Congratulations for the discovery of the next epicycle!
New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN
41–50 of 217 posts
Re: New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN
#42I recently finished The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, which explore the concept of aliens using their super advanced technology to mess with the results of Earth's particle accelerators, thereby stopping humanity's ability to develop technology based on new physics.
Is this discovery exciting? Or are we living in The Three-Body Problem?
Re: New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact: in the most general case, energy is not a conserved quantity. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-...
Isn’t information a better unit?
MengerSponge's article is raising an extremely subtle point about how we translate modern physical theories into English: we do it poorly.
Conservation laws (Noether's theorem) are dependent on the way the physics is voiced, mathematically. Saying "energy is conserved" is the moral equivalent of looking at Newton's laws and just ignoring GR. GR tells us new, precise, and amazing things about conservation laws. It's just that, unfortunately, they're a little hard to translate into English.
Re: New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN
#44Does it fit into the standard model? I thought higgs boson was the last undiscovered particle according to the standard model.
Particles are compositional.
Re: New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's always many considerations. Energy density, stability, what kind of energy can you convert it to, can it be directed easily, how hard is it to store etc...
Antimatter's reputation for being incredibly difficult to store comes from the fact that it's produced as individual particles. A superconducting antimatter hockey puck would be much easier to store than a cloud of antiprotons of the same mass. And yeah, you'll need a way to build gamma ray mirrors before antimatter reactions will push you in any direction (the energy comes flying out isotropically and we can't prese…
I would be so nervous to be in the middle of space with an hockey puck of antimatter.
Re: New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN
#46I recently finished The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, which explore the concept of aliens using their super advanced technology to mess with the results of Earth's particle accelerators, thereby stopping humanity's ability to develop technology based on new physics. Is this discovery exciting? Or are we living in The Three-Body Problem?
Interesting.
For what reason are the aliens trying trying to stop us from discovering new physics? Stop us from blowing ourselves up? Blowing them up?
Re: New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN
#47Can someone explain the practical use for this? Better batteries or something?
Re: New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t information a better unit?
MengerSponge's article is raising an extremely subtle point about how we translate modern physical theories into English: we do it poorly . Conservation laws (Noether's theorem) are dependent on the way the physics is voiced, mathematically. Saying "energy is conserved" is the moral equivalent of looking at Newton's laws and just ignoring GR. GR tells us new, precise, and amazing things about conservation laws. It's…
>Saying "energy is conserved" is the moral equivalent of looking at Newton's laws and just ignoring GR.
If you're not expecting the spacetime background to be changing rapidly during your experiment, it's pretty moral to say energy is conserved.
Re: New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN
#49I recently finished The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, which explore the concept of aliens using their super advanced technology to mess with the results of Earth's particle accelerators, thereby stopping humanity's ability to develop technology based on new physics. Is this discovery exciting? Or are we living in The Three-Body Problem?
Interesting. For what reason are the aliens trying trying to stop us from discovering new physics? Stop us from blowing ourselves up? Blowing them up?
Without ruining too much of the books (they are worth a read), there is conflict between us and the aliens and limiting technological progress is an important part of their strategy
Re: New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN
#50I recently finished The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, which explore the concept of aliens using their super advanced technology to mess with the results of Earth's particle accelerators, thereby stopping humanity's ability to develop technology based on new physics. Is this discovery exciting? Or are we living in The Three-Body Problem?
If aliens don't like us, then why wouldn't they just destroy us, rather than troll our physicists and mess with the results?
Why would they specifically mess with the particle accelarators at this point? Why not with earlier physics?