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Physicists Spot Potential Source of 'Oh-My-God' Particles
sciencehabit (1205606) writes For decades, physicists have sought the sources of the most energetic subatomic particles in the universe — cosmic rays that strike the atmosphere with as much energy as well-thrown baseballs. Now, a team working with the Telescope Array, a collection of 507 particle detectors covering 700 square kilometers of desert in Utah, has observed a broad 'hotspot' in the sky in which such cosmic rays seem to originate. Although not definitive, the observation suggests the cosmic rays emanate from a distinct source near our galaxy and not from sources spread all over the universe.
I have an idea backed only by my imagination.
What if those galaxies are proof of symetry, and they're some of the few that are made of both matter and anti-matter, and the high energy ejections we're seeing are from that collision. Maybe half the galaxies in the sky are made of anti-matter and the non-particle-scale properties of antimatter are otherwise identical to matter.
It would be interesting "conversation" with lag measured in thousands of years.
Just saying what we're all thinking.
For those of us scientists who hold Christ-gods and sky friends as important in our lives as an empty roll of shit-tickets or takeaway flyers:
God Particle: the Higgs Boson.
Oh-My-God Particle: ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (most likely a proton) detected on the evening of 15 October 1991 over Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.
other particles we find similar to it could be given normal names like UHE particles, or super high energy rays but that doesnt secure grant funding in the theocratic Mormon state of Utah.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Running ther reactors without shielding.
Have gnu, will travel.
Actual scientists... people with PhDs... are creating names like "Oh-My-God" . What's next, "veribifaction" in physics education?
Professor: "So I totally EyeJammed my telescope and galactified my research. I thought I was peepin' down a R.D. but really it was a 2nary star, bitches!"
Unless the particles aren't the message but the means of communication. Maybe they form some kind of field mechanic communications bridge to enable instantaneous communications?
We should consider something like this instead of probes like Voyager. Eventually we'll find a way to use fields or lasers as a communications field conduit that enables immediate lagless communications. Someone is probably working on this right now. To some extent the teleportation technology we've seen for communications could use such beams as guidance and accelerators that cut down lag. So maybe instead of thousands of years the lag is like a day or an hour or a few minutes.
A darker side of this could mean that the existence these focused particles could prove someone is communicating with their homeworld from Earth.
The film Kpax used this kind of idea as his transportation method, which was a pretty awesome film.
Makes for some awesome sci-fi even if it's far fetched!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Religious scientist is like saying technophobic blogger.
thank you, because here i was thinking the naming of the OMG particle related to sex!
ed
Its aliens who have created an Ion drive capable of accelerating Hydrogen ions to near speed of light.. - Giving an almost limitless supply of thrust. What we are seeing is pollution from the thrusters!
Any form of faster-than-light communication naturally leads to the ability to communicate backwards in time via moving frames of reference. So FTL anything means the universe is non-causal and we haven't seen anything to suggest that.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
WTF is "as much energy as well-thrown baseballs"?
That should technically be something like "as much kinetic energy as a well-thrown baseball". In other words, about 50 joules: what you get from a baseball at about 60 miles per hour. So, not major-league fastball fast (90+ mph) but quite a respectable velocity.
And we're not going to talk about assorted forms of chemical or nuclear potential energy in the baseball. If you set fire to a baseball, you could get quite a bit more thermal energy. And you could get a heck of a lot more energy out of a baseball if you fused all its component atoms down to iron.
~Idarubicin
The particle's energy is equivalent to an American baseball travelling fifty-five miles an hour
Take the energy of a baseball thrown at 90-something miles per hour. Now instead apply that energy to a single proton. That's an awful, awful lot of energy for one tiny particle.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Couple books/shows come to mind...
Ender's Game using the ansible for instant communication across great distances (the idea that half of it is in one place, the other half somewhere else) and didn't they do that for very short distances already? like a few feet or so?
but also Dr Who comes to mind... depending on what we send out, can they control us with it?
Could it be a very weak attack?
Idiocracy... it's not just a funny movie, it is the future.
No kidding, it should have been in the internationally accepted furlongs per fortnight.
No brain, no pain.
Somewhere in the ballpark (hur hur) of 140 Joules each
In high school I could throw a fastball at 75 mph. I got recruited by Bama but they rescinded the offer when I hurt my elbow in a skateboarding accident.
