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Old 15th February 2013, 04:28 PM   #921
lpetrich
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Now can we try to talk about the Higgs boson please? If that's too limiting for you, let's talk about mass.
OK. Let's see what different theories predict about the Higgs-particle spectrum.

What 0+ 0- +-1
Unbroken Standard Model 1 1 1
Eaten by Z and W+- 0 1 1
Low-energy SM 1 0 0
Low-energy MSSM 2 1 1
Low-energy NMSSM 3 2 1
CP-even neutral: 0+
CP-odd neutral: 0-
Charged: +- 1
MSSM = Minimal SUpersymmetric Standard Model
NMSSM = Next to MSSM

There's an interesting curiosity about the MSSM Higgs masses. A parameter they depend on is m(A), and if it's greater than about 200 GeV, then the particles "decouple". One of them, a neutral CP-even one, stays around 100 GeV and acts much like the SM Higgs particle, especially if m(A) is large. The others get masses close to m(A).

It's that light one that was most likely recently discovered. I can't find any LHC limits on heavy MSSM Higgses, however.

Higgs Theory and Phenomenology in the Standard Model and MSSM
The NMSSM Higgs sector

BTW, First three-year LHC running period reaches a conclusion | CERN press office starting a 2-year shutdown.
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Old 15th February 2013, 07:10 PM   #922
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Here's a nice example of dishonest cherry-picking...

Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
See wiki re the electromagnetic wave equation and in this section note this: "the curl operator on one side of these equations results in first-order spacial derivatives of the wave solution, while the time-derivative on the other side of the equations, which gives the other field, is first order in time".
Note the word I've highlighted.

For future reference, let's continue the sentence Farsight truncated, and let's quote the following sentence of the article Farsight was quoting, and let's highlight that important word a few more times:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia
, resulting in the same phase shift for both fields in each mathematical operation.

From the viewpoint of an electromagnetic wave traveling forward, the electric field might be oscillating up and down, while the magnetic field oscillates right and left; but this picture can be rotated with the electric field oscillating right and left and the magnetic field oscillating down and up.

Enjoy the moment as Farsight argues with the Wikipedia article he had just quoted:

Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
The sinusoidal electric wave you see in the pictures is the slope of the curvature, whilst the orthogonal magnetic wave is the rate-of-change of slope. NB: the "fields" referred to are E and B, which aren't actually fields, but instead denote the linear and rotational forces resulting from electromagnetic field interactions.
Yet Farsight's own authority refers to them as fields, for good reason: They're fields.
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Old 15th February 2013, 07:38 PM   #923
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
I don't reject those theories, I understand them. I understand things like intrinsic spin. It isn't something magic and mysterious. The electron doesn't have its magnetic moment for nothing. Don't dismiss the Einstein de-Haas effect.
It's funny that you bring that up, since you brought it up as a way to distract us from the real problem you have in dealing with spin: photon-photon systems cannot have the right spin to match your theory.
Quote:
The theological part is dismissing references to Maxwell / Einstein / Minkowski etc as "quote mining" along with dismissing references to hard factual scientific evidence.
But given that you, by your own admission, cannot actually follow the hard science written by these authors, all you can possibly do is quote mine.
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Old 16th February 2013, 12:47 AM   #924
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Seems like Farsight has been extracting Great Meaning out of the 3+1 form of Maxwell's equations, and not the general-covariant form, the one where space and time dimensions are treated alike. The g-mu-nu that he sometimes mentions, that's the metric of space-time in general-covariant form.


Now to what one finds for Grand Unified Theories. It's rather remarkable that one can get all the elementary fermions into a few GUT multiplets without a lot of extra particles. The gauge and Higgs particles do get some additional ones, however, particles that can cause proton and bound-neutron decay. From proton-decay experimental bounds, these additional particles must have GUT-scale masses.

First, the gauge symmetries that are already a part of existing theories.

