected, makes me say "bah" and wait. When they get to a seven-sigma disagreement, I'll be impressed; but I doubt they will. I believe D0's final paper on this will agree much better with the SM.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[Chris Burke]

Unless the Time Machine opened a portal not just back in time, but to another dimension, and now he's specifically telling Franklin to use the wrong convention for their universe!

Oh and uh somehow the temporal field and the tachyons and so forth prevent the time traveler from annihilating instantly.

The script is still in progress, okay?

Re:Is 1% significant?

[d*m*int]

The main difference is that it would be ruled by the Anti-Monitor.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, everyone would be evil. Except for the current evil people, they'd be the good guys.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[shadowbearer]

  That's human convention, not the universe's. The universe doesn't respect human notation ;-)

SB

Re:Is 1% significant?

[scribblej]

Richard Feynman has a series of lectures on physics - you can probably find them online... someplace... anyhow, the one on symmetry is great and ends up with a nice (related) punchline I won't spoil.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[sjames]

It would be exactly the same in every measurable way except that Leonard Nimoy would have a beard.

Re:Is 1% significant?

[dmpot]

Their error, as stated in the linked abstract, is less than 0.3%.

It usually means that with 70% probability the value lies with this interval, but if you want to have 90% probability, it is going to be thrice more. So it could be said that the chance that this difference is significant is about 90%. However, it could be some other errors that were not taken into account properly. I would say that without independent confirmation is too early to say that it is an established fact and not a random fluke.

LHC can suck it!

[oldhack]

Your expensive tube is doing fat lot of good, eh?! You go Fermilab! LHC can suck it!

Re:LHC can suck it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fermilab will antimatter when the LHC finally does come online in its full 14TeV power.

Re:LHC can suck it!

[Anonymous Coward]

This post bought to you by American Patriots Inc:

USA! USA! USA!

WHOO!

YEAH!

WHOO!

USA! USA! USA!

FUCK YEAH!

WHOO!

YEAH!

WHOO!

USA! USA! USA!

American Patriots Inc sincerely wishes to thank you for your time.

Re:LHC can suck it!

[Tablizer]

You go Fermilab! LHC can suck it!

Don't worry, the blackholes it will generate will certainly suck stuff, including Fermi.
   

duh!

[toastar]

so can this help us map the antimatter in the universe?

Re:duh!

[jfengel]

Mostly, it helps us explain why there isn't any antimatter to map.

One would expect that the universe started with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but we don't see any antimatter. One possibility is that there's a slight bias towards matter. Much antimatter was present at one point, but interacted with matter, producing high-energy photons and leaving the universe with just matter.

At least, that's one possibility, and this experiment is evidence in favor of it. One more piece of a very difficult puzzle.

I see anti-matter

[Anonymous Coward]

It's obvious, the matter - anti-matter annihilated each other so the matter left in the universe is the 1% extra produced in the big bang. Of course, I have trouble calculating a tip so I'm probably out of my depth.

Re:I see anti-matter

[Steve Max]

The problem is that there wasn't an 1% extra (remember, this result is "we get an 1% asymmetry on a certain system", not "there is an 1% asymmetry on the Universe); there was something like 10 000 000 000 antiprotons for 10 000 000 001 protons; we get 10 billion annihilations and a single proton out of that. It would be easier to explain if the asymmetry was bigger: we'd have to add some feature to our standard model, but that's not hard. The hard part is to make the asymmetry so small, but still bigger than zero. There are features on the SM that make this non-zero, but they're not enough. Maybe this D0 result agrees with some theory that predicts a matter/antimatter asymmetry that matches our observed value batter, but I don't think this result will hold.

Budget

[MichaelSmith]

So presumably 99% of the mass-energy in the universe is currently energy, much of which must be potential and kinetic energy. The momentum of the Big Bang, the energy we will get back in the eventual collapse, light elements which will eventually fuse, and heavy elements which will eventually undergo fission.

Re:Budget

[ShakaUVM]

>>The momentum of the Big Bang, the energy we will get back in the eventual collapse...

Eventual collapse?

Haven't kept up with physics, eh? =)

Re:Budget

[Trepidity]

As far as I can tell, the "big crunch" hypothesis isn't yet totally ruled out, though majority opinion is probably against it.

Re:Budget

[MichaelSmith]

Well okay but even if we don't rewind the energy to push us to infinity must have come out of that 99%.

Re:Budget

[DMiax]

Man, I wished so much for the collapse... It would mean that all the cool physics at high densities and small distances would happen again...

Re:Budget

[nadaou]

never fear, opinions on the matter may swing back in favor of the big crunch at some time in the future. if you get my meaning.

Re:Budget

[Graff]

So presumably 99% of the mass-energy in the universe is currently energy, much of which must be potential and kinetic energy.

Not necessarily, it depends on how many iterations of annihilation-recombination took place.

For example, say we have 100% matter and antimatter, it interacts and annihilates leaving 1% matter. The remaining energy recombines back into matter and antimatter (through processes like vacuum fluctuation and virtual particles), now 99% of that annihilates, leaving lasts iteration's 1% plus this iteration's 99% x 1% = 0.99% for a total of 1.99%. Next will be 98.01% x 1% = 0.9801%, and so on.

Thus the formula is:
0.99^0+0.99^1+0.99^2+...

This is a geometric series and since r is 0.99 the limit is 1/(1-r) or 1/0.01 = 100%

So, theoretically, 100% of the energy could end up as matter. Of course in the real world not all of the energy combines into matter-antimatter pairs and not all of the matter and antimatter annihilate each other. This means that we end up with a universe where a good chunk of the original energy is matter, a tiny bit is antimatter, and the rest of it is energy of some sort. It's almost definitely not 99% energy, and it's almost definitely not 100% matter.

Re:Budget

[MichaelSmith]

I wasn't sure about my assumption that the left over energy would be all our energy, including the energy which would be released ultimately fusing everything down to iron. But if that is the case we can't be 100% matter because then we would be at maximum entropy.

Re:Budget

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> So presumably 99% of the mass-energy in the universe is currently energy, much of which must be potential and kinetic energy.

Yes.

In fact, you might go as far as to say all of it is potential or kinetic.

Re:Budget

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what she said

Re:Budget

[edremy]

And you could have a front row seat, if you weren't getting crushed back into an infinitesimal ball of energy

Re:Budget

[Culture20]

And you could have a front row seat, if you weren't getting crushed back into an infinitesimal ball of energy

It worked for Galan of Taa. Side effect: munchies.

Re:Budget

[Sheafification]

Your summation doesn't make sense. We have 1/0.01 = 100 = 10000%, so the total energy is 10000% of what it started as? The very first term in the series should be a clue that something is wrong: 0.99^0 = 1 = 100% already.

Re:Budget

[nizo]

Only if it happens in the next 50-80 years or so, barring some serious life extension discoveries.

Re:Budget

[BitZtream]

Yea, it just depends on which day of the week you subscribe to which theory.

The reality of it is ... they are theories and they continually keep finding new data that says the theories are at least partially wrong or in some cases bare no relation to reality.

Stop pretending you (or anyone else) understands the universe.

Re:Budget

[Graff]

Your summation doesn't make sense. We have 1/0.01 = 100 = 10000%, so the total energy is 10000% of what it started as?

I did make a bit of a mistake in writing it down. The actual equation should be:

0.01 x 0.99^0 + 0.01 x 0.99^1 + 0.01 x 0.99^2 + ...

which simplifies to:

0.01 x (0.99^0 + 0.99^1 + 0.99^2 + ...)

or:

0.01 x 1/(1 - 0.99) = 0.01 x 100 = 1 = 100%

At every step you have so much energy left, this is the 0.99 term. Since you have 99% energy left of the previous step's energy after every iteration you end up with the geometric series. You have to take the energy of each step and multiply it by 1% to get how much matter is left at every step, that is the 0.01 term that you see in the equation. I mistakenly left out out and just assumed it was there.

You can see this is correct by doing the math manually (or through a spreadsheet):

step 1: 100% energy x 1% matter = 1% total matter
step 2: 99% energy x 1% matter + step 1 = 1.99% total matter
step 3: 98.01% energy x 1% matter + step 2 = 2.9701% total matter
step 4: 97.0299% energy x 1% matter + step 3 = 3.940399% total matter

Compute that to a couple of hundred steps and you see that the curve appears to approach an asymptote of 100%, just as the math predicts.

Re:Budget

[geekoid]

You should stop pretending that people can't understand the universe. There is a lot unknown, but none of it is unknowable.

The 'big crunch' doesn't seem very likely at this point. Can new data change that? yes, but as time as gone one the data keeps piling against it.

Stupid anti-science people.

Re:Budget

[InfoJunkie777]

As far as I can tell, the "big crunch" hypothesis isn't yet totally ruled out, though majority opinion is probably against it.

I have some on this point in astrophysics. I think "continual expansion" continues for one trillion years, then "heat death" and the universe goes dark. Even read a GREAT SF story on it once. Most of this comes from string theory and the "brane thing".

Uneven laws

[Thanshin]

It would be so funny to discover now that the laws of physics are uneven in space...

That the same experiment gets you different results depending on which sid of the Milky Way you are...

Or they could be uneven in time. Maybe every 54.12 years the relation between produced matter/antimatter switches from 1:1.01 to 1.01:1.

Re:Uneven laws

[cc1984_]

It would be so funny to discover now that the laws of physics ... be uneven in time. Maybe every 54.12 years the relation between produced matter/antimatter switches from 1:1.01 to 1.01:1.

You're not the first to think this (specifically the fundamental constants like the speed of light might be changing over time):

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/constant_changing_010815.html

Re:Uneven laws

[silentcoder]

That would not be a "discovery" but a confirmation. Many physicists have suggested such hypothesis in the past. Even more have suggested asymetry in time -t that at various ages of the universe the fundamental constants may have been different to what they are now.

There are a few pieces of evidence suggesting this (the rate of decay of Oklo's uranium COULD be explained that way - though a natural fission reactor is a more plausible one), and several physicists have conjectured that the fine-structure-constant may have changed over time, and that would be an explanation for the wrong speed of galaxies that wouldn't require cold-dark-matter.

Our estimates on the age of the universe have changed 4 times in the past 2 decades - generally, it got younger with the current consensus at about 13-Billion years.
Of course if any of the fundamental constants had changed over time or in different regions of space - in the end, it's simply a matter of how you travel through space-time, then that means all bets are off. The fundamental constants determine the laws of physics. Thus far, outside of singularities like the big bang or black holes (and Stephen Hawking thinks we don't even need THOSE to be singularities) there is no really strong evidence for it. It's possible, but unlikely - and if true, means it's mathematically impossible for us to understand the universe.