Plenty of benign books, like cooks books and top selling novels, I'll see at Costco one week, then gone a week or two later... beyond some staples, they change what is on their shelves quite a lot. And when the state (which is not Costco...) does say you can't read the book, that will be a different story. Otherwise, Costco's decision to carry or not carry a book doesn't factor into my decision which books to read.
Obligatory:
http://xkcd.com/603/
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
We should consider something like this instead of probes like Voyager.
Voyager's purpose was not to communicate with aliens. The "message" on the spacecraft was a publicity stunt concocted by Carl Sagan, and no sane person expects that any alien will ever receive it.
Ansible - You're thinking of Quantum Entanglement. Dr Who - You've confused it with A for Andromeda
This what I come to Slashdot for.
I use to be a baseball player, then I took a skateboard to the elbow.
Well good for you. But that's really not the point.
Costco is a big Obama/Democrat donor and is using their not insignificnat power to shutdown the voice of an author who is critical of the Obama/Democrat machine.
This is fascism, you do understand this do you not? And while this is not direct state censorship, Costco is working at some level along with the actual state, and that makes this very close to actual censorship.
One would think that an enlightened, intelligent, reasonable person would be against censorship. But we know that you sooper genisus are all socialist all the time and anything that furthers that end is just fine with you.
This is tyranny, straight up.
I've been laughing at this (pdf) for days now. The lower right pic on the second page gets me every time.
They might recognize our technology. After all, they are already throwing baseballs at us.
Can anyone comment on how this impacts the theory these were coming from Cygnus X-3:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~rene/talks/Cronin-Fest-Ong-Writeup.pdf
It's only wage-slave click-baiting modern journalists who are responsible for this. It only takes one scientists to slip up and use a funny or sensational nickname for a particle (which will happen eventually), and then these media idiots run with it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The problem is your own bigotry - why do you assume that real scientists - people with PHDs - are somehow not human? Guess what - scientists fart too! They even make fart jokes! Scientists also snort when they eat, scratch their balls, argue with their wives and kids, bitch at/about their neighbors and are even known to drink beer in the backyard while having a barbecue! Scientists can and do listen to opera, rock, country western, rap, hip hop and everything in between.
Youre a pretentious asshole. No one is obligated to live out your preconceived bigotries to your expectations.
I didn't see Costco on the ballot.
Maybe not communication..... ....but, maybe its part of a super ion-drive thruster, that can accelerate ions to near lightspeed before throwing them out the back of their spacecraft. This would give them very close to an actual impulse drive, without violating that annoying Newton's Third Law.
The unit of energy is fff, the energy required to accelerate one firkin by one furlong-per-fortnight.
Steerriikke!
No, it's keeping the shelves fresh with new material.
Again, to repeat the post above yours, Costco moves through inventory quite fast; it's part and parcel to their business model. I bet they did the same with Obama's book, and Coulter/Hannity books, etc. Hell, they do it with higher-end wine, too!
Nonsense, this was politically motivated and if you think otherwise you really need to take a look at what other bullshit things you believe because other people tell you to.
This book is a best seller right now, and in theaters right now, and they are getting bad publicity because of this whole thing. A business looking to make money does not make these kinds of decisions.
Hillary book is there on the shelves and selling like empty cracker jars, but you think they have no room for thie super popular book.
Are you really an idiot or do you have an actual brain? Use it.
That's purely a velocity measure, to include the energy you need to include the mass.
So it's "hogs heads * (furlongs/fornight)^2"
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
or perhaps it's from a stargate
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Aye. 'Tis the "Runcible" our lad is thinkin' of, Captain.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It's interstellar Unicorn vomit - ejected our way from the taping of "Mythological Beasts Gone Wild" during spring break, beyond Arcturus.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The "Oh, Yes! Particle?"
The "Yes, Right There Particle?"
The "OOOOOOOOHOHHHHH Particle?"
For the Dr Who it was this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
The probe is intercepted by a giant spaceship heading for Earth. When the broadcast is shown, an alien face appears and identifies itself as being a Sycorax. The alien demands Earth's surrender and causes a third of the world's population to go into a hypnotic state. The Sycorax threaten to make these people commit suicide unless they are given half of the world's population as slaves. One of the scientists discovers that all of the hypnotised people share the same blood type (A-positive), the same as contained in a sample on Guinevere One.
They used blood control to control people.
On the Ansible you are probably right.
