Welcome, Fergus.....nice to have you on board. Hope you stay long...and post often.
A New Voice
by apfergus 34 Replies latest jw experiences
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apfergus
The answer is always 42. It's just a matter of finding the right units. In all actuality, though, we're trying to double check a measurement made in a previous experiment called LSND (Los Alamos Solar Neutrino Detector). Either the LSND measurement is wrong, or if it isn't then there's another generation of subatomic particles that we haven't found yet. I'm personally hoping for the latter of the two--that's job security right there.
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AuldSoul
or if it isn't then there's another generation of subatomic particles that we haven't found yet.
WOW! That doesn't happen all that often...when will you likely know? I'm sure you would be broken if you broke the news on a public forum prior to publication, but I would like to at least know when you have an answer (or suspect that you will) so I can start watching for published results.
I'm sure if you find an error in the LSND measurement that will be news, too. Just on a much smaller scale. Small scale, unfortunately, does not equal job security.
I have what may be a very simple pet question to ask you. It is one that has gone unanswered for a long time now. Since you work in the field of a subatomic playground you may know the answer. I keep hoping I will find out the answer so I can add to my own knowledge.
How can gluons be particles when they are defined as massless and neutral?
That one has me stumped. I have always thought a foundational requirement for definition as a particle was the possession of mass as a property.
Respectfully,
AuldSoul -
apfergus
Good question, actually. It's all because of quantum mechanics. Back in the early-ish 20th century a guy named DeBroglie came up with a relationship between an object's momentum and it's wavelength. This completely counterintuitively implies that things with no mass, such as light waves, can have momentum--a property usually reserved for massive particles. Also, massive particles could be wave-like. This blurred the lines seperating waves from particles and now pretty much everything is just colloquially referred to as a particle--gluons, neutrinos (once thought to be massless, now we're working on measuring their mass), photons, and gravitons (never actually been observed, but theoretically massless).
Hopefully that helps. It's one of those things that kind of requires a bit of suspension of disbelief before you can really accept it. Quantum mechanics is just plain weird sometimes.