Macroscopic: U(1)EM
EM = electromagnetic

Low-energy Standard Model: SU(3)C * U(1)EM
C = quantum chromodynamic (QCD)
Hidden by color confinement for length scales greater than about 10^(-15) m

Unbroken Standard Model: SU(3)C * SU(2)L * U(1)Y
L = weak isospin
Y = weak hypercharge
Electroweak symmetry breaking: the last two get reduced to U(1)EM


The simplest GUT that unifies the gauge fields is Georgi-Glashow SU(5). It does so at the price of adding gauge and Higgs particles that can cause proton decay. However, the elementary fermions do not get additional particles; all the SM ones can fit into 2 multiplets per generation, with right-handed neutrinos being a third one.

The next one up is Fritzsch-Minkowski-Georgi SO(10). It adds more gauge particles, but it unifies the Higgs particles into one multiplet with no extra particles relative to SU(5). Likewise, it unifies all the elementary fermions into one multiplet per generation, with only right-handed neutrinos added.

SO(10) breaks down into SU(5) * U(1)B-L
B-L = (baryon number) - (lepton number)

From there, the next one up is E6, which breaks into SO(10) * U(1). It can unify the elementary fermions and the Higgs particles into one multiplet, with an additional Higgs singlet and two of the three sets of Higgs particles being forced up to GUT energies by symmetry breaking.
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Old 17th February 2013, 03:09 PM   #925
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Originally Posted by edd View Post
Do you really not see what you've done there?
Let me fix it for you: when an electromagnetic wave runs through the electromagnetic field the electromagnetic field waves.
A field isn't something magical and mysterious that's something separate to space edd. It's a condition of space. Have a read of Einstein' s 1920 Leyden Address and his 1929 talk on the history of field theory. This NASA article on gravitomagnetism is worth reading too. It says spacetime instead of space, but you should nevertheless catch the drift of "Einstein was right again. There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity".

Originally Posted by edd View Post
Even then you're stretching it too far to say the field would be displaced.
Maxwell said "light consists of transverse undulations in the same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.” And when a light wave interacts with an electron, it makes it move. And as you know, both have a wave nature. They aren't billiard balls.

Originally Posted by edd View Post
Plus if space were doing the waving it'd be a gravitational wave. And be quite different.
Light waves are transverse waves. Gravitational waves aren't. They're different, but not totally different. The coordinate speed of light varies in a non-inertial reference frame such as a gravitational field, and c=√(1/ε0 μ0). Personally I wonder if this is why LIGO hasn't detected gravitational waves. Like it's trying to measure length-change with a rubber ruler.
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Old 17th February 2013, 03:11 PM   #926
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Originally Posted by lpetrich View Post
Show me where I am supposed to have done that and explain why that is supposed to be the case.
You totally evaded and dismissed the Einstein-de Haas effect and magnetic dipole moment in your post #918.

Originally Posted by lpetrich View Post
All of which are 100% consistent with quantum-mechanical intrinsic spin. Farsight, why don't you try to work through the calculation of the Dirac value of the magnetic moment? It's calculated using the Dirac-field hypothesis, not the circling-photon hypothesis.
And now you're trying to play the maths card.

Originally Posted by lpetrich View Post
It's quote mining because those quotes are often out of their context and often misunderstood.
It's not "quote mining". They said what they actually said.

Originally Posted by lpetrich View Post
Also, why is it some sort of heinous crime against science to treat those gentlemen as something other than prophets of revealed truth?
It's nothing to do with "prophets". It's paying attention to what people like Einstein and Maxwell and Minkowski actually said, and to the hard scientific evidence that supports what they said. Sadly there are people in this world who peddle unsupported hypotheses and urge other people to disregard hard scientific evidence and what Einstein etc said.

