There were philosophical differences as well as a head-to-head clash between Newtonian dymanics (little balls bouncing around not caring about which way time was going) and kinetic theory (entropy, the 2nd law, "time's arrow"). You had reductionists and their counterparts. There was a lot of good work on the atomic theory that led to great advances in chemistry and thermodynamics, but remember that no one had ever seen an atom. I think it is a lot like how some people are wary of quarks because though they make a lot of sense in the standard model, they cannot exist by themselves, which leads to a philosophical distinction (are they real if you can't isolate them?).
The whole world is celebrating this, not just the UK. Several years ago various organizations were formulating ideas when it was decided it should be a global effort. There is an international steering committee made up of people from representative scientific societies (that include the US and Germany). The supporting societies organize events in their respective countries, but any organization that wants to promote physics can do so under the WYP banner.
Various events for each country can be found here.
Römer measured the speed of light in 1676 just by observing Jupiter's moon Io. He got a value that was about 75-percent of the correct value, but that was due to the uncertainty in the known value of the diameter of the Earth's orbit. The result did demonstrate a finite speed at which light travels.
The World Year of Physics is celebrating the year that Einstein put out three of his best papers: Special Relativity, brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect. In addition to the importance of relativity, he also confirmed the existence of atoms with the brownian motion paper, and the existence of quantized energy with the photoelectric effect.
That was one hell of a year. Any one of those would have established his reputation, but all three, and in the same year!!
For what it's worth, the temperature at 65kft, according to the 1976 Standard Atmosphere, is -70 F (the 4-degree per 1 kft doesn't hold all the way up because there is a temperature inversion between 10 kft and 45 kft).
I'm not sure about the upper limit on 200 kts for the winds aloft, but you should state the winds can be from -200 kts to +200 kts because it makes a big difference for an airplane whether it is going into a headwind or not.
The aerodynamic force goes as the density times the square of the velocity. At 65kft the density drops from 1.225 kg/m3 to 0.0907 kg/m3, so all other things equal (namely the area of the wing), to maintain the same lift you need to increase your relative velocity about four times, so your 60 kts becomes 240 kts. As an example, the SR-71 has a takeoff speed of 334 kph, so to fly at 85kft (density 0.0342 kg/m3) it needs to fly at least 2000 kph just to stay aloft (and in fact the link I provided says it can go over 3500 kph!).
I had a prof pull out that joke on our classical mechanics class back in the mid-eighties, so it has been around a while.
Re:Reviewer catches himself.
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Data Crunching
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· Score: 1
I disagree. I thought it was a very good book review because he described the scope and contents of the book, then talked about what in particular was good and bad supported with specific examples. Usually what gets passed off as a book review here (and elsewhere) is more a synopsis of the type you'd find from an "Amazon top 100" reviewer: a brief description similar to what is on the dust jacket, then a sentence or two talking about what is in each chapter, and if you're lucky maybe a comment or two about how it was written too dry or folksy.
One might take issue with the reviewer's comments or opinions (e.g., whether the statements about MySQL are accurate), but he at least has comments and opinions to discuss.
You know, you might have identified a niche husbandry consulting market.
Re:Take THAT, space science nay-sayers!
on
Glass In Spaaaaace
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· Score: 1
Robert Park and the American Physical Society have long been foes of both the Shuttle and the ISS.
First off, the American Physical Society has no stance for or against the Shuttle and the ISS. They are a professional society for physicists. They occasionally perform studies or issue statements based on areas of their expertise. The only statement about the ISS that I am aware is Statement 91.2 and was released in 1991. Basically it said that the APS feels there is no current credible scientific justification for the proposed ISS and that the scientific value of the ISS has been greatly overstated and can be done better and cheaper on Earth and/or in the shuttle. I think 14 years later it is hard to argue that statement has not proven accurate.