Re:Uneven laws

[Black Gold Alchemist]

If the laws are uneven in time, that could lead to perpetual motion among other interesting consequences.

For example, pretend that the speed of light is variable over time and remember that E=mc^2. On earth, we build a matter-antimatter annihilation laser and point it at a base in space. When the speed of light speeds up to c=1.1 the normal value, we fire off the laser, converting 10 g of matter into 1.08749377 petajoules. The light energy travels for a time, during which the speed of light slows back down to c. It hits a set up in the space base that converts the light back into matter. We divide by normal c, and are left with 12.1 grams of matter. We mail it back to earth, and send 10 g grams back to the laser (to repeat the process). The other 2.1 g is used as starship fuel, worth over 180 terajoules. Don't rinse, but repeat.

Re:Uneven laws

[Joce640k]

That would just mean that the "laws", aren't - in the same way that Newton's "laws" turned out to be not quite right when you're moving quickly.

And science would be cool about it. Excited about it, even.

Public imagination aside, scientists tend to celebrate when they're find out they were wrong (especially if it took big/expensive machines to do it...)

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

So maybe Dragons really did exists once upon a time when the laws of physics were different.

Oh.. the creationists will love this.

Re:Uneven laws

[Joshua Fan]

The real problem facing physicists right now is the lack of a Fermilab in Australia to confirm such a possibility.

Re:Uneven laws

[Thanshin]

I love your post. Much food for thought.

Thanks.

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm... no, it's NOT possible. It's not possible for a CONSTANT to change ;) Then it wouldn't be a constant, and we could have to rename it.
( I know, I know, some computer languages have constants that can change...)

Re:Uneven laws

[Black Gold Alchemist]

Thanks.

Re:Uneven laws

[Yvanhoe]

Because, of course, magically, no doppler shift will happen when you elevate c to 110%...

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting idea. They may very well not be constants, but quasi-constant terms that simply change too slowly or too little for us to notice. The question is that they probably do not change in random ways, but in well defined patterns, so there could be more fundamental laws of physics awaiting to be discovered.

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Just tell Doppler to move out the way during the experiment, i'm sure he wouldn't mind.
God knows what he is doing up in space INSIDE the experiment chamber anyway. Sometimes i think that dude is getting a bit senile.

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody knows that the universe only exists because the event horizon of two super-massive black holes are in contact with each other. http://xkcd.com/502/

Re:Uneven laws

[SplashMyBandit]

Anyone can propose a theory. There is no shortage of speculative theories out there. Creating a theory is easy, even philosophers can do that. 'Proving' that the theory is not false the hard bit - something that sets the physicists apart from the philosophers. I'm not trying to bash philosophers here, since they have their place, merely trying to say that theories are pretty much 'dime a dozen' these days - but experimental verification of them is a much more rare and precious thing. That's why I stopped reading about all the whacky things the Universe could be doing - and concentrated on what is and isn't known about what it actually does do.

Re:Uneven laws

[leromarinvit]

If the laws are uneven in time, that could lead to perpetual motion among other interesting consequences.

Meh. All this proves is that the loss rate for interstellar mail must be at least 21%. It's not the postman's fault, it's a law of nature!

Re:Uneven laws

[silentcoder]

Hypothesis are a dime a dozen, theories are supposed to be hypotheses that have stood the test of time for a while, but the terminology often gets mixed up to the detriment of science (even by scientists).

That said, in this case - the people who made these hypothesis are highly respected phycisists who had genuine puzzles they were attempting to explain. In most cases so far - there ended up being other more plausible explanations, but I just don't imagine serious physicists proposing an alteration to a fundamental constant lightly.

Right now there is some puzzles in cosmology that suggest that the fine structure constant may have been slightly lower in the past, there is further very strong evidence that supports the possibility (notably - the energy of the background cosmic radiation is slightly lower, by almost exactly the amount it would be if this was true).
BUT - and this is a big but, in the meantime, two other explanations for the cosmic radiation difference have been proposed. In both cases they don't rely on a different fine structure constant shortly after the big bang. But their supporting evidence is still being tested. In the meantime - neither explains the puzzles that led to the proposal in the first place, so if either is shown to be accurate - cosmology still can't answer those.
That puts the weight of evidence currently on the side of a change over time in the FSC, if only because it explains more observations than any other available hypotheses.
Downside - if the FSC was different, that means a LOT of other differences, because the FSC is an amalgamation of several other fundamental constants including Planck's. Change that in the past, and it means the physics of the early universe was slightly different to ours, and such a difference is a mathematical singularity, it's impossible from our side of it, to predict what was on the other side.

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Pi can be viewed as changing over time.

Re:Uneven laws

[cfc-12]

I can heartily recommend Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep", which is set in a galaxy where the laws of physics do indeed vary widely depending on your distance from the centre of the galaxy.

Probably not what you'd call hard science fiction, but definitely one of the best "what if" books I've ever read.

Re:Uneven laws

[jenik]

I'd suggest you read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions to see that science appears to work very differently than you (and many others) think. Scientist tend to prevent any substantial change in their paradigm as long as possible---for example by "tweaking" theories or devising auxiliary hypotheses.

Re:Uneven laws

[Shikaku]

I would mind you insensitive clod!

And space is the only place where I can get some peace and quiet so get off my solar lawn!

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

The Bible does explicitly mention the dragons a few times, suggesting that they once existed in ancient times. The people of the Midde Kingdom [China] & their Komodo dragons can attest to the existence of dragons too. There should still be some remote places in our world where the last of them may be found....

Re:Uneven laws

[thegarbz]

Maybe we can retrofit the Synchrotron.

Even if we can't at least it has a better name than Fermilab.

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

In another sense though, if the "fabric of space-time" is like round weights rolling around on a raised sheet, is a) the sheet itself smooth, and/or b) anything sticking to the other side of the sheet?

We still have the Pioneer anomaly and galaxy rotation speed to account for..

Re:Uneven laws

[John Hasler]

> Probably not what you'd call hard science fiction...

It's certainly what I call hard science fiction.

> ...but definitely one of the best "what if" books I've ever read.

Everything Vinge has written is excellent.

Re:Uneven laws

[JamesP]

Or they could be uneven in time. Maybe every 54.12 years the relation between produced matter/antimatter switches from 1:1.01 to 1.01:1.

Funny you mention that, there are some theories that say the speed of light changed in time, so in the past (like, billions of years ago) it was slower, IIRC

Re:Uneven laws

[MartinSchou]

Well, define dragon.

Flying lizard-like creature? I give you the Pterosaur.

Fire breathing creature? Not quite, but the bombardier beetles is somewhat there. It's not real fire, but getting hit by a liquid close to 100 C is going to feel like being burned. And if that compound is also acidic or caustic, it gets even worse, and anyone hit by a decent amount of it would certainly feel like they're on fire.

These two aren't exactly along the same evolutionary branches, but a combination of the two aren't beyond the realms of realism.

Re:Uneven laws

[cc1984_]

No nitpicking with semantics now :) I guess they'd be called parameters in keeping with Hubble's constant/parameter.

Re:Uneven laws

[Joey Vegetables]

Nothing we know about the universe or any part of it is in fundamental conflict or contradiction with the Biblical creation story. It's just that there is an awful lot we do not know, about pretty much everything. We speculate based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable (e.g., the speed of light being more or less constant, and other physical laws remaining somewhat constant throughout the universe). That's fine, as long as we remember that this is speculation, not fact. We continue to experiment, and to use some approximation of the scientific method (heavily biased by politics, of course) to try to learn more. That's also fine, as long as we regard what we learn as being always tentative, and always subject to refinement, or even outright abandonment, if further evidence or experimentation renders our original tentative findings invalid.

Re:Uneven laws

[T Murphy]

What did you think those LHC blackholes are for?

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more have suggested asymetry in time -t that at various ages of the universe the fundamental constants may have been different to what they are now.

Constants are just fudge factors anyway. They just represent the unknown agglomeration of math and science that we have not yet figured out.

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

To be more precise, all those texts make it clear that these fire breathing dragons were ridden, sometimes by many people, and that they made thunderous noise and very bright light, while spewing smoke.

Which is more likely, fire breathing dragons, which man rode for vast distances, whereby for absolutely no reason and no explanation suddenly died out over night, without evidence, in historic times, or that as almost every civilization describes, depicts, and documents (including the Bible) in innumerable ways, we were previously visited from space? Even the Book of Enoch clearly describes rockets, space travel, and relativistic travel for Enoch.

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

"We mail it back to earth" ...

At what cost of fuel? You never mentioned the distance, but my guess is that at 100% efficiency, it would take exactly "over 180 terajoules."

Re:Uneven laws

[Myopic]

That is indeed interesting. My inference is that you just explained why C must be constant. You did a physical proof by reduction to the absurd.

Re:Uneven laws

[wurp]

When this sort of thing happens (we discover the laws of physics aren't quite what we thought they were) then the best historical way to get a new theory is to keep the fundamental assumptions and figure out exactly what laws fit the fundamental assumptions plus all the observations.

For example:

Special relativity came from reconciling the constant speed of light with conservation of energy and momentum.

General relativity came from reconciling the implications of special relativity along with the indistinguishability of acceleration and gravity with cons. of E and M.

Quantum mechanics came from reconciling high and low energy black body radiation, the behavior of atoms excited by light, and the quantized behavior of light under some circumstances while it behaved like a wave in others. Again, barring fluctuations over very short times or in extremely precise location measurements, energy and momentum are conserved.

Re:Uneven laws

[Just Some Guy]

Out of curiosity, why would you take that away from it? Couldn't it also mean that perpetual motion is only impossible within a confined space? I mean, to my (admittedly untrained) eye, it seems like you're begging the question by proving that C is constant by presuming that the consequences of C being constant are necessarily true.

Re:Uneven laws

[John Hasler]

> Out of curiosity, why would you take that away from it? Couldn't it also
> mean that perpetual motion is only impossible within a confined space?

No. The conservation laws are more fundamental than that. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem.

Re:Uneven laws

[pclminion]

His argument is basically correct. Noether's theorem says that for every symmetry there is a conserved quantity. In the case of time, the conserved quantity is energy. This means that if the laws of physics are not symmetric in time, then energy need not be conserved.

Re:Uneven laws

[Myopic]

Yes, of course you are right. I am assuming that conservation of energy/mass/whatever will hold more than that the constancy of C will hold. I'm not a physicist, so I'm not trying to claim a special truth, I'm just saying that's my inference.

Basically, I'm saying that because I find perpetual motion to be so absurd (not just perpetual motion, but in this hypothetical situation, free energy) that the underlying assumption (that C is not constant) can't be true. That conclusion relies on the presumption; yes.

