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Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

sciencemag.org

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Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#121

Post by kache_ »

atty wrote: post #115

Alexey Petrov, quoted in the article, subbed in to teach one day in my quantum mechanics class :) It was the first day we were being introduced to the theory of scattering, and I will never forget his intro. He asked the class, “what is scattering?”, waited a moment, and then threw a whiteboard marker against the wall, and answered his own question: “that’s scattering”. Lots of times, physics classes can be so heavy…

An old professor of mine loved the "Throw something at the blackboard" technique. Great way to get the class potheads to wake up

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#122

Post by snissn »

atty wrote: post #115

Alexey Petrov, quoted in the article, subbed in to teach one day in my quantum mechanics class :) It was the first day we were being introduced to the theory of scattering, and I will never forget his intro. He asked the class, “what is scattering?”, waited a moment, and then threw a whiteboard marker against the wall, and answered his own question: “that’s scattering”. Lots of times, physics classes can be so heavy…

that's super cool! i've always been able to connect the work in physics class to some physical system except for when i studied quantum mechanical density matrices. still have no idea what those are about :)

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#123

Post by geniium »

atty wrote: post #115

Alexey Petrov, quoted in the article, subbed in to teach one day in my quantum mechanics class :) It was the first day we were being introduced to the theory of scattering, and I will never forget his intro. He asked the class, “what is scattering?”, waited a moment, and then threw a whiteboard marker against the wall, and answered his own question: “that’s scattering”. Lots of times, physics classes can be so heavy…

I love that kind of practical example.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#124

Post by ffhhj »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #54
ipnon wrote: post #40

Nature seems to have this interesting property of always increasing in perceived complexity.

Wouldn't that be amazing if the universe developed more and more characteristics as you look for them? Or even, that it's pushed to create something when you do? Infinite playground.

If there was a single force in the beginning, there might be more forces branching out in the future of the universe, who knows.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#125

Post by terramex »

wnevets wrote: post #117

I can't wait for PBS Spacetime to tell me what to think about this.

They already did, 15 minutes ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Ko7NW2yQo

For those who do not know - PBS Spacetime is YouTube channel hosted by astrophysics Ph.D Matt O'Dowd, aimed at casual physics enthusiasts without oversimplifying underlying physics too much.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#126

Post by quchen »

goatcode wrote: post #68

>the strong force and the weak force. Is there a reason we're leaving "nuclear" off these forces' names now?

I think this would be misleading once you dive deeper into particle physics. The strong interaction is really »the interaction mediated by gluons between color-charged things«.

• Gluons interact with gluons, without the need for quarks.

• Many (almost all) bound quark states are not found in nuclei, only uud (protons) and udd (neutrons) are. But there are also all the mesons (e.g. the pion), and a whole lot of other baryons (xis and sigmas and what have you) exist.

To put this into perspective, it feels a bit like calling electromagnetic interaction the »chemical interaction«, because chemistry is explained for the most part by the interaction of electrons. But that would leave out a lot of different ways matter can interact, like Bremsstrahlung, positrons, proton/proton repulsion, and all that.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#127

Post by forgotmysn »

kache_ wrote: post #121
atty wrote: post #115

Alexey Petrov, quoted in the article, subbed in to teach one day in my quantum mechanics class :) It was the first day we were being introduced to the theory of scattering, and I will never forget his intro. He asked the class, “what is scattering?”, waited a moment, and then threw a whiteboard marker against the wall, and answered his own question: “that’s scattering”. Lots of times, physics classes can be so heavy…

An old professor of mine loved the "Throw something at the blackboard" technique. Great way to get the class potheads to wake up

how many potheads did you have in your quantum mechanics class?

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#128

Post by 1-6 »

uhtred wrote: post #120

Can anyone explain in layman's terms why this is important?

3D point clouds and x-rays! More research can be done on low-cost devices. It puts LiDAR to shame but there are also great privacy implications. Muon tomography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_tomography

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#129

Post by ISL »

atty wrote: post #115

Alexey Petrov, quoted in the article, subbed in to teach one day in my quantum mechanics class :) It was the first day we were being introduced to the theory of scattering, and I will never forget his intro. He asked the class, “what is scattering?”, waited a moment, and then threw a whiteboard marker against the wall, and answered his own question: “that’s scattering”. Lots of times, physics classes can be so heavy…

My favorite example of this was during a lecture on waveguides, when Michael Schick picked up the section of cylindrical metal pipe he was using to motivate the cylindrical-waveguide problem at hand, looked at the class through the pipe, and said, "clearly, it admits higher-order modes."

That little episode brought great joy to this experimentalist's heart.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#130

Post by nahuel0x »

ipnon wrote: post #40

Nature seems to have this interesting property of always increasing in perceived complexity.

Maybe there aren't anything like "fundamental laws" and all are emergent patterns, like we are, and in other places in the Universe the "fundamental laws" are completely different. In that case, the hermetics had a point when they talked about infinite divisibility.
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