Bob Park writes a weekly one-page commentary work What's News pertaining to physics and general science folly. He is rather opinionated on many subjects and is not shy to state them (it is, after all, an opinion column). He does not speak for the APS any more than a political commentator speaks for any newspaper on the Sunday editorial page. Park's disclaimer at the bottom (at the time the link in question was posted) was:
THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY and THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the American Physical Society or the University, but they should be.
The "unique result" statement you criticize is taken from a report by the National Research Council (at NASA's request), which basically states (and Park reiterates) that nothing on protein crystal research has been done that has not been done on Earth. In fact, the exact statement taken from the Executive Summary is:
The task group heard a great deal about experiments to date in NASA 's macromolecular crystallography program. The results so far are inconclusive, and the impact of microgravity crystallization on structural biology as a whole has been extremely limited. At this time, one cannot point to a single case where a space-based crystallization effort was the crucial step in achieving a landmark scientific result. In many of the cases that have so far been listed as successful, the improvements obtained have been incremental rather than fundamental. In addition, the difficulty of mounting simultaneous efforts to produce the best possible crystals both on the ground and in space has limited the ability of researchers to make the comparisons between microgravity and Earth crystals that would be necessary to demonstrate that the microgravity environment can produce superior crystals.
Finding: The results from the collection of experiments performed on microgravity's effect on protein crystal growth are inconclusive. The improvements in crystal quality that have been observed are often only incremental, and the difficulty of producing the appropriate controls limits investigators ' ability to definitively assess if improvements can be reliably credited to the microgravity environment. To date, the impact of microgravity crystallization on structural biology as a whole has been extremely limited.
A more descriptive statement Park made was in a link in the link. They aren't comments to be taken with salt but rather a listing of damning facts regarding selling the ISS for growing protein crystals. There isn't any way to put a good spin on that.
That NRC report statement about protein crystals can be made for just about most of the research attempted on the ISS. You can argue all you want about the political and/or societial reasons for having or not having the ISS, but you cannot just
A gas floating around in space has a speed of sound associated with it, which is the speed a disturbance propagates through the gas (due to the gas molecules bumping into each other down the line). This is the same way a sound wave propagates through the atmosphere. The medium that the sound waves travel in is the gas itself.
You get a shock wave when you have a bunch of matter traveling at supersonic speeds that then at some point slow to subsonic speeds. That is what is going on here.
Apparently so. Here is a post I made yesterday which just scratches the surface. That post was based on my memory and some quick Googling. Here is another place to start.
Not quite correct. The recent studies being referred to have to do with alcohol. It seems that a serving of alcohol a day (whether it be in the form of wine, beer, etc.) seems to be good for certain things (the heart, and the brain). About a decade ago there was this big red wine craze, which led some to think that it is something to do with the tannins in the grape (and hence Welch's Purple Grape Juice, as Larry King will tell you), but it seems to be just the alcohol. People who consumed a drink a day seem to do better with regard to some things than people who do not drink; however, people who drink much more than this do not do better than the moderate drinkers, and they of course suffer other maladies that moderate or abstinate drinkers do not.
The argument for red/purple grape juice has to do with the higher antioxidant levels apparently present, but you can get higher levels in artichokes, beans, and other things. Lycopene is another buzz topic, so if you want lots of that eat tomatoes and watermelon.
Basically the best health advice has always been to take things in moderation, and to eat healthy and exercise. I find it amazing the power of will millions of people have to stick to crazy diets and programs when all they need to do is adhere to the above advice.
The USAF typically does not normally do bucket captures unless the payload absolutely requires it. It is too costly and dangerous (especially costly).
The normal landing (on soil, at least) is done by strapping on a bunch of corragated cardboard to the bottom of the payload and letting the cardboard take most of the landing abuse when it comes down on parachute.
Because they have a good idea on what the wind direction vs altitude profile is, even these parachute landings get put down pretty near where they would like.