Again, don't construe my comment as a statement of surety.

Re:Uneven laws

[ceoyoyo]

It's still a discovery. Suggesting something is a hypothesis. Testing a novel hypothesis by making observations, and finding that those observations support the hypothesis, is a discovery.

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

unless the mass also changes with time

Re:Uneven laws

[Chris Burke]

Nothing we know about the universe or any part of it is in fundamental conflict or contradiction with the Biblical creation story.

Unless you interpret Genesis literally, and you interpret "literally" in a really bizarre way that means "exactly what it says, only what it says, but including every possible implication" so "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds" means that every "kind" of creature on earth was created exactly as it is today and "kinds", which oh by the way means "species", never change.

Yeah, I don't really get it.

I think there's a reason the GP said "Creationists" and not "Christians".

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, its the other way around.

E= mc^2 follows from the basic principles of Special Relativity (including the belief that c is constant).

So it's not a proof, it's circular reasoning. (But probably still correct.)

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing we know about the universe or any part of it is in fundamental conflict or contradiction with the Biblical creation story. It's just that there is an awful lot we do not know, about pretty much everything.

Well...

We know that the creation did not start with the earth and the sun and stars being created at a later date.

We know that the birds do not predate land animals.

We know that women was not created as an after thought because man needed a help mate

We know that the earth is not a few thousands years old

I could go on but that should be sufficient to challenge the notion that Genesis does not conflict with reality.

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now there is some puzzles in cosmology that suggest that the fine structure constant may have been slightly lower in the past, there is further very strong evidence that supports the possibility (notably - the energy of the background cosmic radiation is slightly lower, by almost exactly the amount it would be if this was true).

If stuff was different in the past...would that not affect the speed of light in the past...so when Hubble looks back in time...(if the fsc stuff was different) we would see evidence of this difference in the speed at which galaxies travel or may be the shape and density of galaxies than what we would expect had the fcs been the same...???

I am not a physicist...but if stuff was so fluid we would have seen some evidence of this in the past.

Re:Uneven laws

[IICV]

Uhm, everything we know about the universe is in fundamental conflict with the Biblical creation story. Seriously, there are maybe one or two things that could be considered factually accurate in the whole thing, and that's entirely by accident. The Earth existed before there there was light? There was light on Earth before there were stars in the sky? The Sun was created before the rest of the stars? The sky and the waters were the same thing and had to be separated? Are you going to say that none of these fundamentally contradict what we know?

It makes no sense and is completely inconsistent with reality. It is a prehistoric myth, and is exactly as useful as the story of how the stars were created when Coyote scattered Cloud Woman's fire across the sky.

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, pretend that the speed of light is variable over time and remember that E=mc^2.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. E=mc^2 is a consequence of Einstein's special relativity, which assumes that the speed of light is constant. If the speed of light is not constant, then special relativity is wrong and E=mc^2 no longer holds.

Re:Uneven laws

[b4dc0d3r]

No he didn't, it only works in a hypothetical environment. Space particles will absorb some of the energy, especially since finding an area with a different speed of light will probably be VERY far away. The chance of you getting the matter back at that point in anywhere near human timescales is pretty much nothing. By the time you get it back, it will probably be smaller than you expect due to this absorption.

Plus, when the speed of light slows, a laser beam will effectively slow down as well. I'm not sure if it will shed mass or just effectively lose power. If you ignore the absorption loss above, you'll get back exactly what you sent.

Re:Uneven laws

[Anonymous Coward]

or example, pretend that the speed of light is variable over time and remember that E=mc^2.

No, let's not do that, because it would be nonsense. E = mc^2 is a mathematical consequence of the constancy of the speed of light, and the conservation of momentum and energy. If the speed of light is not constant, then E != mc^2.

Re:Uneven laws

[geekoid]

maybe, but there isn't any data that shows that.

Re:Uneven laws

[geekoid]

If the laws of the universe changed, then lensing wouldn't work.

Re:Uneven laws

[geekoid]

Yes, it is.
The time, data, the logivcal inconsisences withint genesis, there reference to 'otthers' Adam and Eve having two boys and yet the hunmna race scame from them.

On and ON and ON.
It's an allegory. get over it.

Anyone who actually studied the history of the bible knows that. It's literalism at it's stupidest.

Just as a point of reference, knowing it's an allegory doesn't mean there isn't a God. It does mean as a work of fact it's wrong.
I was taught that in Sunday school for crying out loud.

Of course, now I am an Atheist. That is a completely different topic.

Re:Uneven laws

[geekoid]

"Hypothesis are a dime a dozen, theories are supposed to be hypotheses that have stood the test of time for a while,"

sigh.

ihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory

A scientific theory is constructed to conform to available empirical data about such observations, and is put forth as a principle or body of principles for explaining a class of phenomena.

Just to be complete:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_model

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis

A hypothesis (from Greek ; plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for an observable phenomeno

Re:Uneven laws

[geekoid]

yeah, there is a reason the term 'laws' isn't really used anymore.

Re:Uneven laws

[Foobar of Borg]

I'd suggest you read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions to see that science appears to work very differently than you (and many others) think. Scientist tend to prevent any substantial change in their paradigm as long as possible---for example by "tweaking" theories or devising auxiliary hypotheses.

And I'd suggest that you do actual science to see that Kuhn didn't have a fucking clue what he was talking about. "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is a fascinating book when you are a freshman in college and haven't really learned anything yet. But later, after you have your doctorate and have been doing actual research, you realize that it is a useless pile of shit.

Re:Uneven laws

[sjames]

Actually, the inevitable blue shift is why more energy is collected at the space station.

Re:Uneven laws

[Black Gold Alchemist]

Zero. Gravity does the rest.

Re:Uneven laws

[silentcoder]

How the hell did my mention of some cutting edge cosmology hypothesis lead to a creationism debate ... is there nothing in this world the creationists WON'T latch onto ?
So I'm rather going to discuss the dragon posts - ignoring the bible stuff - because THOSE are at least slightly interesting.

>Flying lizard-like creature? I give you the Pterosaur [wikipedia.org].

Yes, erm - no mammals ever saw one, the earliest mammals were the Morganocodontids, who did live before the K/T event, but not THAT long before. Pterosaur is as far in the past of the earliest mammal as Tyranosaurus is in ours.Seems rather unlikely that racial memory from a time our ancestors were smaller than your pinky would remember the big lizards that were around at the time -and which we outlived.

>Fire breathing creature? Not quite, but the bombardier beetles [wikipedia.org] is somewhat there. It's not real fire, but getting hit by a liquid close to 100 C is going to feel like being burned. And if that compound is also acidic or caustic, it gets even worse, and anyone hit by a decent amount of it would certainly feel like they're on fire.

The fire breathing bit was never the hard part. There are numerous creatures on the planet that mix chemicals that create something very close to fire. There are many plausible evolutionary paths to that. The fact that none of them are big suggest however that either it is simply not a good trait for survival - or there just never was mutation to do that in any vertebrate. It's not that, that can't happen - it's that it just never did.
Even the flying lizard bit is easy - probably not on the scale the legends drew them, but hey legends are prone to exaggeration - especially on size (what slashdotter does NOT exaggerate the size of their legendarily unused physical features ?).

>These two aren't exactly along the same evolutionary branches, but a combination of the two aren't beyond the realms of realism.

I said above that fire breathing wasn't hard - so lets see what IS hard. The hard part is this: every culture, every dragon story get the same basic body shape. A creature that has four legs AND wings. A vertebrate with six limbs. Nothing like that has EVER existed. Not in the fossil record, nor anywhere on the planet now. Birds have only TWO legs to get wings. The first vertebrate on the planet had 4 limbs, and every descendant got that basic body pattern - and the DNA evidence concurs.

Again, a mutation in DNA could produce a six-limbed vertebrate - but not a flying lizard in one jump. So you'd need a BRANCH of vertebrates with six limbs, before natural selection could refine those extra limbs into working wings. While a single species living and going extinct without leaving a fossil is statistically MORE probably than a species leaving one at all - an entire BRANCH - that level of natural selection means at least 500 thousand generations - multiple species, and never once did even ONE of them leave ANYTHING ? Unlikely. Now further - this creature is supposed to be a big reptile, so that's a fairly LATE branch-off from other vertebrates, and if humans ever saw one (and could draw it) then it must have been around until no less than 5000 years ago.
The odds of THAT not leaving any fossils shrink to nearly nothing.

The dragon myth is still interesting because it's so pervasive. It occurs in every culture everywhere on earth. Even if we are generous and say it dates back more than 70-thousand years to when we were all one "race" in Africa - and this is how it got in them all (so how come NO other myth made it all the way through ? If there is something psychologically attractive to the myth - then that would be just as good evidence for it arising independently over and over - a hell of a lot of other ideas did) - that's still statistically unlikely to leave no fossil evidence but nevermind.
The point is - in those cultures there are marked differences between their dragons (and a lot of what WE know as dragon stories aren't, they

Re:Uneven laws

[silentcoder]

All you just said is that Lensing is evidence suggesting that the laws were always the same. Minor changes in the fundamental constants could affect many laws of physics WITHOUT affecting the law of gravity specifically.

Besides which - the actual theories suggesting it suggest a discrepency in fundamental constants immediately post big-bang, and does not put a time when it would have reached it's current values but does say that it must be a LONG time ago - it could easily be quite long enough to lie outside our lightcone, so it won't have any noticeable EFFECT on gravitational lensing... or right, on anything else - that's what "light cone" in physics means, the furthest space-time range we can detect, EVER. The universe isn't old enough for anything outside it too ever reach us.

Did you really think serious, respected cosmologists (who USED gravitational lensing to DISCOVER that the speed of galaxies is wrong) would suggest an explanation that is so easily debunked by they very thing they are trying to explain ?

Consider this. The jury is still out on blackhole singularities, with Hawking just about the only person who doesn't accept it as fact, but there is no debate about the big bang. The very CONCEPT implies a singularity. By definition there couldn't have been laws of physics BEFORE the big bang, there was no "there" for them to exist in, and no "before" for that matter. That's what makes it a singularity. Science offers no ANSWER to the question "were the laws of physics fundamental - so any universe would have the same ones ?" - it speculates but it cannot give any evidence for it. There is much (good scientific) speculation, but always with the proviso "we're trying to imagine the unimagineable, and certainly the unstudyable - so this is just an idea - no more valid than any other idea" - because it's mathematically impossible to test a theory about one side of a singularity from the other side.
So at some point in the history of the universe, Planck's constant wasn't - there was no electron's for it to apply to. Then it was. We can't say exactly when that was. We can't say that if any big bang it would have the same end value. We can't say that the other fundamental constants all came into being at the same "first moment" - it could have been a billion year process. If just one of them was slightly different, or hell late in coming to be - it would affect the values of all the others.
Just sticking to the "testable" stuff - early universe but POST big-bang if say the very first electrons had a slightly different value for Planck's constant (because the matter some other constants come from didn't exist yet, or because there was so much less space or something) - then the Fine Structure Constant would be changed, a lot of others that WERE around would be likewise changed. The constants are all mutually dependent. The thing is - such a thing could leave detectable evidence, but it's so long ago it is quite likely we wouldn't have found any (yet), and there is no guarantee it WOULD.

