The Oh My God Particle
fourmilab.ch
The Oh My God Particle
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Re: The Oh My God Particle
#2A pretty quick read about a super-fast proton detected in 1991, with a nice set of comparisons to get the point across. Such as that the proton had enough energy:
to light a 40 watt light bulb for more than a second.
Yowza.
That said, included in the article is this:
[Star Trek's best ship would take] a little more than 21 years [to reach the center of the galaxy]. By contrast, an observer on board the Oh-My-God particle would arrive at the nucleus of the Milky Way, according to his clock, just about 3 seconds after leaving Starbase Terra. That's more than 9,700,000 times faster than the starship.
* bzzzz * wrong. It's only perceived as faster to the riders, the particle takes ~32,000 years (according to their numbers) to do the same trip, which isn't pointed out in that section. At which point our whole civilization is probably dead or passed you by long ago. And they've apparently forgotten about suspended animation.
Re: The Oh My God Particle
#3A pretty quick read about a super-fast proton detected in 1991, with a nice set of comparisons to get the point across. Such as that the proton had enough energy: to light a 40 watt light bulb for more than a second. Yowza. That said, included in the article is this: [Star Trek's best ship would take] a little more than 21 years [to reach the center of the galaxy]. By contrast, an observer on board the Oh-My-God part…
But that's what he said: "according to his [the rider's] clock" it would take about 3 seconds to reach the center of the Milky Way. So yes, he is talking about how fast the riders perceive it, which is all they care about, since they wrote off their entire families for dead before they left.
Now the strange thing about traveling at 1516c (i.e. far greater than the speed of light), is that the time dilation equation yields an imaginary time, in this example 1 / sqrt(1 - 1516^2). I'm not sure how that translates into a perceived travel time of 21 years.
Re: The Oh My God Particle
#4Summary: A particle (probably a proton) was detected hitting the atmosphere at nearly the speed of light, which is kind of impossible or at least implausible, and they can't figure out how it happened or where it came from.
My question is: are they sure their equipment didn't just have a glitch?
Re: The Oh My God Particle
#5A pretty quick read about a super-fast proton detected in 1991, with a nice set of comparisons to get the point across. Such as that the proton had enough energy: to light a 40 watt light bulb for more than a second. Yowza. That said, included in the article is this: [Star Trek's best ship would take] a little more than 21 years [to reach the center of the galaxy]. By contrast, an observer on board the Oh-My-God part…
But that's what he said: "according to his [the rider's] clock" it would take about 3 seconds to reach the center of the Milky Way. So yes, he is talking about how fast the riders perceive it, which is all they care about, since they wrote off their entire families for dead before they left. Now the strange thing about traveling at 1516c (i.e. far greater than the speed of light), is that the time dilation equation y…
Warp engines make a little stable bubble of space and shift what's around it, so onboard time matches galaxy time, and you can jaunt a significant way across the galaxy and still be home in a few years Earth time.
Re: The Oh My God Particle
#6> Sokolsky has calculated that at 3×1020 eV, even a single proton could travel no farther than 10 megaparsecs
I wonder how fast proton looses energy (due to interactions with photons of background radiation).
How much energy it would need to travel to us from edge of observable universe?
Particle have (very short) wavelegths associated with them. It might be interesting to observe larger amount of such high energy photons coming from same point in the sky especially if there is a black hole near their path that could bend it slightly. Maybe we could get some diffraction patterns. ... yeah I'm probably insane.
Re: The Oh My God Particle
#7Summary: A particle (probably a proton) was detected hitting the atmosphere at nearly the speed of light, which is kind of impossible or at least implausible, and they can't figure out how it happened or where it came from. My question is: are they sure their equipment didn't just have a glitch?
Re: The Oh My God Particle
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's what he said: "according to his [the rider's] clock" it would take about 3 seconds to reach the center of the Milky Way. So yes, he is talking about how fast the riders perceive it, which is all they care about, since they wrote off their entire families for dead before they left. Now the strange thing about traveling at 1516c (i.e. far greater than the speed of light), is that the time dilation equation y…
Warp engines make a little stable bubble of space and shift what's around it, so onboard time matches galaxy time, and you can jaunt a significant way across the galaxy and still be home in a few years Earth time.
ahhhhh ... ok :)
Re: The Oh My God Particle
#9> Sokolsky has calculated that at 3×1020 eV, even a single proton could travel no farther than 10 megaparsecs I wonder how fast proton looses energy (due to interactions with photons of background radiation). How much energy it would need to travel to us from edge of observable universe? Particle have (very short) wavelegths associated with them. It might be interesting to observe larger amount of such high energy ph…
The usual energy loss mechanism for cosmic-rays (fast protons) is reverse-compton scattering off the cosmic-microwave background photons, which is quite amazing really. Some of the most energetic particles scattering off the ubiquitous but very low energy background.
Anyway, if you propose that this is the mechanism for energy loss and you know how dense the CMB photons are (which we do very well) then you can predict interesting things like the maximum distance a cosmic ray can travel before it runs out of steam entirely, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin_limit
Although i'm not sure how the OMG particle fits in with this scheme yet
Re: The Oh My God Particle
#10A pretty quick read about a super-fast proton detected in 1991, with a nice set of comparisons to get the point across. Such as that the proton had enough energy: to light a 40 watt light bulb for more than a second. Yowza. That said, included in the article is this: [Star Trek's best ship would take] a little more than 21 years [to reach the center of the galaxy]. By contrast, an observer on board the Oh-My-God part…
But that's what he said: "according to his [the rider's] clock" it would take about 3 seconds to reach the center of the Milky Way. So yes, he is talking about how fast the riders perceive it, which is all they care about, since they wrote off their entire families for dead before they left. Now the strange thing about traveling at 1516c (i.e. far greater than the speed of light), is that the time dilation equation y…
I think the imaginary time should be taken as an indication that it doesn't make sense to talk about travelling at v > c, in terms of a Special Relativistic framework at least :)