They have a nice graphic here of the OMG particle hitting the atmosphere.
http://www.spaceanswers.com/deep-space/what-is-the-omg-particle/
It was David Tennant's (Doctor #10) first episode
Nobody gives a fuck about your livelihood.
Just because you wrote a book doesn't mean anybody is required to carry it, or read it, or give a damn about it.
I propose a new book: "Dinesh D'Souza: Imagine A World With one Less Whiny Bitch With a Crackpot Theory"
"veribifaction"?? If you're going to make up words, at least try to make the derivation clear. What's a "veribi"?
Unless the particles aren't the message but the means of communication. Maybe they form some kind of field mechanic communications bridge to enable instantaneous communications?
So that would be like needing to make a phone call immediately. And then standing in line for the next version of iPhone.
I'm certain that advanced civilizations have evolved beyond this kind of behavior.
Have gnu, will travel.
Actual scientists... people with PhDs... are creating names like "Oh-My-God".
You need to meet more people with doctorates.
Many of them are actual people with senses of whimsy and humour. It's not like they joined some sort of academic cult and were turned into mindless zombies.
Not that that doesn't happen, but it's not part of the PhD process. Many people are able to survive academic life and still think that thagomizer is a perfectly fine name for the spikes on the end of a Stegosaurus's tail.
Oh, but where it gets real funny is if you don't take the kinetic energy of a baseball and transfer it to a single proton, but where you take the impulse of a baseball and transfer it to a proton.
Now that is a fun proton gun to wield on a baseball field and should confuse the hell out of a batter when you direct it against, well, a flying baseball. Though it would likely cause different problems than just pushing baseballs off-course.
Because the energy of such a proton would be quite intimidating...
The particle's energy is equivalent to an American baseball travelling fifty-five miles an hour
How much is that in Volkswagens? And how fast is it travelling relative to imperial standard sheep? Can you measure the kinetic energy in terms of double-decker busses?
... in the "tiny universe" experimenter's particle accelerator.
If you want the book to reach people, maybe you should apply the same persuasive techniques to Costco stores that we've seen in this very thread.
For instance, you might find yourself in a Costco and see a small group of people gathered around telescopes, discussing the many wonders of the universe they hope to see. You could shove your way to the center of their attention and shout about how Costco censors a completely unrelated book! I can think of no finer way to win the respect and admiration of the scientific community.
Last post!
We should consider something like this instead of probes like Voyager.
Voyager's purpose was not to communicate with aliens. The "message" on the spacecraft was a publicity stunt concocted by Carl Sagan, and no educated person expects that any alien will ever receive it.
Fixed that for you. Plenty of people are perfectly sane while still having no concept of the scales involved. It's ignorance not insanity that leads them to think the Voyager probe(s) may eventually get far enough away to be picked up by aliens.
Dinesh D’Souza has always been a hack. it'd be different if it were a good writer, but i might as well be outraged at them pulling twilight from their shelves. some things really aren't worth the ink they're printed with :)
Hmm... Energetic particles hitting Earth, originating from a single location in the sky... Someone is obviously trying to throw a rock through our window.
fuck off kid.
someone saw something moving at nearly the speed of light packing the energy of a fast moving baseball at 20 odd something orders of magnitude it's mass... and you don't think OMG is an appropriate declaration?
this comment deserves recognition. please mod parent up :)
You speak as if this is fact, and not just theory. Come back when you have a provable fact.
>means the universe is non-causal and we haven't seen anything to suggest that
The fact that everyday life in this universe is so f*cked up tells me either it isn't causal or that there is a lot of FTL giggery going on to retrofit the past to benefit some future and devil take the mess it leaves along the way.
adjusts tin foil hat. takes meds.
The media latches on to somethings and inflates their relevance, but in this case it is a term that physicists seem to use on their own, at least informally. Other cases such as the penguin diagram named after a bet and the tadpole diagram ended up being more formal names that are used regularly in publications.
Corporations are people too, and are entitled to their own opinions and to select what they do and do not sell. Take your socialist BS and move along, please. Stop trying to tell people what they must or must not sell.
lmgtfy.
http://physics.stackexchange.c...
If you have two frames of reference that are not at rest with respect to each other (which is most all of them) and you move from one to the other faster than light and back, you arrive before you left. Any type of faster than light anything (communications or travel) regardless of method (ansible, warp drive, stargate, wormhole, whatever) violates causality because general relativity.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Or how about this? You can lick my balls.