That doesn't mean it didn't HAPPEN. It also doesn't mean it DID. When we get MORE evidence about the early universe - especially that which lies beyond our lightcone (about 200 thousand light years) only THEN can we start to say "it didn't happen that way" or "turns out it did" - and when we can, we can then build new theories on top of this confirmation - but the confirmation either way could be hundreds of years away. If it's to be found at all, the evidence is probably NOT on this planet, and probably needs telescope technology way beyond anything we have to detect... maybe a space-born interferometer array would see something that confirms it either way ? Maybe some idea we've not even thought of yet - and it would say "yes" or "no" - till then, we're guessing and using indirect evidence.
We know the galaxies are spinning too slowly, we have a few ideas about why - the most popular is cold dark matter - and there is other evidence that some at least could exist (it seems to bend light), but c

Re:Uneven laws

[MartinSchou]

How the hell did my mention of some cutting edge cosmology hypothesis lead to a creationism debate

I didn't realise that discussing the possibilities presented to us by natural history and evolution was akin to creationism. But that might not have been aimed at me.

Yes, erm - no mammals ever saw one, the earliest mammals were the Morganocodontids, who did live before the K/T event, but not THAT long before. Pterosaur is as far in the past of the earliest mammal as Tyranosaurus is in ours

According to the evolution of mammals page, the earliest known marsupial, Sinodelphys, appeared 125 million years ago.

And Pterosaurs existed from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous Period (220 to 65.5 million years ago). That gives us an overlap of about 60 million years where mammals and Pterosaurs co-existed.

every culture, every dragon story get the same basic body shape. A creature that has four legs AND wings. A vertebrate with six limbs

Not correct. The Chinese dragon very rarely have wings, and when they do, they're essentially bat-like in that they're extending from the front limbs. They also don't breathe fire. Same with the Japanese dragons. In fact if you look at the Dragon article, only the European ones have wings. And even the article on European dragons have very few mentions of wings.

That's actually surprising to me. I thought only the Chinese dragons were wingless creatures. And interestingly enough, a lot of the dragons in the European article have only four limbs - i.e. if they have wings, they don't have four legs (making them Wyverns). This made me curious, and looking at the Saint George and the Dragon article, a lot of the drawings/paintings do not show the dragon with four legs plus wings. This is odd, because they alternate in age. I.e. Saint George and the Dragon, by Rogier van der Weyden is from the early 1400s - two legs plus wings. Then Lyfe of Seynt George (Westminster, 1515) shows four legs plus wings. And Saint George and the Dragon by Gustave Moreau mid 1800s has two legs plus wings again. The treatment by artists list also shows a mix, though the earliest all seem to show a Wyvern.

I don't think Dragons ever existed (cool as it would be too be wrong)

I agree. But the post I responded to was talking about going to a dimension where Dragons did exist. My post was about the posibility of this from the perspective of what we have seen possible in our natural history. And nothing really stops the dragon from being a flying lizard that can breathe a fire-like substance. Size wouldn't nescesarily be a problem either ... get the air dense enough and rich with oxygen and you could have them huge. Pteranodon managed a wingspan of up to 9 meters (no weight estimates though). It's still a long way to what most of us here think of when we say Dragon (i.e. Smaug or one of the ones from Reign of Fire) though.

Re:Uneven laws

[SplashMyBandit]

Fine structure constant is defined by other quantities but is not yet determined ab-initio by any theory. It still relies on measurement to define it (eg. depends on an empirical constant). Again, there seems to be an emphasis on worrying about d(alpha)/dt yet alpha still isn't understood fully. Same with cosmology (among other fields), all these wild theories/hypotheses yet if you look even at measurements on the galactic scale (as I did during my PhD in astrophysics) you see how poor they are (which is why estimates of the total mass and distances in our galaxy vary by up to an order of magnitude). All I was trying to say is that there are so many theories out there that there isn't much point in getting wound up about one over the other. Better to keep an open mind and try and understand the limits of the actual measurements.

Re:Uneven laws

[silentcoder]

Heh... that's almost exactly what *I* said :P

Re:Uneven laws

[Seahawk]

Well - if c gets speeds up instead of slowing down, that would put a stop to that idea.

Re:Uneven laws

[MobyDisk]

I took the opposite approach. I see it as a challenge to find a set of laws that would allow for C to change, but for the experiment to result in conservation of energy. That is how I like to think of Einstein and relativity: When he discovered that C is constant... what had to change for things to work? Space itself had to change. That's a crazy awesome leap of intellect. Maybe one is needed here too.

Re:Uneven laws

[SplashMyBandit]

Incidentally a "theory" is more than a hypothesis that has "stood the test of time for a while". In general a hypothesis is a testable prediction, while a theory is a conceptual framework that allows you to make testable predictions. Subtle difference but I understand what you were trying to say (you were modded +5 too, well done).

new matter?

[kix]

I'm probably misunderstanding something here, but it seems that they have discovered that when the big bang happened, then because of this property, a bit more matter was created than anti-matter out of wherever they came in the first place, the rest of it annihilated with each other and everything else is made up from the "extra bits". This seems fairly reasonable.

Now, it is also known that new matter-antimatter element pairs are being created and annihilated all the time everywhere, this is where Hawking radiation comes from.

Does this new discovery mean, that it would be possible, that instead of an antimatter-matter pair a matter-matter pair is created sometimes instead and therefore the amount of matter in the universe is increasing (even if by a tiny amount)? Or are the conditions needed for this to happen too extreme to ever take place outside of big bangs and accelerators? Although as I understand some cosmic rays have far greater energies than accelerators.

Real physicists - please help me make sense of it all!

Re:new matter?

[chichilalescu]

no, this is doesn't fit the physics i know of.
in quantum field theory, you can describe the phenomena of a photon splitting into a particle-antiparticle pair that then anihilates to recreate the initial photon. these are the pairs that appear and disappear all the time (because of virtual photons that appear and disappear). However, a photon splitting into a particle-particle pair doesn't fit QFT.

Re:new matter?

[stevelinton]

Does this new discovery mean, that it would be possible, that instead of an antimatter-matter pair a matter-matter pair is created sometimes instead and therefore the amount of matter in the universe is increasing (even if by a tiny amount)? Or are the conditions needed for this to happen too extreme to ever take place outside of big bangs and accelerators? Although as I understand some cosmic rays have far greater energies than accelerators.

I think it's a bit more subtle than that -- things like a particle with a magnetic dipole decaying and tending to send the matter particle towards its North pole and the antimatter towards its South pole, but I'm not certain.

Re:new matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

you mentioned Hawking radiation. i have been trying to educate myself about this but to no avail :) i am a psychologist. all i can remember is that the hawking radiation is made up of virtual particles; what are these virtual particles? are they as their names suggest "virtual"`? thx.

Re:new matter?

[MichaelSmith]

Hawking radiation comes out of back holes. Because of quantum mechanics space is filled with virtual particles which come into existence and the annihilate themselves. Particles like an electron and an antielectron. Stuff like that. But if a black hole is nearby the electron could get swallowed, leaving the antielectron all alone in the world. The antielectron in this base becomes hawking radiation.

i am a psychologist

All right, okay. I should have read your post before I replied. How about this: particles come and go and nobody knows why. Sometimes they get lost which makes the other particles sad, so they wander off and get called "radiation".

Re:new matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

sad particles. well just another indication that the incidence of depression among peers is greater than originally thought. thx. :)

Re:new matter?

[kix]

Right, of course you are correct. After having read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle I actually understand that the question was rather silly. sorry about that. Although, if everyone read the correct wikipedia entries before asking things, there would be very few questions indeed ;)

thanks.

Re:new matter?

[chichilalescu]

The uncertainty principle imposes that if you look at some region of space for very short time periods, the energy contained in that region of space is not well defined (it can have many values, with a minimum inversely proportional to the time interval). this energy must be associated (in quantum field theory, the model that must be used to describe the phenomena) to some field that satisfies certain constraints. for instance, it could be associated to a pairing of a particle and its antiparticle (or a pairing of two photons). these pairs are pairs of virtual particles, because they only exist for the small time interval, during which the unvertainty principle allows the existence of the corresponding energy (actually, it allows for an "error" in the amount of energy contained in the region of space).
So if you look at a region in space for some macroscopic time, you don't actually see anything, but as you start to look for smaller and smaller amounts of time, things start to happen (this was tested experimentally, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect).
Hawking radiation is a very special occurence of this pair production. Supposedly, close to a black hole, it is possible that when a pair of virtual particles is created, one is eaten up by the black hole before they have a chance to anihilate one another, and the second particle manages to get away. At least, this is how I understand the idea, because I never had the chance to actually study it.

Re:new matter?

[MoeDrippins]

> Now, it is also known that new matter-antimatter element pairs are being created and annihilated all the time everywhere, this is where Hawking radiation comes from.

Wait, what? We "know" this because of a theoretical radiation that has never been observed?

Re:new matter?

[kix]

yes, the great Stephen has said it, therefore it MUST be true!

Re:new matter?

[Remus Shepherd]

Now, it is also known that new matter-antimatter element pairs are being created and annihilated all the time everywhere, this is where Hawking radiation comes from.

Does this new discovery mean, that it would be possible, that instead of an antimatter-matter pair a matter-matter pair is created sometimes instead and therefore the amount of matter in the universe is increasing (even if by a tiny amount)?

No, that's not accurate, and you are misunderstanding something.

Virtual matter-antimatter pairs are created from the low energy background, and absorbed back again, in an invariant process that conserves charge and mass (and a few other properties). That's why only pairs are created -- only antimatter can balance the mass of the matter. The pairs are always balanced, so they're always am-m pairs.

This new discovery is about another type of physics, the physics of high energy collisions. In particular it's about the physics of the neutral beta meson, which is an odd pair of particles that can change from matter to antimatter faster than a tranny with a velcro business suit. The equations say that the meson should spend equal time in both its forms, but it is actually biased toward matter. That points to a break in symmetry, which may point to a new particle or force that mediates the matter-antimatter transformation.