Last edited by Farsight; 17th February 2013 at 03:23 PM.
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Old 17th February 2013, 03:37 PM   #927
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Originally Posted by ben m View Post
Really? You understand intrinsic spin? I'm skeptical.
Don't be. Intrinsic spin is intrinsic to something, and makes it what it is. For example, a tornado has intrinsic spin. Try taking the spin out of the tornado. What are you left with? A tornado? Nope.

Originally Posted by ben m View Post
In the past, whenever you've said "I understand X", you've proceeded to spout great heaps of misunderstanding. Want to prove that? If I had told my graduate oral-exam committee "I understand intrinsic spin", they would have made me solve Peskin and Schroder problems on the blackboard. Peskin & Schroeder problem 3.1 is a good one.
Snipe snipe snipe, retreat behind mathematics. Now go and look at the Einstein-de Haas effect and magnetic dipole moment. Do you think the electron's spin ˝ is some kind of magic? Presumably so, since here you are advocating the point-particle electron. When godless dave said nobody claimed they were point particles, you kept schtum, didn't you? Seeing as point particles can't spin.

Originally Posted by ben m
Evolutionist: Let's talk about <neat recent discovery>...
Don't bore us with ad-hominem trash. Talk about the scientific evidence. Talk about Einstein and Maxwell etc. Talk physics.
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Old 17th February 2013, 04:00 PM   #928
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Don't be. Intrinsic spin is intrinsic to something, and makes it what it is.
Great, it's an argument by etymology! In German the term is Eigendrehimpulse.

Quote:
For example, a tornado has intrinsic spin. Try taking the spin out of the tornado. What are you left with? A tornado? Nope.
Why would I expect a classical fluid-mechanics analogy to be relevant? Why would I expect this particular analogy to be relevant?

Quote:
Snipe snipe snipe, retreat behind mathematics.
The Dirac Equation isn't a "retreat behind mathematics", it's an extremely rich source of (a) physical intuition and (b) actual correct experimental predictions.

Anyway, if you knew I was going to "retreat" there, why didn't you beat me to it? An argument that could find errors in the Dirac equation, or point out dualities which explain why Dirac's predictions work so well, would be a lot less crackpotty than a refusal to engage with it.
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Old 17th February 2013, 04:05 PM   #929
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Arrow

Originally Posted by lpetrich View Post
OK. Let's see what different theories predict about the Higgs-particle spectrum.

What 0+ 0- +-1
Unbroken Standard Model 1 1 1
Eaten by Z and W+- 0 1 1
Low-energy SM 1 0 0
Low-energy MSSM 2 1 1
Low-energy NMSSM 3 2 1
CP-even neutral: 0+
CP-odd neutral: 0-
Charged: +- 1
MSSM = Minimal SUpersymmetric Standard Model
NMSSM = Next to MSSM

There's an interesting curiosity about the MSSM Higgs masses. A parameter they depend on is m(A), and if it's greater than about 200 GeV, then the particles "decouple". One of them, a neutral CP-even one, stays around 100 GeV and acts much like the SM Higgs particle, especially if m(A) is large. The others get masses close to m(A).

It's that light one that was most likely recently discovered. I can't find any LHC limits on heavy MSSM Higgses, however.

Higgs Theory and Phenomenology in the Standard Model and MSSM
The NMSSM Higgs sector

BTW, First three-year LHC running period reaches a conclusion | CERN press office starting a 2-year shutdown.
Where is your none of the above? The big issue is that there's CERN physicists out there saying that the Higgs mechanism is the cuckoo in the nest of the standard model, only they're shouting in the wind whilst Higgs propaganda dooms the HEP community (and possibly the whole of theoretical physics) to a long slow harikiri. The public are unimpressed by billions spent on "the mystery of mass", which Einstein solved a hundred plus years ago, and is irrelevant to modern life in these days of energy issues. I know you root for physics, but I do too. How can I put this? Think about Brookhaven. People like you need the wake-up call before it's too late. Public and government want some results after decades of zilch. You're getting in the way. Bow before you break.