The question is: does it matter if causality is violated? The models do not preclude such a violation IIRC. And the fact that we haven't yet observed such a thing happening certainly doesn't mean that it can't.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/
That's kindof BS...
Mass doesn't expand infinitely nor is there a speed threshold of energy as far as our current understanding of physics goes... This is a simplistic bookkeeping trick that attempts to account for limited acceleration near the speed of light (since F=ma, for a given force, you get less "a" if you somehow fudge 'm' to increase as you approach the speed of light). General relativity explains this much better by having any mass or energy actually distort space time so that you don't ever need this overly simplistic bookkeeping trick (which has unfortunate anomalies like rest-mass and photons having no rest mass, but momentum).
In your own frame of reference, you can accelerate as long as you have the energy to do so. The problem is that from an external observer's frame of reference despite your apparent acceleration from your frame of reference (you think you are going faster and faster), your time dilation factor relative to the observer means it doesn't observer you exceeding the speed of light, The observer thinks your acceleration (dv/dt) is asymptotically approaching zero as you approach the speed of light. Even though you have been accelerating all the time, you don't teleport relative to the observer (although the observer will think you were moving very, very fast, but not faster than light), but if you were to get back to the same frame of reference as the observer, you will have noticed your observer has experience quite a bit more time than you have (this is the origin of the twin paradox of special relativity).
From your special relatively frame of reference, you moved very fast (because you experienced less time for the distance you appeared to travel), but from the observers point of view, more time was experienced, so the velocity never exceed the speed of light. The way this is book-kept for is usually lorenzian length contraction. As you approach the speed of light the distance you observer to traverse over a unit of your time is shorter, so when you divide the distance by your time, you also don't observe that you went faster than the speed of light.
Of course if you could somehow create say a warp drive (or some other FTL transport), to a third party observer, you might appear to be in two places at once, and/or it would appear like time transport, but many folks thinks it is really possible to do this. Creating such a warp disturbance (actually warping space time around you) would likely require a very, very large, but not infinite amount of energy to maintain a negative energy-density around you. It is hypothesized you could not do this w/o some sort of pervasive zero-point energy source or creation of a type of exotic matter to sustain the required region of negative energy-density.
Okay, I've read through a number of your replies, and one question keeps coming up. Who the Hell are you? What skin do you have in this game?
Companies pull books all the time for all kinds of reasons. Why is this one worth disrupting the site over? Are you Dinesh himself, trying desperately to get more income (or mindshare, whatever). Or has he hired you to spread the word on whatever sites you can? Are you simply a Concerned Citizen for whom this one book is the final straw?
Or are you a crazy lib who hates Dinesh D'Souza, and intends to delegitimize him by being a dick on websites in his name?
Or are you just trying out a new trolling technique? In which case, full marks for creativity, full marks for getting the bites. But 0/10 for pulling at the emotions like a traditional troll does. You're stirring up more confusion than anger.
Last post!
The vw beetle would be going less than 300 feet per hour. There's no such thing as a standard sheep. Your double-decker bus quip is just dumb.
No dumber than measuring energy in baseballs.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Yes, actually use your brain and think about it, and look up how Costco handles their "treasure" items. Beyond the basics they try to always stock, they purpose carry limited supplies of just about everything else to create a "treasure hunt" feeling, to encourage people to impulse buy because an item might be gone the next time they come back. Pretty much all books come under this category, where they get a fixed number per store. If it sells quickly, they run out, if it sells slowly, it can sit on the shelf a long time until they drop the price. Costco is far from a trend setter, and a very popular book can run out at their store if they underestimated their need with no plans to get more into stores, while others will hang around for months. Very popular books sometimes show up much later than their peak interest, and a lot of the time comes down to whether the publisher is trying to push a book or trying to get rid of extras. Regardless, it is a matter of luck to find a particular book when you want it at Costco.
For those of us who want to know where this is, from TFP:
A cluster of events appears in this map centered near right ascension 150 deg, and declination 40 deg, with a diameter of 30 deg–40 deg
They're probably the death throws of some ancient civilization exploding because they thought it would be cool to mess around with a new power source. They should have stuck with coal....we need to heed this warning.
I'm not sure that's true. If you consider the one-way trip from A to B then, yes, there will be some frames of reference in which you will be calculated to have arrived at B before you left A.