The meson is a pair, and itself is a mediator of the strong force, and furthermore is its own antiparticle; it is not related to am-m pairs or Hawking radiation in any way.

Re:new matter?

[kix]

thanks for the explanation, it is good and clear, but this whole thing is just teeming with questions.

How have we actually measured that this particle swaps between matter/antimatter states or is that just a theory?

Also, as I understand that all particles are actually just probabilities for something existing somewhere at some time. Would this not infer that the probability of this particular particle being matter or antimatter is just extremely close to 50%, or, actually 49% antimatter, 51% matter?

Again, I have probably misunderstood something, but I don't pretend to be a physicist anyway, just curious..

Re:new matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hawking radiation comes out of back holes.

Speak for yourself. No such stuff comes out of my back hole.

Re:new matter?

[SL Baur]

Hawking radiation is a very special occurence of this pair production. Supposedly, close to a black hole, it is possible that when a pair of virtual particles is created, one is eaten up by the black hole before they have a chance to anihilate one another, and the second particle manages to get away.

Actually, I thought Hawking radiation was due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle making the event horizon fuzzy so that one particle could be created inside the event horizon (and stuck inside the black hole) and the other outside (and free to escape).

Re:new matter?

[grep_rocks]

Have you ever heard of pair production? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production (photon -> e+ e-) there needs to be something nearby to balance the momentum, such as a nucleus, happens all the time...

Re:new matter?

[Just Some Guy]

I've been on an elevator with you and beg to differ.

Re:new matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure? The Hawkings can be very small.

Re:new matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like putting too much air in a balloon.

Re:new matter?

[John Hasler]

> yes, the great Stephen has said it, therefore it MUST be true!

No, logic has said it, therefore it MUST be true!

Re:new matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm? The sentence you quote does not say "because". The end clause is just there for color.

Re:new matter?

[TeethWhitener]

Just a technical aside: You need two photons to produce a particle-antiparticle pair (conservation of angular momentum).

Re:new matter?

[TeethWhitener]

Linear momentum, not angular momentum.

Re:new matter?

[chichilalescu]

to tell you the truth, i took my QFT course four or five years ago, and we didn't discuss rigurously the problem of virtual particles.
When I think of virtual particles, I allways think of this Feynman diagram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vacuum_polarization.svg . Is this wrong? If it's wrong, what would be a correct picture?

Re:new matter?

[Remus Shepherd]

How have we actually measured that this particle swaps between matter/antimatter states or is that just a theory?

If it's the meson I think they're referring to, it is its own antiparticle -- it is one up quark and one anti-up quark, the antiparticle version of which is one anti-up quark and one up quark. Theory says that because both versions are identical, the meson is in a quantum superposition between both versions, each half of the time. Like Schrodinger's cat, it's both a particle and an antiparticle until it's measured.

Has it been measured directly? For this article I assume it has.

Also, as I understand that all particles are actually just probabilities for something existing somewhere at some time. Would this not infer that the probability of this particular particle being matter or antimatter is just extremely close to 50%, or, actually 49% antimatter, 51% matter?

Again, I have probably misunderstood something, but I don't pretend to be a physicist anyway, just curious..

I think actually you've got a grasp of it here. The meson should be in its matter state 50% of the time, and its antimatter state 50% of the time. But it isn't, it is slightly biased toward matter.

LHC can't contribute

[Bananenrepublik]

LHC is a proton-proton collider, Tevatron (where D0 is situated) an antiproton-proton collider. Therefore Tevatron provides a situation which is symmetric between matter and antimatter, LHC doesn't. The conclusion of the paper is that there is a 1% excess of matter in a situation that started with no preference for matter or antimatter. I don't see how LHC could contribute to this given that they are always starting with two matter particles.

Re:LHC can't contribute

[Shillo]

Had you read the abstract, you'd know that Fermilab's result is b+anti-b decay, not p+anti-p, so LHC is fine as long as they can specifically track which muons came from b quark decays.

As a matter of fact, they have a special detector just for that (it's not general-purpose, because b+anti-b pairs decay within centimetres from their creation point, so they actually drop particle tracker 5mm from the beam). See LHCb experiment.

Shit, don't let Al Sharpton hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

He'll be down here protesting about bias against the minority muon, and how this is a PLOT perpetrated by THE MAN, to keep a muon down.

Well

[Daath]

It doesn't matter. But it doesn't anti-matter, less.
Or something.

Re:Well

[JamesP]

So it does matter... and anti-matter, and energy...

yay

They fight for survival

[Laxator2]

The Tevatron is so thoroughly outclassed by the LHC that they have to take advantage of every opportunity to make a press release and show that they are still relevant. Once the LHC starts producing science data there will be impossible to justify funding for the Tevatron. The whole of Fermi Lab. (which uses about half the science money given by the D.O.E.) will be in danger of being closed, so they are fighting for survival. During the Bush administration they had to get private funding to avoid lay-offs. http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/good-news-or-less-bad-news-for-american-science/

Re:They fight for survival

[DMiax]

OTOH this is what happened to the LHC predecessor at CERN when Fermilab was bleeding edge. I suspect that in 20 years the #1 accelerator will be our fellow Americans' one. (unless they win the race to have short-sighted politicians...)

And I think it is probably better to have only one "best accelerator" at a time. LHC will be able to confirm the data from Tevatron *and* do something more. And so will do the next Tevatron with LHC data.

Re:They fight for survival

[Thanshin]

I don't know anything about particle accelerators but...

It's a machine that does something that no other machines can do. So, I imagine there could be an industrial process that such machine could be used for.

Is there? Can the old accelerators be transformed from science labs into industrial tools?

Re:They fight for survival

[compro01]

In terms of raw energy levels, the LHC eats everyone's lunch, but the LHC does different work than the Tevatron. The LHC wouldn't be able to do any of the stuff they're doing in this instance, as the LHC doesn't deal with antimatter. It's a proton collider. the Tevatron is a proton-anti-proton collider.

Re:They fight for survival

[Laxator2]

Honestly, I don't know much about what happened at CERN before LHC, I only remember that they had LEP, which was an electron-positron collider, while the Tevatron is proton-anti-proton. The "scooping" of experiments happens all the time, for example Cornell's collider was the main place to study B mesons for about 20 years, before SLAC built the BaBar machine that accumulated in one year as much data as the Cornell machine has accumulated in 20 years. Luckily, the people at Cornell were able to move to K mesons (which contain strange quarks rather than bottom quarks) in a different energy range and do precision measurements. This way they kept the funding going. As for the next collider, the US Congress has canceled SSC back in 1993 and there is little chance such a project (40TeV, as opposed to LHC's 14TeV) will ever get built in US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

Re:They fight for survival

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. Antimatter is produced in abundance at the LHC. When two protons collide, things get very messy, due to the marvels of QCD. A significant fraction of the LHC physics program is dealing with the properties of antimatter (and also oscillations/asymmetries between matter and antimatter).

Re:They fight for survival

[Hurricane78]

Of course to real scientists there is no point to NOT run both in parallel. There’s plenty of stuff the Tevatron can still do.
Oh, and maybe they should go big, and say that the US must be first again, and build a XLHC (extremely large hadron collider), crossing the whole country from coast to coast. ^^

Re:They fight for survival

[Jedi Alec]

Hmmm....black hole in the middle of the Bible belt...

Hey, a man can dream right? And if *they* believe it maybe it will really happen? Think about it, we could call it the Rapture.

Re:They fight for survival

[zmooc]

Particle accelerators are all about the destruction of minute amounts of material. Industry is about construction of massive amounts of material. Therefore particle accelerators are the exact opposite of industry and I doubt an industrial application for particle accelerators can be made up.

Re:They fight for survival

[noshellswill]

Hummm ... ours works and theirs doesn't. True this year ... true next year. We might as well let Texas re-build their donut cause LHC is looking more every month like the lipstick encrusted flying pig.

Re:They fight for survival

[argStyopa]

I don't dispute your comments factually, but "Once the LHC starts producing science data there will be impossible to justify funding for the Tevatron." is just stupid.

By that same logic, we should only have one (the largest, best) astronometric telescope, one (the largest, the best) microscope, etc.

Setting aside, of course, the fact that LHC is, I believe, yet to actually produce science data...the last couple of years have been fairly strong evidence that nobody should assume the LHC is going to run, even if it was firing up TOMORROW.

Re:They fight for survival

[Laxator2]

Actually, there is a very important application of a by-product of a circular particle accelerator: very high-quality X-rays. They are a pain for the particle physicists, but a blessing for the condensed-matter and biophysics people. At Cornell they use these X-rays to study a lot of crystalized proteins. Another reason to keep the funding going.

Re:They fight for survival

[Anonymous Coward]

You work in marketing, don't you?

Colliders are tools. Very expensive and really freaking cools tools, but tools none-the-less. If we don't fund them, some other country will surely fund their own and take that nice little leap forward ahead of us. If it's one thing I've learned in my years, the US doesn't like any other position than 1st in race.

Re:They fight for survival

[John Hasler]

> Is there? Can the old accelerators be transformed from science labs into
> industrial tools?

They might be convertable to synchrotron radiation generators to produce intense beams of monochromatic X-rays but I doubt that the conversion would be cost-effective.

Re:They fight for survival

[John Hasler]

> Hmmm....black hole in the middle of the Bible belt...

You know, you really ought to visit the Midwest some time. But that might damage your prejudices, so I guess you'd better not.

Re:They fight for survival

[BitZtream]

The thought that its not relevant is retarded.

Random people and kids in high school still make discoveries in their basement. Don't rule out the possibility that it can make discoveries just because it doesn't support the same energy levels.

Energy input is not the only part of these equations.

Re:They fight for survival

[azgard]

So what you are saying, basically, particle accelerators are anti-industry. That's why we have so few of them, and so much industry; it's a symmetry violation.

Re:They fight for survival

[Anonymous Coward]

More likely the new best accelerator will be built in China. The chances of America "wasting" money on one anytime in the next two decades is slim to none.

Re:They fight for survival

[bingoUV]

Not correct. Counter examples

1. Much of defence industry creates stuff which is able to destroy other things.
2. Paper shredder
3. DRM, in a twisted way, though it doesn't deal with physical substance.

Also, destruction of the material by particle accelerators leads to creation of other things - radiation for instance. This radiation might be of some use.

Re:They fight for survival

[LWATCDR]

"The Tevatron is so thoroughly outclassed by the LHC" hummm real? What discoveries has the LHC made?
Really I am sure that the LHC will produce higher energy collisions than the Tevatron but really can't this idiotic my big science project is more L33T that your science project just stop.
Good grief you would think it was a high school football game.
In science everybody wins.