Clinger: I made it clear that the "fields" referred to are E and B, which aren't actually fields, but instead denote the linear and rotational forces resulting from electromagnetic field interactions. Pay attention to Minkowski:

"Then in the description of the field produced by the electron we see that the separation of the field into electric and magnetic force is a relative one with regard to the underlying time axis; the most perspicuous way of describing the two forces together is on a certain analogy with the wrench in mechanics, though the analogy is not complete".

That's my bolding, and this is from Space and Time which you can find on wikipedia. Scroll down about four-fifths through the article, this paragraph is opposite figures 3 and 4, though this translation says "force screw" instead of "wrench".

Last edited by Farsight; 17th February 2013 at 04:06 PM.
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Old 17th February 2013, 04:26 PM   #930
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Have a read of Einstein' s 1920 Leyden Address and his 1929 talk on the history of field theory.
I don't see what is supposed to make Einstein's Leyden Address a revealed text.
Quote:
This NASA article on gravitomagnetism is worth reading too. It says spacetime instead of space, but you should nevertheless catch the drift of "Einstein was right again. There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity".
An attempt to explain that effect in nontechnical terms. This sort of text-thumping would make a Bible-thumper proud.
Quote:
Maxwell said "light consists of transverse undulations in the same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.”
Thumping again, treating Maxwell as an inspired prophet.
Quote:
Light waves are transverse waves. Gravitational waves aren't.
Don't make me laugh. I *studied* general relativity, an I know for a fact that GR gravitiational waves are transverse. That's what you get when you solve the equations.
Quote:
They're different, but not totally different. The coordinate speed of light varies in a non-inertial reference frame such as a gravitational field, and c=√(1/ε0 μ0).
A lot of units factors. Thumping that would make a scriptural percussionist proud. The local speed of light in a vacuum is officially defined as a constant. In fact, in theoretical work, it's often set equal to 1.

Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
You totally evaded and dismissed the Einstein-de Haas effect and magnetic dipole moment in your post #918.
I don't deny either effect for a moment.

Quote:
And now you're trying to play the maths card.
Yes, I have a whole deck of them.
Quote:
It's not "quote mining". They said what they actually said.
A classic defense of quote mining.
Quote:
It's nothing to do with "prophets". It's paying attention to what people like Einstein and Maxwell and Minkowski actually said,
Thus treating them as prophets.
Quote:
and to the hard scientific evidence that supports what they said.
100% consistent with a unified space-time continuum, intrinsic spin, the Dirac theory of the electron, etc.
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Old 17th February 2013, 04:33 PM   #931
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Originally Posted by lpetrich
...The simplest GUT that unifies the gauge fields is Georgi-Glashow SU(5). It does so at the price of adding gauge and Higgs particles that can cause proton decay...
Well protons don't decay so there you go. Back to the drawing board. Start by understanding what a field is, and that E and B aren't fields. It's the electromagnetic field. One field and two forces, linear and rotational because of the screw nature of the electromagnetic field. Then ask yourself this: in low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation to gamma photons, where does the strong force go? Oh, and the $64,000 dollar question is this: The strong force keeps a proton together. What keeps an electron together?

I'm a bit surprised you didn't want to talk about mass. Anyway, I'm off to bed.
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Old 17th February 2013, 05:58 PM   #932
Reality Check
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Well protons don't decay so there you go.
Protons are not observed to decay so thre you are.

Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Back to the drawing board. Start by understanding what a field is, and that E and B aren't fields
Back to your high school sceince textbooks, Farsight.
E is an electric field.
B is a magnetic field.
They are components of an electromagnetic field.

Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
What keeps an electron together?
Wow - what astounding ignorance, Farsight !
An electron is a fundamental particle. There is nothing inside it to come apart!