The jet stream is very localized within a particular altitude band, and as you mention, much faster than anywhere else. The winds up at 100kft depend on the latitude and the season, but they could be anywhere from 100 kts or so to absolutely calm. They could also be blowing in the opposite direction than at the lower altitudes. These guys might find that their balloon would start out going one direction and then come back once the high altitude winds are hit.
If they are smart, they'll determine when the winds hit turnaround for their area and launch then.
Re:Should be good if you use accrued vacation
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Star Wars Sickout
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· Score: 1
I would think it is the other way around since vacation/sick time is an indirect expense, meaning that it is something that you cannot apply a fee to (and thus earn a profit from). In fact, it sort of a double loss because when you are taking that time, not only are you being paid out of overhead, but you are also not spending that time charging a customer or otherwise advancing the company bottom line as you normally would.
I know from a bean counter point of view that companies want people who accrue too much time to use it, but that is because it becomes an accounting headache carrying that potential expense around and not knowing when it might be used in a big lump (it is hard to develop a spending plan if you expect that for a certain month you'll need to spend X dollars out of overhead when there are people who could potentially end up taking that whole month off because of so much accrued time).
Tech support proceeds to blame your hardware vendor, who blames your software vendor, ad nauseum.
This is standard computer procedure. Years ago I was working in a group where we used a Data General minicomputer. We were having some flaky behavior with it so we had a field tech come in and work on it. This guy, a hardware guy, determines that it is a problem with the software. He calls into DG to work out the software issue, and the DG software people start telling him that it must be a hardware issue. They're telling the hardware guy, who has took the machine apart and tested all the hardware, that it is a hardware issue because it certainly couldn't have been the software!
This sharpness verses resolution thing apparently is not well understood in this forum, given the number of posts that use it incorrectly.
In a properly designed optical system the 6 megapixel camera will not perform better than the 1 megapixel camera, and in fact I can think of at least one reason why it would perform worse, but more on that later. Within the context of this topic, the only way to get better optical performance is to put up a bigger-diameter lens, not a bigger focal plane.
The performance of an imaging system depends first and foremost on the aperture size of the system. If you have perfectly performing optics in front of an imager with infinitely small pixels, you'll still get a blurry image. The very fact that light entered your system (usually through a circular aperture such as on a telescope opening) means that it diffracts off of the aperture opening and prevents the system from generating a perfect focus. Most stars are so far away that they should appear as point sources, but through any telescope (or your eye, for that matter) they will always look like a blurry disk. The size of the blurry disk depends on the aperture diameter (larger apertures give smaller disks---it actually depends on the f/number, so if you have an iris in the system you need to take that into account) and the wavelength. For 500 nm light (sort of in the mid-visible) the Hubble creates a blur spot of about 12-microns diameter (Hubble has a 2.4 m primary with a 24 m focal length). You get better resolution by generating smaller blur spots.
How sharp a picture looks depends on how many pixels you can get across the blur spot. Optical systems are designed to get about 2-3 pixels across the blur spot (anything less and you can't see the resolution you have in your image, and anything more is overkill). If you are using a sensor with 30-micron pixels to look at that Hubble 12-micron blur spot, there will be details you can't see (two stars very close together will create two 12-micron blur spots very close together, but they would both fall onto only one pixel and would appear as one star), i.e., it won't be as sharp as it could be. The ideal sensor for Hubble would have 4-6-micron pixels (this is all in an ideal sense as the Hubble has various additional optics that go to different instruments, and these optics make the blur spot larger, which means the different instruments can and do use larger pixels). If you used a sensor with 1-micron pixels, you'd have a lot of pixels across the blur spot but it does not buy you anything in performance.
So, a 6 megapixel camera will only perform better than a 1 megapixel camera if the system was originally underdesigned, which is not usually the case. In fact, a 6 megapixel camera will probably perform worse in this context because as the pixels get smaller (which they would have to do in this case because your overall sensor size is designed to be the size of the field of view and anything physically larger than that is just wasted space), they aren't as sensitive (do not have as deep of an electron well).