Re:They fight for survival

[geekoid]

I've been there, and over all it was a poor experience. A lot of ignorance.

Maybe George W can solve this conundrum

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm somewhat out of my depth here," said Bush, a longtime Fermilab follower who describes himself as "something of an armchair physicist." "But it seems to me that, when reducing the perturbative uncertainty in the determination of Vub from semileptonic Beta decays, one must calculate the rate of Beta events with a standard dilepton invariant mass at a subleading order in the hybrid expansion. The Fermilab folks' error, as I see it, was omitting that easily overlooked mathematical transformation and, therefore, acquiring incorrectly re-summed logarithmic corrections for the b-quark mass. Obviously, such a miscalculation will result in a precision of less than 25 percent in predicting the resulting path of the tau lepton once the value for any given decaying tau neutrino is determined."

http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-finds-error-in-fermilab-calculations,1463/

1% huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit, that's close enough for guvermint work, hoss! Let 'er rip!

PEAR

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the experimenters believe in a bias towards matter, so they are actually reproducing the PEAR results.

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/

Begs the question

[syousef]

This finding invites theorists to explain

Aw, ubermiester, couldn't you have phrased that as "begs the question" so we could have 70 pedantic emails on the history and correct use of the term "begs the question" with pedants insisting that it is a logical fallacy and doesn't mean invites or asks the question?

Re:Begs the question

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF you're complaining about lack of mistakes in the summary?

There's no pleasing you people!

Re:Begs the question

[Tim C]

Never mind, console yourself with this pedantic reply pointing out that comments on slashdot are not emails instead.

Authors

[stevelinton]

I know modern science is meant to be collaborative, but this paper has more than a page of authors! I note that they are listed alphabetically -- remind me to change my name to Aarons before taking up particle physics.

Re:Authors

[mathfeel]

I know modern science is meant to be collaborative, but this paper has more than a page of authors! I note that they are listed alphabetically -- remind me to change my name to Aarons before taking up particle physics.

This is typical of "big science" that involves tons of people like experimental high energy versus "bench science" or "desk science" like everyone else.

Re:Authors

[Ranzear]

I could still one-up you with Aardsma.

Re:Authors

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that in the ATLAS collaboration (one of the LHC experiments) the alphabetical surname to beat is "Aad".

Re:Authors

[mangu]

When encyclopedias were printed in dead trees they usually started with Alvar Aalto.

Re:Authors

[YttriumOxide]

I believe that in the ATLAS collaboration (one of the LHC experiments) the alphabetical surname to beat is "Aad".

This guy beats that... sadly, not a physicist... or alive anymore. (there certainly may be some people with that surname (or related such as "van Aachen") still around though)

Re:Authors

[sisinka]

This is typical of "big science" that involves tons of people like experimental high energy versus "bench science" or "desk science" like everyone else.

... which will finally result into a breach of the critical mass of physicists per square kilometer.
???
Profit!

All you need is love, love is all you need..

[3seas]

What makes the difference in this bias of what matters?

What other thing can beat out antimatter evil?

Just ask a Beatle. and a warm gun.

Dark matter, Dark energy, Anti-matter... What next? Anti-energy.

Anyone have any examples of Anti-energy?

Bzzzt! Contestant #3426345 rings in with...

[IBitOBear]

What is, "there used to be a lot more matter and antimatter before they started canceling each other out and now we live amongst the debris"?

or, from my safety fifth-grader...

What is "the standard model is wrong"?

And I don't mean that in a bad way. The "flat earth" hypothesis was an _amazing_ deduction at its inception. It was only off by eight inches declination for every mile. This was a _tiny_ margin of error. But error compounds and so does any other form of tiny, so eight inches per mile, an error of ~.0126% (e.g. 8/63360) was enough to make the earth round.

Ta dah! 8-)

Re:Bzzzt! Contestant #3426345 rings in with...

[queazocotal]

It's been known for a long time that the standard model has problems.
To continue your analogy.

The earth is flat works really well as a model. If you're in a hilly terrain, you might suspect early on that the flat earth model isn't quite right.

To find out that earth is actually a slightly disorted sphere with a radius of some 6000km means that you have to go quite far (distance wise) to realise that the errors in the flat-earth model actually add up to a coherent alternative theory - a spherical earth.

It's much like this in physics.

Saying 'the standard model is wrong' - and giving plausible arguments - doesn't give much for alternative theorists to get their teeth into.

If however, you can produce a concrete measurement that can say 'The standard model is off by 0.3% here, 0.6% here, 1.2% here, and this looks _really_ like a curve of 0.5x+x^2 in the energy/bias ratio' - this can eliminate whole classes of alternate theories.

At the moment, string theory (and the descendant fields) suffer from an embarrasment of possibilities.
There are people arguing that the world is flat, round, toroidal, duck-shaped, ...

These theories are generally internally consistent, and can only be proved wrong with measurements of the real world. Without these measurements, the theories are interesting maths that you can make a career in maths about, but not predict the world in a useful way.

Re:Bzzzt! Contestant #3426345 rings in with...

[Hurricane78]

It's been known for a long time that the standard model has problems.

Well, of course. With them all being anorexic and on drugs, you can see their problems when looking at their bodies. ;)

Re:Bzzzt! Contestant #3426345 rings in with...

[vlm]

The "flat earth" hypothesis was an _amazing_ deduction at its inception. It was only off by eight inches declination for every mile.

Try measuring some shadows at local noon at different latitudes. Just a couple hundred miles and you'll get a result a heck of a lot more than fractions of a percent. Unless by bad luck your midpoint happens to be directly beneath the sun that day.

Re:Bzzzt! Contestant #3426345 rings in with...

[rabtech]

The idea that the ancients or even medieval Europeans believed the earth to be flat is an urban legend and 100% provably false. Eratosthenes, the librarian of the Alexandrian Library, came to within 300 to 10,000km of the actual circumference of the earth (depending on exactly how long one "stadia" is taken to be) back around 200 BC.

The Roman Catholic church likewise carried a lot of Greek scholarship forward and you would have been laughed at for suggesting the earth was flat in any court, monastery, etc. This actually came back to bite them re:Galileo though I suggest reading up on that as well (Pope Urban VIII is the one who allowed Galileo's works to be published with formal approval of the Inquisition, there is a lot of history there and his persecution was more about personal dynamics and politics than anything to do with the actual science... how oddly relevant today)

No one thought Christopher Columbus would sail off the edge of the earth, they merely assumed that the distance was too great to cross due to danger from storms or the amount of supplies a ship could reasonably carry. Given the number of ships that were regularly lost making the Atlantic crossing for hundreds of years, their skepticism wasn't exactly misplaced.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth/

Re:Bzzzt! Contestant #3426345 rings in with...

[IBitOBear]

Dude, make two identical objects place the first, place the second exactly one mile due north of the first, measure the differences in the shadows. Now do it 5 to 10 _thousand_ years ago in the equatorial region...

The flat earth theory, given the age of its inception and the precision of measurement at the time of its inception, was an _amazing_ advancement in human thought and understanding.

Advance to 200BC when Eratosthenes calculates the circumference of the earth to with 5% of the actual by having a guy _pace_ _off_ a _fifty_ _mile_ distance and then measuring a shadow to the degree of accuracy available of in the day for something casting a shadow while only 50 miles from the equator.

The fact that in hindsight we can place and measure objects much further away in much different circumstances doesn't change the fact that the flat earth hypothesis was only wrong by fractions of a single percentage.

The point being that "all science is eventually proven wrong" is a statement much like "statistical significance" in that most people don't understand what the terms _really_ mean. On average, old science is proved wrong by hairs breadths and slivers (given the technology of any given proof). [ASIDE: statistical significance is a term meaning nothing more than "large enough to be measured" as opposed to being huge/obvious/important.]

In the terms of this article, 1% is a ginormous amount of variance from the standard model that dwarfs the flat earth vs round earth thing. (etc.)

Re:Bzzzt! Contestant #3426345 rings in with...

[geekoid]

yes, quite far..miles.

quite far, sheesh.

Re:Bzzzt! Contestant #3426345 rings in with...

[queazocotal]

If the terrain is hilly - then working out that there is a overall 4"/mile^2 curve is hard when the terrain might go up and down a thousand times that.

This is pretty much the state we're in at the moment - most measurements are in the 'local area' - and they all seem to not contradict the model of the flat earth - to within the limits of experimental error.

Anyone suggesting the earth is spherical may get 'Hmm - interesting theory - can you prove it?' - and they can't - as there is no data.

how much space does one's spirit take up?

[Anonymous Coward]

we already know how much it weighs? what is it's energy mark/potential? are there dark as well as light spirits? as one has never yet been captured or 're-created' in the lab, we'll just have to wait (hopefully for a while longer) to see?

Right on

[FreeUser]

Uhm... no, it's NOT possible. It's not possible for a CONSTANT to change ;) Then it wouldn't be a constant, and we could have to rename it.

Exactly. Understanding our universe would involve deterimine what causes universal constants (universal variables?) to change over time. Assuming the change is not completely random (in which case, understanding our universe would become a great deal more difficult-though not necessarily impossible), a function over time or relationship to some other changing characteristic of the universe should emerge.

And no, it's not going to be some stupid Heinleinian "god made things old to fuck with us" kind of thing ... it will just mean the universe is far more interesting and magnifiscent that we (and most especially, more than the creationists) ever imagined.

the weight of a human spirit

[mangu]

Yes, we do have an approximate idea of how much a human spirit weighs. The answer is 8e-23 g, or eighty trillionths of a trillionth of a gram.

This is calculated by estimating the average number of bits of information in a neuron and multiplying by the number of neurons in a brain. The energy needed for representing a bit of information is kT/6, where k is Boltzmann's constant (1.38e-23 J/K) and T is the absolute temperature of the medium which, in the case of a human brain, is nearly constant at 310 K.

Then energy is converted to mass according to the formula E=m*c**2, where E is the energy, m is the mass, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum.

Re:the weight of a human spirit

[SL Baur]

Yes, we do have an approximate idea of how much a human spirit weighs. The answer is 8e-23 g, or eighty trillionths of a trillionth of a gram.

The weight of a human spirit could be tested in a lab with a sensitive enough scale. Put a dying person on a scale and watch what happens when they die.

I recall reading that someone had actually done this, but that was many years ago and from a dubious source. Has it been tried?

Re:the weight of a human spirit

[lannocc]

You're assuming that the totality of human experience is captured in the neurons. I would argue it's not even all in the head! Physical maladies like a huge scar from knee surgery weigh on the "spirit" even if the original incident memory is long forgotten. I think we're doomed to discover the human, though possessing digital processing abilities, is a very much analog medium and so impossible to perfectly replicate. How do we completely quantify a physical entity with momentum?