But I don't think heading back to your starting point will mean getting home before you left. In any frame of reference in which you were calculated to have arrived at B before having left A, you will take correspondingly longer to return to A, leaving you always at least slightly in the future of your launch event.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
They used blood control to control people.
I haven't seen blood control in years!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What's that in European baseballs?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
You mean the Theory of General Relativity?
Carefully chosen words. It's not insane to conceive of future humans deliberately tracking the Voyagers down. Then selling them on eBay. It's not very likely, but it's not impossible.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
You can have any three of locally flat spacetime (i.e., Special Relativity), clear local connections between observable cause and observable effect, faster-than-a-massless-particle travel for massive particles ("FTL"), and formal logic.
Most working scientists would reject FTL, as there has never been any evidence supporting the idea that massive particles can exceed "c" _locally_, and an abundance of evidence supporting the idea that massive particles cannot exceed "c" locally.
Special Relativity ("SR") is extremely well-tested in part because it underlies the Standard Model of particle physics, which is also extremely well-tested directly using laboratory studies and also using astrophysicall observations.
SR's constant "c" can in modern terms be considered the sole free parameter of the (Poincaré) symmetry group of the flat space metric ("Minkowski space"). The parameter is usually seen as the velocity of a massless particle (with photons being massless particles _by definition_, although experiment supports the definition well), but it can be decoupled from the definition without requiring the mathematical structure of Special Relativity to be abandoned _locally_ (where in GR terms that would be in the local section of the fibre bundle). One could also pragmatically consider SR to be even more special than it is, but that it forms an (extremely) Effective Theory in practice.
Local causality is an important assumption for physical investigation. One might have to consider either a wide-reaching alternative like superdeterminism (in the 't Hooft sense) allowing for "conspiracies" by the universe to make _non-local_ causal connections in the very early universe, or some other of scheme to provide corrections to local causality in some non-classical limit. These are not exactly insane ideas, but local causality holds up very very well in everyday physics.
Finally, there might be some bug in the formal systems (perhaps in real number mathematics, perhaps in classical logic) that we use in mathematical physics. I don't think anyone has seriously advanced that as an alternative, although people will grudgingly admit that it's there (it gets raised sometimes in the context of Bell's inequalities, sometimes seriously, e.g. by E.T. Jaynes).
"Because general relativity" is not really accurate; although FTL is likely to violate one or more of the energy conditions, it doesn't really break GR. Lots of exact solutions of the Einstein Field Equations show closed timelike curves, and that is generally considered to mean that such solutions are unphysical. However that could simply be wrong. In ditching Special Relativity (and keeping FTL, causality, and logic) you break the condition that you can always use the Minkowski metric successfully in the limit where spacetime intervals go to zero, but that condition was built in to GR because of the success of SR. However, if you modify SR, GR just won't care. (GR doesn't deal in silly trivialities like comparing velocities, so any formal correspondence with a theory that does -- like SR, as the chief example -- is handy for practical purposes).
Indeed, "democratization" of causal cones comes up from time to time (Carroll at this link, for example and note the link to Geroch http://blogs.discovermagazine.... ) and the idea of using multiple causal cones whose null slopes differ from that of photons is headache-inducing but not manifestly unworkable *in GR*, which has vastly different symmetry groups than the Poincaré or Lorentz groups.
The lack of evidence for FTL means that if there is anything moving FTL it interacts very weakly and very rarely with non-FTL mass-energy and causes only extremely weak spacetime curvature. On the other hand, you could be a bit silly and abuse Wheeler's single-electron idea by extending it to all mass-energy, and formally describe vacuum fluctuations in term
They have already broken causality a bit at the quantum level. They've entangled photons, sent one photon through a polarization filter, making sure that photon was a specific polarization, then sent the other through a slit, such that it they knew it was still quantum, then sent the other photon that already had a know polarization through the opposite polarization filter, and it passed through.
Or something along these lines. The conclusion was the photon had its past changed because it is impossible to change its polarization once it's set. Changing the polarization would mean changing the information, which means you no longer have the same photon, yet they knew it was the same photon because the entanglement was still valid.
The crazy part is the past didn't change relative to us, only the photon. Yay, interweaving timelines of different multi-verses. I have no idea. The scientists were kind of shocked also and were not entirely sure how to interpret it. I guess future experiments will help isolate what's going on.
What exactly is a 20 degree radius? One wonders about that article.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us