Land-based telescopes can only achieve high optical performance in the infrared. The best they can hope for in the shorter wavelengths is the pre-spherical-abberation-corrected Hubble performance, so you will not be able to replace Hubble with ground observatories (nor with the JWST for that matter).
There are a host of other issues with ground-based adaptive optics that limit their use (namely, you can only do it in the optical vicinity of reference stars). Because of the infrared performance, perhaps your argument works against building the JWST.
A nice review of the issues involved can be found here.
I am not sure where you got that idea about the Hubble image quality. Hubble is performing near the diffraction limit. I believe it has a Strehl ratio around 0.8 in the visible, which is way way better than anything else at that size. Once you are at the diffraction limit you aren't going to get any better than that unless you put up a larger mirror, and the Hubble mirror is about as big as you are going to get launched.
Could you please comment on the disappointingly low resolution? To what are you comparing this to?
Tumbleweeds and other sight gags
on
Planet Simpson
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· Score: 2, Informative
I don't know how old the author is, but for those of us who grew up in the 70's and 80's on Warner Brothers (and other) reruns, sight gags such as the tumbleweed blowing by to highlight the lack of life, or crickets chirping to highlight the lack of applause, is pretty common and many decades old. In fact, it is "old school," if this old fart may borrow from the 90's vernacular.
I am a cosmic ray physicist expatriate, so bear with me as I dust off some brain cells:
1) The energies of the protons hitting the top of the atmosphere are very very high. The muons themselves at the ground have energies of a few GeV, and they themselves have lost 2 GeV just getting down through the atmosphere. The primary particles (mostly protons) creating the detectable ground-level showers have energies from tens of GeV's on up (TeV's, PeV's, etc.) The fluxes of these particles drop off as a power law with energy.
Incidentially, the highest energy cosmic ray detected was over 10^20 eV! I believe the flux for particles at that energy are something like one event per square kilometer per century or something like that.
2) Muons are leptons, so they are not affected by the strong force, as you mention.
For charged particles another source of energy loss is through radiation as they accelerate (or decelerate). When a charged particle passes close to a nucleus it can have its trajectory altered resulting in radiation emission. This is bremsstrahlung. If the radiated photons have enough energy (greater than 1.02 MeV), they can pair produce into electron/postitrons and thus an electromagnetic cascade is born. It turns out that the energy radiated has a 1/m^2 dependence, which makes it very important for electrons, but basically nothing else (the muon being 207 times the mass of the electron, I believe). This is why muons don't create showers, or conversely why basically only electrons and photons do.
Because charged muons don't strongly interact, and they don't create showers, their dominant energy loss mechanism is due to ionization and atomic excitation (because they have charge), which is well described by the Bethe-Bloch equation.
Hadronic showers, by the way, are a little bit tricky because the shower profile and composition fluctuates so much (electromagnetic showers are very well behaved and easy to identify). To design them you need to take care to put an electromagnetic calorimeter in front of them so you can tell the difference between electromagnetic and hadronic showers. The material that makes up the EM part has to be something that will ensure a good EM shower, but with low enough Z so that the hadrons will not start their shower there. Occasionally hadrons will knock off an electron in the EM part, which will cause a EM shower and make it look like a EM event, but this is just part of the background that you need to take statistically into account by making good computer models (along with other things like getting a handle on how what percentage of hadrons at a given energy will be entirely contained in the calorimeter and what will leak out the back). You can't construct and analyze a particle detector these days without a very good physical model of it.
At the relativistic energies we're talking about here (a few GeV), the dominant energy loss mechanism is through ionization and atomic excitation (for muons and protons, these energies are too low for radiative effects to be important, but as you pointed out earlier they dominate for electrons), which are described by the Bethe-Bloch equation. Basically in this energy range the energy loss is determined only by the particle velocity, so a muon and a proton moving at the same velocity will have the same range.