Re:the weight of a human spirit

[mangu]

The weight of a human spirit could be tested in a lab with a sensitive enough scale

The problem is that the changes that happen on the body when a person dies are much larger than the mass associated with the information in the mind. The tiniest exhalation of breath would mask the effects of such a small measurement.

However, there's another concern here that makes such a measurement pointless. When one speaks of a spirit, or a soul, leaving the body at death there's an implicit assumption of the philosophical principle of dualism. If the soul exists independent of the body, one cannot assume that the soul leaving the body will cause any physical change.

On the other hand, if one assumes the materialistic point of view that the spirit is just a manifestation of physical effects, then one must conclude that no spirit leaves the body at death, it just ceases to exist. In any case it wouldn't be possible to measure any change in mass.

The point I was trying to raise in the GP is that information is physical. To postulate dualism, one must implicitly assume that the existence of the soul has no connection at all with the physical world, any manifestation of the soul through its existence in a human body is completely miraculous. The only possible way to believe both in the existence of a soul surviving out of the material body after death and in physics is to assume the existence of miracles that have no connection to physical phenomena.

The resultant implications are such that I'm pretty sure most people who are familiar with information theory are materialists. Otherwise, how to explain the complexity of the human brain? A much simpler brain, consuming less resources, would be enough to control the purely physical needs of the human body.

Re:the weight of a human spirit

[Anonymous Coward]

The energy needed for representing a bit of information is kT/6? [Citation needed]

Re:the weight of a human spirit

[mangu]

Sorry, my mistake, that should be k*T*ln(2)

Re:the weight of a human spirit

[izomiac]

That seems rather low, was the estimate based on just neurons? Synapses are more important, and even they vary by the micro-environment around the cell membrane. I'd imagine that, to represent all of the information contained in the brain you'd need to map the following:

• The position of each molecule of neurotransmitter
• The position, state, and substrate of each membrane receptor
• The voltage potential across the membrane at each point along its 2D surface (to map the location of action potentials, IPSPs, and EPSPs)
• The voltage potential around the membrane as it diminishes to the baseline (the action potential is confined to a few micrometers around the membrane, and wire effects are important)
• The metabolic profile of the brain and its structures (emergent properties of higher organization and their interaction with the body)
• The map of synapses (the neural network)
• The state of the second messenger systems in the neurons
• The mRNA gene expression profile in the neuron (snapshot of protein synthesis)
• The superstructure of the DNA in the neuron (DNA packing & gene regulation)
• The genome for each neuron (DNA replication isn't 100% accurate, so each copy is different)

There'd be a ton of entropy if you wanted to express that as a series of bits... Heck, there're probably several mol of neurotransmitters alone. With positional information that becomes a ridiculous amount of information. But to be truely accurate you'd also need to take into account stuff like hydration shells, which just makes the whole thing impossibly complex. I'm not sure the number is really knowable unless you make massive simplifications (not that we could actually verify if they're safe assumptions or not). Unlike computers, biology doesn't use too many layers of abstraction, so low-level processes matter quite a bit.

Re:the weight of a human spirit

[geekoid]

wow. that's a lot of crap.

Nice made up number to protect you 'faith'. Falwell would be proud.

It ain't that smart

[Anonymous Coward]

Hypothesis number one: there's an equal amount of matter and anti-matter. They ought to eradicate each other.
Observation: there's quite a bit of matter lying around and precious little anti-matter. They obviously didn't eradicate each other.
Hypothesis number two: there's loads of anti-matter and matter, but there's a slight bias in favour of matter.

Obviously there's a bit more to it than that, but maybe not as much as they would have you believe.

In case you want hear from a physicist

[Anonymous Coward]

This is yet another reason why you shouldn't read mainstream media to get your physics news. Just reading the article summary makes me shiver all over.
Please, there are no fireballs at a particle collider and we are many many orders of magnitude in energy away from recreating the conditions after the Big Bang.
There is no miniature universe anywhere. Nothing went from being neutral to more matter than antimatter. Given that the (anti)matter in question here are (anti)muons
that would imply violation of charge conservation, which is not what they observed. This has nothing (well almost nothing, I'll explain in a sec) to do with why there is
so much more matter than antimatter in the universe, and the Standard Model does not suggest that there should be equal amounts either. The only correct
representation of facts in there is that the paper is indeed from the D0 collaboration and it has to do with seeing 1% more muons than antimuons.

Okay, so what did they do? They looked at decays of neutral B-mesons. These are curious mesons, because they oscillate back and forth between being a
B and an anti-B. If you ever took quantum mechanics: The propagating energy eigenstates are |B> +/ |anti-B> while |B> and |anti-B> are eigenstates of charge-conjugation+parity (CP).
The B can decay into a mu+ (antimuon) + other stuff, the anti-B can decay into a mu- (muon) + other stuff. (In both cases the other stuff has the opposite charge, so total
charge is conserved.) They saw a 1% asymmetry in the amount of mu+ vs. mu- which means that during the oscillation back and forth they end up 1% more often in one
than the other state which means there is a matter-anti-matter asymmetry in their behavior (technically there is CP violation in the mixing). The newsworthy fact is that in
the Standard Model this particular asymmetry (CP violation in mixing) is predicted to be about 25times smaller. With the uncertainties they quote that makes a 3-sigma discrepancy
which is regarded enough to claim "evidence of something" (you need 5 sigma to claim "observation of ..."), in this case direct evidence of new physics beyond the
Standard Model, which is what particle physicists have eagerly been looking for for the last decades. Personally, I'm holding my breath until I see the same measurement
from CDF (the other experiment at Fermilab). There have been many 3-sigma descrepancies in the past ...

As far as the universe is concerned, today we only have matter (forget about particle colliders, the point is there are no stars or huge clouds of anti-hydrogen out there).
As the theory goes after the Big Bang there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which would eventually have all annihilated into radiation and we wouldn't be here.
The matter we see today is from a tiny, 1 in 10^9, asymmetry in the amount of matter vs. anti-matter that was generated dynamically by particle reactions after the Big Bang.
When the universe cooled down and all the anti-matter got annihialted the tiny excess of matter was left over, which is the matter we see today. To generate this asymmetry one
needs (among other things) CP violation. There is CP violation in the Standard Model, it's just not nearly enough (several orders of magnitude) to generate the required asymmetry in the early
universe. It is totally not straightforward what the 1% asymmetry in the B-anti-B mixing from above translates into in the early universe, although I'm quite sure people are looking at
it right as I speak. I would be very surprised if it was enough though.

Re:In case you want hear from a physicist

[Anonymous Coward]

That was a great explanation, many thanks! Only one part seemed a bit too sketchy:

As the theory goes after the Big Bang there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which would eventually have all annihilated into radiation and we wouldn't be here. The matter we see today is from a tiny, 1 in 10^9, asymmetry in the amount of matter vs. anti-matter that was generated dynamically by particle reactions after the Big Bang.

Something doesn't make sense in that description though, regardless of the asymmetry. Matter and antimatter coalesced out of a higher energy state in the Big Bang, so why would they appear only to immediately annihilate themselves against each other into energy again? Except for the tiny asymmetry, the before-and-after states of this process are identical because of energy conservation, so unless some other property changed as well, in effect it didn't happen.

In practice it wouldn't be a process of appear+annihilate at all, but a gradual cooling down of the high energy state through spacetime expansion until only the 1 in 10^9 asymmetric part remains. The sudden appearance and annihilation as two separate steps is completely artificial, and I don't see why that part of the Big Bang is being described that way, even in a theoretical model.

Re:In case you want hear from a physicist

[Lord Ender]

I can picture you reaching for the nonexistant typewriter lever at the end of each line, then realizing it isn't there, then hitting the enter key to advance to the next line as a substitute.

Re:In case you want hear from a physicist

[kmac06]

Excellent, thank you, you answered all the breathless questions I had. If it was as TFA said this would have been huge. Also, I thought the standard in particle physics was 10 sigma...is that for "proof of" (vs "evidence of" vs "observation of")?

Re:In case you want hear from a physicist

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone that checked out of physics qight before the Modern Physics track (I'm an engineer, and not of the nuclear variety, I have no use for such tiny things), and someone that has read about this sort of thing (sub atomic particles and their many wonderful interactions and breakdowns) in other publications, I wonder if perhaps this particular pairing of particles may indeed have a true imbalance in matter-antimatter breakdowns, but may be balanced by another pairing that may have an antimatter bias, thus having a balance in a "bigger picture" so to speak? Since so much at this scale is a blurring of real particles/energy waves and mathematical constructs that exist to explain something observed experimentally through interactions with other particles or waves, I am not finding it convincing that conservatin of charge is really violated, or if perhaps some as yet unexplained particle/wave/energy phenomenon may be occuring in that ~1% of reactions that carries off the detectable balancing charge from the reaction.

The last time I looked at a list of the theoretical particles that make up the Proton, Neutron, and the Electron, and then the particles that make up those particles, it filled a page with their names and short explanations. We're at a scale where stuff has to be mathematically infered based on observations that are too small to be directly measured and have to be done indirectly through other measurements. And, we have no real idea if what we're measuring is the smallest possible entities/quanta of energies that make up these particles, or if there are still smaller bits of matter/energy that go into making up these items that we are looking at. It's like trying to examine one card near the base of a house of cards made up by arranging millions of decks of cards that's the size of the Taj Mahal. What about the fibers that make up that card? What about the particles that make up those fibers? Can those particles be further borken down? How would we know? We can't directly interact with the fibers, much less the particles that make up those fibers. It's amazing to me that we've come this far with our understanding of how these things work and are arranged. To use the above analogy, to look at that one card we're trying to find out about, we're having to take another deck of cards and throw it at the taj mahal sized house of cards at a non-trivial fraction of the speed ofl ight and hope that there is a possibility that we can see where that one card managed to hit another deck of cards arranged in another house about 5 miles away and we can accurately discribe how it hit it, what happened when it hit it, and what happened immediately after it hit it.

This is why I'm not a high-energy subatomic physicist, I can't get my mind around those concepts enough to make myself believe that we're seeing what we're seeing.

Re:In case you want hear from a physicist

[Bigjeff5]

You're ignoring pressure. Objects under pressure hold together more tightly.

The big bang is thought to have started from a state of extreme pressure - imagine the entire universe crushed into a space smaller than the size of an atom. That's the state of the universe pre-Big Bang, and it is sufficient to hold the universe in a state of matter.