ETA
So the $64,000 dollar question really becomes what basic physics do you understand, Farsight?
You do not now what an electric field is.
You do not know what a magnetic field is.
You do not know what an electron is.
You do not know what relativistic means in a relativistic quantum field theory like the Higgs mechanism.
You do not know what intrinsic spin means in QM as shown by your use of macroscopic spins as in tornadoes.

ETA2
Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Then ask yourself this: in low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation to gamma photons, where does the strong force go?
We shold ask ourselves a better question: What will be your next trivial question, derailing the thread?
There are no quarks after the annihilation so there is nothing to exert the strong force .
Likewise there is no EM force between an electron and a positron after they annihilate .
Likewise if the Sun were to magically vanish then there would be no gravitational force from the Sun !

Last edited by Reality Check; 17th February 2013 at 06:14 PM.
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Old 17th February 2013, 06:44 PM   #933
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Then ask yourself this: in low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation to gamma photons, where does the strong force go? Oh, and the $64,000 dollar question is this: The strong force keeps a proton together. What keeps an electron together?
Once again, it's the Farsight-style argument-by-insinuation.

"Look at this! Look at that! Betcha never asked yourself THAT before! Think about it and you'll agree with me on your own in no time."

Except---no we won't. You've been posting this for years and you know how unsuccessful it has been. Did you learn anything from those years of posts and responses?

A proton-antiproton pair is net neutral under QCD, and so are all the accessible final states. As far as I can tell this adequately answers your question---both philosophically, and intuitively, and (since QCD is a real field theory) testably. If you think there's something wrong here, you're going to have to address these details, not ask the same question again.

The proton is a composite particle containing three quarks, and we know what holds these quarks together. The quarks are fundamental. No known theory or experiment requires any substructure "held together" inside a quark. Electrons are also fundamental. No known theory or experiment requires any substructure "held together" inside an electron. That answers the question as far as I'm concerned, until someone points out a problem in these details, which you have (still) not done.
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Old 17th February 2013, 07:41 PM   #934
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
A field isn't something magical and mysterious that's something separate to space edd. It's a condition of space. Have a read of Einstein' s 1920 Leyden Address and his 1929 talk on the history of field theory. This NASA article on gravitomagnetism is worth reading too. It says spacetime instead of space, but you should nevertheless catch the drift of "Einstein was right again. There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity".
Instead of quote-mining from a NASA press release (and a poor quote mine at that, since it does say "spacetime"), why not spend your time learning this science?
Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Snipe snipe snipe, retreat behind mathematics.
But these theories are mathematical theories. They are specially designed to be tested against very precise measurements. If you cannot do the math, then you cannot use the theory and you certainly can't talk about evidence for or against the theory.
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Old 17th February 2013, 08:12 PM   #935
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Originally Posted by ben m View Post
Once again, it's the Farsight-style argument-by-insinuation.

"Look at this! Look at that! Betcha never asked yourself THAT before! Think about it and you'll agree with me on your own in no time."

...
How many times have we seen physics by quotations, pictures and analogy presented by those who do not understand that physics is based on mathematical models that have been validated through experimentation? I guess the math is either too time consuming or beyond their comprehension. In all the threads and in all the posts made by such people, a real scientific argument based on relevant equations is never to be seen. Why don't they see how transparently naive their bluster and pretend physics is to the rest of us?
I guess they must be too busy waggling their fingers in front of their faces trying to see what? Higgs bosons?
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Old 18th February 2013, 12:11 AM   #936
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Where is your none of the above?
Why should I have had it?
Quote:
The big issue is that there's CERN physicists out there saying that the Higgs mechanism is the cuckoo in the nest of the standard model, only they're shouting in the wind whilst Higgs propaganda dooms the HEP community (and possibly the whole of theoretical physics) to a long slow harikiri.
Problems with the Higgs particle are well-known to theoretical particle physicists, so it's not like you are revealing some great secret that they are keeping.