Muons are the most dominant charged particle in terms of flux on the ground not because they they can travel longer through the atmosphere, but because when a high-energy primary proton comes barrelling through the atmosphere it knocks off lots of pions in the downward direction that then decay into high energy muons. For every one proton that initiates such a particle shower, you get many many muons.
It also explains why the atmospheric muons are there in the first place - all the other particles get stopped in the atmosphere.
Atmospheric muons are not what is left over because all the other particles have been stopped, they are actually secondary particles created by the primary particle interactions in the atmosphere. There are basically no primary muons. Muons survive to the ground because they are created further down in the atmosphere, and as another person pointed out, they are at least minimum-ionizing in energy.
At ground level muons are about the only thing you can use for this purpose because the other particles you mentioned (protons, neutrons, and electrons) do not have appreciable penetrating energy because they are all interaction products. Neutrinos, as you alluded to, interact so weakly that they are both too tough to detect, and for the same reason they wouldn't make very good probe particles. Ground-level muons are routinely used to calibrate cosmic ray detectors, except for the neutrino detectors which are located deep underground to get away from atmospheric muons.
By the way, muons have been used as probes before. The most fameous example was searching for hidden chambers in the Great Pyramid of Chefren. Apparently they're still doing it today.
Slashdot Mirror
A nice writeup is here.
Various events for each country can be found here.
This says it better than I can.
Römer measured the speed of light in 1676 just by observing Jupiter's moon Io. He got a value that was about 75-percent of the correct value, but that was due to the uncertainty in the known value of the diameter of the Earth's orbit. The result did demonstrate a finite speed at which light travels.
That was one hell of a year. Any one of those would have established his reputation, but all three, and in the same year!!
For what it's worth, the temperature at 65kft, according to the 1976 Standard Atmosphere, is -70 F (the 4-degree per 1 kft doesn't hold all the way up because there is a temperature inversion between 10 kft and 45 kft).
I'm not sure about the upper limit on 200 kts for the winds aloft, but you should state the winds can be from -200 kts to +200 kts because it makes a big difference for an airplane whether it is going into a headwind or not.
The aerodynamic force goes as the density times the square of the velocity. At 65kft the density drops from 1.225 kg/m3 to 0.0907 kg/m3, so all other things equal (namely the area of the wing), to maintain the same lift you need to increase your relative velocity about four times, so your 60 kts becomes 240 kts. As an example, the SR-71 has a takeoff speed of 334 kph, so to fly at 85kft (density 0.0342 kg/m3) it needs to fly at least 2000 kph just to stay aloft (and in fact the link I provided says it can go over 3500 kph!).
I had a prof pull out that joke on our classical mechanics class back in the mid-eighties, so it has been around a while.
One might take issue with the reviewer's comments or opinions (e.g., whether the statements about MySQL are accurate), but he at least has comments and opinions to discuss.
You know, you might have identified a niche husbandry consulting market.
First off, the American Physical Society has no stance for or against the Shuttle and the ISS. They are a professional society for physicists. They occasionally perform studies or issue statements based on areas of their expertise. The only statement about the ISS that I am aware is Statement 91.2 and was released in 1991. Basically it said that the APS feels there is no current credible scientific justification for the proposed ISS and that the scientific value of the ISS has been greatly overstated and can be done better and cheaper on Earth and/or in the shuttle. I think 14 years later it is hard to argue that statement has not proven accurate.
Bob Park writes a weekly one-page commentary work What's News pertaining to physics and general science folly. He is rather opinionated on many subjects and is not shy to state them (it is, after all, an opinion column). He does not speak for the APS any more than a political commentator speaks for any newspaper on the Sunday editorial page. Park's disclaimer at the bottom (at the time the link in question was posted) was:
The "unique result" statement you criticize is taken from a report by the National Research Council (at NASA's request), which basically states (and Park reiterates) that nothing on protein crystal research has been done that has not been done on Earth. In fact, the exact statement taken from the Executive Summary is:
A more descriptive statement Park made was in a link in the link. They aren't comments to be taken with salt but rather a listing of damning facts regarding selling the ISS for growing protein crystals. There isn't any way to put a good spin on that.