What is unclear is what triggers the release of all that massively pent up energy, which is what sent the universe into the high-energy state prior to the re-formation of matter and anti-matter, which happened when the Universe expanded far enough to start to cool back down. Matter was converted to energy, then cooled enough to re-create matter and anti-matter, which destroyed each other almost completely, all before the universe was even close to the size of the head of a pin.

To get an extremely tame but somewhat similar example, look at what happens in a hyper-nova - The super-massive star's fusion slows down enough that it cannot maintain its shape, and crushes on itself, which creates a black-hole, which has far too much matter coming in than it can handle, so it explodes releasing massive amounts of energy in the form of extremely powerful gamma ray bursts. The Big Bang is a similar idea, just infinitely larger.

Re:In case you want hear from a physicist

[Bryan K. Feir]

There have been many 3-sigma descrepancies in the past ...

I have just three words on this:

"Alternating Neutral Currents".

(For those confused, Neutral Currents are interactions mediated by the Z boson. In the early 1970s, there was a race on to provide evidence for these, and there were press releases that had to be retracted because somebody jumped the gun and reported finding a Z before it was verified. This jokingly became called 'Alternating neutral currents', and several physicists had their credibility rather damaged in the process...)

and worse, we could have had our own LHC

[circletimessquare]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

it was canceled in 1993, now its a data center

it was going to be 40 TeV (the LHC is only 14 TeV). we would have already had been running it for years now, and the discussion topics here on slashdot could have been equivalent to discussions about columbus sighting land, in terms of amazing new discoveries by mankind

and to make it incredibly freaky, this thing apparently was going to be in texas, way back when in 1993 when texas still believed in science

Re:and worse, we could have had our own LHC

[wtbname]

I consulted my daughters "Jesus and You, and Science Too" text book, and it confirms that your post is bunk. Texas has never believed in science.

the problem is their equipment

[stoicio]

They are assuming that their equipment is working correctly.

Tom G

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Dirac showed mathematically that the antimatter went backward in time so from our frame of reference in spacetime, it isn't "there". Isn't it in fact in a different location in spacetime? In other words, there may be no bias, the missing 1% is in a spacetime frame of reference we cannot detect.

Re:Tom G

[JeanBaptiste]

then wouldn't they have noticed a whole bunch of antimatter while they were building the thing?

Link to a blog article with a bit more detail....

[glenmark]

For those not feeling brave enough to wade through the arXiv preprint: http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-physics-claim-from-d0.html

Oblig. Futurama

[RealErmine]

Humour Bot: "I says, super collider? I just met her! And then they made a super collider 2, thank you, you've been a great audience"

Not accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

The science budget to DOE (requested for FY2011) is just over 5B USD, up from a little under that as appropriated in 2009. The FermiLab budget is under 500M USD.

Re:Link to a blog article with a bit more detail..

[glenmark]

And here as well: http://www.scientificblogging.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/plot_week_news_cp_violation

Theory

[Joebert]

Wouldn't it be spooky if the other end of a black hole was the inside of a sun ?

texas believed in science once

[circletimessquare]

but luckily pecos bill and jesus, fresh from writing the us constitution, stopped the evil science-believing mexicans from raping white women and illegally occupying manifest destiny lands

Anyone know...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know what happens to the energy of antimatter and matter when collide? Or where all the energy went with all the colliding at the big bang?

Prabu

[Anonymous Coward]

If matter is same as energy [dual property], how can we create a matter out of thin air? If we could create matter and anti-matter from neutral zone, it should be equal. if there is a bias, that means, we could create the energy. There goes the theory that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can be converted from one form to another.

I wish...

[mengel]

But actually, plans are to shut down the Tevatron Real Soon Now, in part because CERN has stolen our lunch, energy-frontier-wise.

See for example, the P5 Report:

"Particle physics in the United States is in transition. Two of the three high-energy physics colliders in the US have now permanently ceased operation. The third, Fermilab's Tevatron, will turn off in the next few years. The energy frontier, defined for decades by Fermilab's Tevatron, will move to Europe when CERN's Large Hadron Collider begins operating. American high-energy physicists have played a leadership role in developing and building the LHC program, and they constitute a significant fraction of the LHC collaborations--the largest group from any single nation. About half of all US experimental particle physicists participate in LHC experiments."

Fermilab plans to keep running neutrino experiments, and working on Project X, which will be developing small accellerator sections which could be combined to make a new, more powerful than ever, linear collider, or possibly even for Accellerator Driven Subcritical nuclear reactors, which could burn fuel that won't undergo fission on its own, or waste from curent reactors, and which would shut down when you turned off the beam.

So there is life for Fermilab beyond the Tevatron. But it is a little sad that what I see out my window isn't the Worlds Most Powerful Accellerator anymore.

detector bias

[swschrad]

all particle detectors are biased, and fussy.

the alternative prospect, that the universe has been biased itself towards things happening rather than things not happening, is just too far-fetched to be believeable. for instance, staff meetings are only one hour out of a week for most people. this is why things still move forward in spite of the organization behind them.

Actually, the Tevatron will be replaced

[students]

The Tevatron has to be partially removed to allow the construction of Project X, which is an accelerator that complements the LHC but does not compete with it. Fermilab is in no danger of being closed due to obsolescence. Many of the people who work there are working on the LHC, and there are many other experiments located at Fermilab.

After congress canceled the Superconducting Super Collider, Europe focused on exploring the "Energy Frontier" and American scientists have focused on the "Intensity Frontier." There are also lots of collaboration and experiments that do not fit into either category. Of course, the rate at which the "Intensity Frontier" is explored does depend on the federal budget, but it will get done eventually.

Journalists - sigh.

[fahrbot-bot]

From TF-NYT-A:

...a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter.

[pedantic mode: on]
Because we call the stuff we're made of "matter"? Seriously, it's nomenclature. If it were reversed, with the slight bias toward "anti-matter", we'd all be made of *that* and call it "matter". (And there's nothing evil about anti-matter.)

The real question is why are things we assumed to be equal and opposite, not. The answer: Because we don't know everything.

I'm taking bets on a new constant

[wealthychef]

Who wants to bet against my prediction that they'll cook up a new fudge factor to cover their physicist butts? :-)

Re:I'm taking bets on a new constant

[Lithdren]

Haha, yeah, those silly scientists and their crazy, trying to explain the universe, stuff! Excuse me, I need to go bury my head in the sand.

Re:I'm taking bets on a new constant

[Slur]

Fudge? Butts? I think you're thinking of a different kind of particle collider.

obvious solution

[ILuvRamen]

Since we know almost nothing about antimatter, I don't think it's proper to automatically decide that less antimatter is being produced. All it means is they're measuring equipment says there is less antimatter. For all they know, a couple percent of the antimatter is turning into a different kind of particle or slipping into another dimension or doing something else that's undetectable. The antimatter particle are likely still being created, something just happens to them before we can measure them.

we are the real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

It's possible, but unlikely - and if true, means it's mathematically impossible for us to understand the universe.

I don't understand why it would be mathematically impossible. It seems more like it just wouldn't make rational sense to us: 0/0 = 1

Or, perhaps there is a better programming language for reality than mathematics. Maybe math itself is like assembly to the machine code of the cosmos.

I think the real problem is that humans are biologically limited in their ability to understand the universe. Our brains just can't grok it, they evolved to exist within a very specific scale and we have pushed right up against the imposed boundaries. If we are to ever truly understand how the universe fits together we will need to first abandon our humanity and escape the shackles of ape evolution. We will need to redesign our brains to interface more directly with reality and to process the increased bandwidth into coherency. Something like 11-dimensional space doesn't make fundamental sense to our brains except abstracted through math. We can't "see" 11-dimensions, we can barely even see the 3D world we live in. Fix that and we will have the basis for actually making sense of the universe.

Sorry,

[Anonymous Coward]

that was just me finetuning the bias level for this weird FeCr tape I'm trying to record on.

What were _you_ reading?

[IBitOBear]

I never said _anything_ about medieval anywhere or anybody, nor any church.

Methinks that you are too used to reading your own assumptions into texts and so you _presumed_ I was talking about that epoch. I never mentioned a date or culture. I am aware of the correct dates and cultures for the discovery of round-earth. The specific references to time and place were not relevant to the conversation so were not cited.

You may be educated but you clearly have not learned to process argument without presumption.

Remember the adage, "you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him think" and in this case your corrective and admonistrative tone is all wet.

dog is my anti-pilot

[fred fleenblat]

But if we lived in a universe full of mostly anti-matter, we probably still would have named it "matter". Which makes one wonder if it's already so.

Re:dog is my anti-pilot

[geekoid]

if you dog collides with a pilot, do they both disappear?

Re:dog is my anti-pilot

[Anonymous Coward]

Captain Neutrino has an undetectable opinion on the issue.

very significant

[peter303]

Muon decay parity violation is .002% asymmetry, or up to 500 times less often. Thats probably CP violation was detected in the early experiments.

Something close to nothing...

[Slur]

At this point probably the best we can say is we're made of "not exactly nothing but damn close to it."

ORLY? Perhaps the vacuum in the device was soft..

[Ungrounded Lightning]

As I understand it (and IANAPhysicist):

One way to view the eventual decay of unstable atomic systems (such as beta decay) amounts to a random encounter and reaction with half of a virtual particle-antiparticle pair from the quantum-mechanical vacuum, with that virtual particle annihilating its counterpart within the unstable system and the energy of the annihilation plus that of the instability liberating the other virtual particle of the pair. (This way things like half-lives depend on the randomness of the encounter and the even statistical distribution of the virtual particles in the QM vacuum, so decay doesn't need a hidden-variable "clock" in the unstable system.)

In a true, hard, vacuum the only thing the decaying particle would be encountering would be QM vacuum virtual particle pairs, which (by the standard model) SHOULD be evenly balanced. But these experiments take place in a real accelerator, in a place built out of normal matter. The vacuum is contaminated by small amounts of normal matter - both the odd gas molecules (or their atomic and subatomic fragments thanks to the high-intensity beams) and random cosmic and local radiation - with a very strong bias toward normal matter. It's also "contaminated" by the colliding beams - are the beam densities equal, or is the antiparticle beam a tad weaker?

Perhaps the unperturbed decays are evenly balanced - but decays resulting from encounters with non-virtual particles (or the "polarized vacuum" around them, with the virtual particles having a preferred orientation due to the fields around the non-virtual particles) are biased according to the matter/antimatter type of the particle?

I'd be interested to see whether these hypothetical effects from contamination of the reaction-region vacuum by normal matter have been taken into account.

Higg's bosun?

[PensivePeter]

Surely the difference can be accounted for by all those Higg's bosuns that we just know are floating around out there?

Fox News Version

[RivenAleem]

The universe is biased towards the "Glass is half full" way of thinking.