Quote:
The public are unimpressed by billions spent on "the mystery of mass", which Einstein solved a hundred plus years ago,
He did not, and no amount of text-thumping can change that.
Quote:
Clinger: I made it clear that the "fields" referred to are E and B, which aren't actually fields, but instead denote the linear and rotational forces resulting from electromagnetic field interactions.
News to me. Everybody in this business thinks that they are fields, even Maxwell and Einstein and Minkowski and others whom you are treating as prophets of revealed truth.
Quote:
Pay attention to Minkowski:
Thumping snipped. He was trying to explain something in nontechnical terms, not reveal some great truth that the equations cannot supply.
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Old 18th February 2013, 01:32 AM   #937
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Well protons don't decay so there you go.
So if we cannot observe something with present-day technology, it does not exist?

Protons are not observed to decay, but their decay is predicted by most Grand Unified Theories. Theories including Georgi-Glashow SU(5) and its supersets, like SO(10) and E6.

The current experimental lower limit is around 1030 - 1032 years, and it's getting close to what one expects from a GUT energy scale of about 1016 GeV. That's what one finds from the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model extrapolated up to GUT energies.

Let's see what one can discover with this argument, looking back to past decades and centuries.

The 1970's: the W and Z particles don't exist.
The mid to late 1960's: quarks don't exist.
The 19th cy. and early 20th cy.: atoms don't exist.
Around 1870: the chemical elements eka-boron, eka-aluminum, eka-manganese, and eka-silicon don't exist. They were eventually discovered as scandium, gallium, technetium, and germanium.
Around 1700: gravity doesn't exist.
Etc.

Quote:
Then ask yourself this: in low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation to gamma photons, where does the strong force go?
It disappears. There is no law of conservation of strong force.

Furthermore, the most likely result of nucleon-antinucleon annihilation is pions, not a pair of photons, and no amount of diagram-thumping can change that.
Quote:
Oh, and the $64,000 dollar question is this: The strong force keeps a proton together. What keeps an electron together?
An electron isn't held together by anything. It's a Dirac field, and it's much like a photon field.
Quote:
I'm a bit surprised you didn't want to talk about mass.
What was I supposed to say?
Quote:
Anyway, I'm off to bed.
What an argument.
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Old 18th February 2013, 05:16 AM   #938
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Originally Posted by Perpetual Student View Post
How many times have we seen physics by quotations, pictures and analogy presented by those who do not understand that physics is based on mathematical models that have been validated through experimentation? I guess the math is either too time consuming or beyond their comprehension.
I recall from elsewhere that Farsight has claimed something like this: math cannot be primary because one must define the terms that one uses in it.

But math can be interpreted as a language, even if it's rather unlike natural languages.

Furthermore, let's consider the people that Farsight has treated as prophets of inspired truth, the likes of Newton and Maxwell and Einstein and Minkowski and Feynman. They have used math rather heavily, and their more important results are all rather heavily math-dependent.
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Old 18th February 2013, 05:55 AM   #939
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Originally Posted by lpetrich View Post
Originally Posted by Perpetual Student View Post
How many times have we seen physics by quotations, pictures and analogy presented by those who do not understand that physics is based on mathematical models that have been validated through experimentation? I guess the math is either too time consuming or beyond their comprehension.
I recall from elsewhere that Farsight has claimed something like this: math cannot be primary because one must define the terms that one uses in it.
Well, of course. It's important to dismiss something you don't understand if you're afraid it might contradict your elaborately constructed mountains of nonsense.

Quote:
But math can be interpreted as a language, even if it's rather unlike natural languages.
Less inconsistent, less illogical, and less prone to ambiguity. Otherwise, yes, it has all the elements of language. Just ask Turing.

Still, when your maths are limited to about what one might expect of a reasonably competent high-school student, this may not be obvious. Farsight may simply fail to understand just how expressive mathematics can be. But I think it's more likely that he insists on trying to interpret everything through natural language simply as a defense mechanism. "I don't understand it, therefore it's wrong." Unfortunately for him, easy comprehensibility does not seem to be a requirement for natural law.
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Old 18th February 2013, 08:49 AM   #940
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Originally Posted by xtifr View Post
Well, of course. It's important to dismiss something you don't understand if you're afraid it might contradict your elaborately constructed mountains of nonsense.