That NRC report statement about protein crystals can be made for just about most of the research attempted on the ISS. You can argue all you want about the political and/or societial reasons for having or not having the ISS, but you cannot just
You get a shock wave when you have a bunch of matter traveling at supersonic speeds that then at some point slow to subsonic speeds. That is what is going on here.
The argument for red/purple grape juice has to do with the higher antioxidant levels apparently present, but you can get higher levels in artichokes, beans, and other things. Lycopene is another buzz topic, so if you want lots of that eat tomatoes and watermelon.
Basically the best health advice has always been to take things in moderation, and to eat healthy and exercise. I find it amazing the power of will millions of people have to stick to crazy diets and programs when all they need to do is adhere to the above advice.
The normal landing (on soil, at least) is done by strapping on a bunch of corragated cardboard to the bottom of the payload and letting the cardboard take most of the landing abuse when it comes down on parachute.
Because they have a good idea on what the wind direction vs altitude profile is, even these parachute landings get put down pretty near where they would like.
If they are smart, they'll determine when the winds hit turnaround for their area and launch then.
I know from a bean counter point of view that companies want people who accrue too much time to use it, but that is because it becomes an accounting headache carrying that potential expense around and not knowing when it might be used in a big lump (it is hard to develop a spending plan if you expect that for a certain month you'll need to spend X dollars out of overhead when there are people who could potentially end up taking that whole month off because of so much accrued time).
In a properly designed optical system the 6 megapixel camera will not perform better than the 1 megapixel camera, and in fact I can think of at least one reason why it would perform worse, but more on that later. Within the context of this topic, the only way to get better optical performance is to put up a bigger-diameter lens, not a bigger focal plane.
The performance of an imaging system depends first and foremost on the aperture size of the system. If you have perfectly performing optics in front of an imager with infinitely small pixels, you'll still get a blurry image. The very fact that light entered your system (usually through a circular aperture such as on a telescope opening) means that it diffracts off of the aperture opening and prevents the system from generating a perfect focus. Most stars are so far away that they should appear as point sources, but through any telescope (or your eye, for that matter) they will always look like a blurry disk. The size of the blurry disk depends on the aperture diameter (larger apertures give smaller disks---it actually depends on the f/number, so if you have an iris in the system you need to take that into account) and the wavelength. For 500 nm light (sort of in the mid-visible) the Hubble creates a blur spot of about 12-microns diameter (Hubble has a 2.4 m primary with a 24 m focal length). You get better resolution by generating smaller blur spots.
How sharp a picture looks depends on how many pixels you can get across the blur spot. Optical systems are designed to get about 2-3 pixels across the blur spot (anything less and you can't see the resolution you have in your image, and anything more is overkill). If you are using a sensor with 30-micron pixels to look at that Hubble 12-micron blur spot, there will be details you can't see (two stars very close together will create two 12-micron blur spots very close together, but they would both fall onto only one pixel and would appear as one star), i.e., it won't be as sharp as it could be. The ideal sensor for Hubble would have 4-6-micron pixels (this is all in an ideal sense as the Hubble has various additional optics that go to different instruments, and these optics make the blur spot larger, which means the different instruments can and do use larger pixels). If you used a sensor with 1-micron pixels, you'd have a lot of pixels across the blur spot but it does not buy you anything in performance.
So, a 6 megapixel camera will only perform better than a 1 megapixel camera if the system was originally underdesigned, which is not usually the case. In fact, a 6 megapixel camera will probably perform worse in this context because as the pixels get smaller (which they would have to do in this case because your overall sensor size is designed to be the size of the field of view and anything physically larger than that is just wasted space), they aren't as sensitive (do not have as deep of an electron well).
