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CERN experiment discovers five new particles

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Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#91

Post by ams6110 »

zerebubuth wrote: post #46
sidlls wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is being downvoted for a number of reasons. I'd like to use it as soapbox for a moment. One reason I left academia was the constant cycle of grant funding proposals followed by a flurry of publication followed by more proposals. These proposals often carried some requirement for language that, in my view, was a direct response to a certain kind of taxpayer, in order to justify on some tangible level the…

How much of that attitude do you think is due to a cultural shared failure to value basic science and theoretical research, and how much is due to a failure to communicate the benefits of such activities? I think it's quite possible that when people hear "it's complicated" or "we won't see practical applications for a decade", they wonder whether it's money well-spent. Especially if funding for things which have an i…

Also I think that popular media accounts of some ridiculous-sounding research that got funding tends to get extrapolated (by at least some folks) to a characterization all taxpayer-funded research. One example I remember hearing about a few years ago was a study of how cocaine affects the sexual behavior of Japanese Quail. A lot of people hear about that sort of thing and question why their money is being spent on such useless-sounding research.

And I imagine a fair number of people who are just working to get by don't see much point in the study of escoteric particle physics either. Never going to affect their lives.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#92

Post by whyever »

quakeguy wrote: post #29
grabcocque wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of baryons fyi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_baryons

Math tells me there must be 216, no? 3 quarks make a baryon, there are 6 types of quarks, so 6^3? Idk if up up up baryons are allowed though, or any other baryon made of 3 equal quarks.

You can also have excited particles that have the same quark content. They are called "resonances", are unstable and can decay. For example, the five particles discovered here are excitations of the particle containing two strange and one charm quark.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#93

Post by shmageggy »

metaobject wrote: post #44
dukwon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's common in particle physics to express base-10 order of magnitude using this notation. I'm unfamiliar with how it's used elsewhere.

I'm guessing shmageggy thought the notation was Big-O notation. It's a bit of CS notation that defines an upper bound on the number of operations for an algorithm as a function of input size. I don't know enough about particle physics to know whether you and him/her are even remotely close to saying the same thing.

I did. I've never seen it used in another way. TIL

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#94

Post by wfunction »

dkural wrote: post #69

Just to give a bit more context: * These are not elementary particles. * It was predicted for a long time that these composite particles should exist. So it is not "new" in the sense that it was unexpected, but we finally have the resolution (energy, luminosity etc.) to detect these with statistical significance. * These belong to the same class as protons and neutrons - these are hadrons made with multiple quarks. H…

I've never heard the term "matter field"... Is that a thing?

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#95

Post by dwaltrip »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #56
nananonymous wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem. They can't answer that question and neither can the market. The market is great at assigning value to things based on scarcity and demand, but there will never be scarcity of the Navier-Stokes equations because they can just be copied and shared so the market is useless for saying what they're worth. And before a discovery is made literally nobody knows how it might change the world. I somehow dou…

good answer. thank you for taking me on. does it justify theft though?

Your comments would be more positively received if you acknowledged the minority position your views represent, and take that into consideration when trying to make points to others.

Many people support large amounts of free market activity and decentralized economic agency, but most people believe that only relying on this model of human organization will bring significant harm to society.

Very few people consider the idea of "taxation is theft" to be even remotely reasonable.

Thus there is a fairly large gap for you to bridge when trying to make points that rely on such principles.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#96

Post by danbruc »

wfunction wrote: post #94
dkural wrote: post #69

Just to give a bit more context: * These are not elementary particles. * It was predicted for a long time that these composite particles should exist. So it is not "new" in the sense that it was unexpected, but we finally have the resolution (energy, luminosity etc.) to detect these with statistical significance. * These belong to the same class as protons and neutrons - these are hadrons made with multiple quarks. H…

I've never heard the term "matter field"... Is that a thing?

They are properly called fermionic fields [1] as opposed to bosonic fields. I also want to note that the »super simple overview of Quantum Field Theory & Particle Physics« really is super simple. As far as I can tell - I am not a physicist - none of the statements is actually correct.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermionic_field

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#97

Post by dang »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #35

you forgot to beg for more funding

Could you please not provoke and feed flamewars on HN? I'm sure there's a good discussion to be had about science funding but this is not the way.

On HN, if you have a substantive point to make, please make it thoughtfully, and if you don't then please don't post.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922258 and marked it off-topic.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#98

Post by cygx »

metaobject wrote: post #44
dukwon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's common in particle physics to express base-10 order of magnitude using this notation. I'm unfamiliar with how it's used elsewhere.

I'm guessing shmageggy thought the notation was Big-O notation. It's a bit of CS notation that defines an upper bound on the number of operations for an algorithm as a function of input size. I don't know enough about particle physics to know whether you and him/her are even remotely close to saying the same thing.

It's math notation invented for analytic number theory that got popularized in CS by Donald Knuth.

By definition, constant (nonzero) arguments denote the same class, so using constants different from 1 isn't really useful. However, the O stands for 'order' or 'order of', and it sometimes gets (ab)used to denote orders of magnitude (eg powers of 10) of finite values instead of limiting behaviour of functions.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#99

Post by cygx »

dukwon wrote: post #32
shmageggy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you intended, but technically O(1%) == O(100%) == O(5000%)

It's common in particle physics to express base-10 order of magnitude using this notation. I'm unfamiliar with how it's used elsewhere.

If you're a physicist, you've probably seen it used as the final term of Taylor expansions. That's the proper usage, whereas the usage above is an abuse of notation insofar as (nonzero) constant arguments are equivalent.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#100

Post by Sciencehaters »

dang wrote: post #97
jamesdwilson wrote: post #35

you forgot to beg for more funding

Could you please not provoke and feed flamewars on HN? I'm sure there's a good discussion to be had about science funding but this is not the way. On HN, if you have a substantive point to make, please make it thoughtfully, and if you don't then please don't post. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922258 and marked it off-topic.

Can you stop doing everything you can to make people hate science. Stop being elitist maybe?
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