Less inconsistent, less illogical, and less prone to ambiguity. Otherwise, yes, it has all the elements of language. Just ask Turing.

Still, when your maths are limited to about what one might expect of a reasonably competent high-school student, this may not be obvious. Farsight may simply fail to understand just how expressive mathematics can be. But I think it's more likely that he insists on trying to interpret everything through natural language simply as a defense mechanism. "I don't understand it, therefore it's wrong." Unfortunately for him, easy comprehensibility does not seem to be a requirement for natural law.
F = ma is an easily understood and is an intuitively satisfying mathematical expression. Even Δt' = Δtγ is quite intuitive once one gets the drift of SR. High school algebra is more than adequate to handle these two important concepts and one could use ordinary language to describe them. But when confronted with the Higgs paper discussed at length in this thread, one must have studied quantum field theory, understand Lagrangian densities, gauge transformations and much more in some detail. That's when words, analogies, and pretty pictures fail the physics pretender, the evidence of which has been amply demonstrated here.
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Old 18th February 2013, 08:14 PM   #941
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Clinger: I made it clear that the "fields" referred to are E and B, which aren't actually fields, but instead denote the linear and rotational forces resulting from electromagnetic field interactions. Pay attention to Minkowski:

Farsight: I am fully aware that decompositions of the electromagnetic fields into the E and B fields are relativistic, just as decompositions of spacetime into space and time dimensions are relativistic.

In other contexts, you have claimed that gravitational fields are real, even though gravitational fields are observer-dependent. (That's Einstein's equivalence principle, BTW, which you have taken such great pains to deny.) The E and B fields are observer-dependent also, but they're just as real as gravitational fields.

You understand neither electromagnetism nor relativity. If you did understand those things, you'd know what a field is, and you'd know that E and B are fields...trivially...by the very definition of the word field.

I provided that link in my post above. You must not have read the Wikipedia article on fields in physics, because you're still making the same absurd claim.
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Old 19th February 2013, 04:27 AM   #942
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Back on topic:

Cosmos may be 'inherently unstable'

Quote:
Scientists say they may be able to determine the eventual fate of the cosmos as they probe the properties of the Higgs boson.

A concept known as vacuum instability could result, billions of years from now, in a new universe opening up in the present one and replacing it.

It all depends on some precise numbers related to the Higgs that researchers are currently trying to pin down. [...]

Since detecting the particle in their accelerator experiments, researchers at the Geneva lab and at related institutions around the world have begun to theorise on the Higgs' implications for physics.

One idea that it throws up is the possibility of a cyclical universe, in which every so often all of space is renewed.

"It turns out there's a calculation you can do in our Standard Model of particle physics, once you know the mass of the Higgs boson," explained Dr Joseph Lykken.

"If you use all the physics we know now, and you do this straightforward calculation - it's bad news.

"What happens is you get just a quantum fluctuation that makes a tiny bubble of the vacuum the Universe really wants to be in. And because it's a lower-energy state, this bubble will then expand, basically at the speed of light, and sweep everything before it," the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory theoretician told BBC News.
Fascinating stuff.
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Old 19th February 2013, 06:17 AM   #943
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I'll have to look into that instability. As it's explained in the article, it doesn't make sense, unless the low-energy state that is created is such that a closed spacetime can eventually form within it.
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Old 19th February 2013, 06:29 AM   #944
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3022 seems to be the original theoretical paper?
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Old 19th February 2013, 06:39 AM   #945
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Could be. Given the abstract, there are no cosmological implications there, of course. I think I'm too busy this week to slog through that paper.
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Old 19th February 2013, 09:36 AM   #946
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[1112.3022] Higgs mass implications on the stability of the electroweak vacuum - edd's link with the article title in it.