There are a host of other issues with ground-based adaptive optics that limit their use (namely, you can only do it in the optical vicinity of reference stars). Because of the infrared performance, perhaps your argument works against building the JWST.
A nice review of the issues involved can be found here.
Could you please comment on the disappointingly low resolution? To what are you comparing this to?
I don't know how old the author is, but for those of us who grew up in the 70's and 80's on Warner Brothers (and other) reruns, sight gags such as the tumbleweed blowing by to highlight the lack of life, or crickets chirping to highlight the lack of applause, is pretty common and many decades old. In fact, it is "old school," if this old fart may borrow from the 90's vernacular.
Civil War
War Between the States
War of the Rebellion
War of Northern Aggression
War for Southern Freedom
The Recent Unpleasantness
1) The energies of the protons hitting the top of the atmosphere are very very high. The muons themselves at the ground have energies of a few GeV, and they themselves have lost 2 GeV just getting down through the atmosphere. The primary particles (mostly protons) creating the detectable ground-level showers have energies from tens of GeV's on up (TeV's, PeV's, etc.) The fluxes of these particles drop off as a power law with energy.
Incidentially, the highest energy cosmic ray detected was over 10^20 eV! I believe the flux for particles at that energy are something like one event per square kilometer per century or something like that.
2) Muons are leptons, so they are not affected by the strong force, as you mention.
For charged particles another source of energy loss is through radiation as they accelerate (or decelerate). When a charged particle passes close to a nucleus it can have its trajectory altered resulting in radiation emission. This is bremsstrahlung. If the radiated photons have enough energy (greater than 1.02 MeV), they can pair produce into electron/postitrons and thus an electromagnetic cascade is born. It turns out that the energy radiated has a 1/m^2 dependence, which makes it very important for electrons, but basically nothing else (the muon being 207 times the mass of the electron, I believe). This is why muons don't create showers, or conversely why basically only electrons and photons do.
Because charged muons don't strongly interact, and they don't create showers, their dominant energy loss mechanism is due to ionization and atomic excitation (because they have charge), which is well described by the Bethe-Bloch equation.
Hadronic showers, by the way, are a little bit tricky because the shower profile and composition fluctuates so much (electromagnetic showers are very well behaved and easy to identify). To design them you need to take care to put an electromagnetic calorimeter in front of them so you can tell the difference between electromagnetic and hadronic showers. The material that makes up the EM part has to be something that will ensure a good EM shower, but with low enough Z so that the hadrons will not start their shower there. Occasionally hadrons will knock off an electron in the EM part, which will cause a EM shower and make it look like a EM event, but this is just part of the background that you need to take statistically into account by making good computer models (along with other things like getting a handle on how what percentage of hadrons at a given energy will be entirely contained in the calorimeter and what will leak out the back). You can't construct and analyze a particle detector these days without a very good physical model of it.
Muons are the most dominant charged particle in terms of flux on the ground not because they they can travel longer through the atmosphere, but because when a high-energy primary proton comes barrelling through the atmosphere it knocks off lots of pions in the downward direction that then decay into high energy muons. For every one proton that initiates such a particle shower, you get many many muons.
At ground level muons are about the only thing you can use for this purpose because the other particles you mentioned (protons, neutrons, and electrons) do not have appreciable penetrating energy because they are all interaction products. Neutrinos, as you alluded to, interact so weakly that they are both too tough to detect, and for the same reason they wouldn't make very good probe particles. Ground-level muons are routinely used to calibrate cosmic ray detectors, except for the neutrino detectors which are located deep underground to get away from atmospheric muons.
By the way, muons have been used as probes before. The most fameous example was searching for hidden chambers in the Great Pyramid of Chefren. Apparently they're still doing it today.