That paper *assumes* no supersymmetry or other effects which might stabilize the Higgs particle -- it only uses the bare Standard Model.


Now for Higgs-particle mass estimates. RÉSONAANCES: Twin Peaks in ATLAS gives these values:
Source Mass
ATLAS ZZ 123.5 +- 1.1 GeV
ATLAS γγ 126.6 +- 1.1 GeV
CMS ZZ -> 4l 126.2 +- 0.6 GeV
CMS γγ 125.1 +- 0.7 GeV
(the ATLAS stdevs I measured off of the graphs)

Jester, who blogged this, linked to some ATLAS sources, but used some CMS results based on 2011 data.

These results will likely get updated in time for the next high-energy-physics conferences this year.

I've burrowed through these sites to find their most recent estimates without much success:
ATLAS Experiment
CMS Public | CMS Experiment


So that paper's Higgs-mass estimates include the most recent experimental results.
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Old 19th February 2013, 10:36 AM   #947
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Is this new information about an inherently unstable universe referring to a Quantum Metastability Event?

My favorite "doomsday" scenario.
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Old 19th February 2013, 12:45 PM   #948
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Originally Posted by lpetrich View Post
Don't make me laugh. I *studied* general relativity, an I know for a fact that GR gravitiational waves are transverse. That's what you get when you solve the equations.
Sorry, my mistake, I should have said aren't the same rather than aren't. They're said to be quadrupole waves where there's a squeeze and stretch. This article gets it across fairly well: "Gravitational waves are transverse waves but they are not dipole transverse waves like most electromagnetic waves, they are quadrupole waves".

Originally Posted by lpetrich View Post
A lot of units factors. Thumping that would make a scriptural percussionist proud. The local speed of light in a vacuum is officially defined as a constant. In fact, in theoretical work, it's often set equal to 1.
The locally measured speed of light in vacuum is always 299,792,458 m/s but we know that the second varies with gravitational potential, and that the coordinate speed of light varies in a non-inertial reference frame such as a gravitational field. So we understand that "a curvature of rays of light can only take place when the velocity of propagation of light varies with position. Don't we?

Originally Posted by lpetrich
I don't deny either effect for a moment.
But you did evade giving a response to my references to the Einstein-de Haas effect and magnetic dipole moment. These provide hard scientific evidence that electron spin involves something going round. As ever you dismiss Einstein etc and evidence when it's inconvenient truth.
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Old 19th February 2013, 12:59 PM   #949
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
But you did evade giving a response to my references to the Einstein-de Haas effect and magnetic dipole moment. These provide hard scientific evidence that electron spin involves something going round. As ever you dismiss Einstein etc and evidence when it's inconvenient truth.
You didn't provide evidence, or argument, or anything. You did a Farsight-standard "look, read this, and you'll come to the same conclusion I did."

Nope.

The Einstein-de Haas experiment proves that intrinsic angular momentum is a type of angular momentum, and goes into the same conservation law. In the real world, Dirac (among others) was able to describe this momentum without assuming anything "going round", and that's perfectly consistent with all known facts about these particles.

Your mental picture already contained "something going round", and you read about de Haas and thought it agreed with your picture. That's all the argumentation you have here, and indeed it's fairly typical of you.

If "something going round" is so important, why can't you find an error (or a failred prediction) in Dirac's treatment?
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Old 19th February 2013, 01:00 PM   #950
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Originally Posted by Reality Check View Post
Protons are not observed to decay so there you are.
Which means those theories that predict it are wrong. Have a google on that.


Originally Posted by Reality Check View Post
Back to your high school sceince textbooks, Farsight.
E is an electric field.
B is a magnetic field.
They are components of an electromagnetic field.
No! There’s an online copy of John David Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics here. Use the read online-option and put double quotes around a phrase to search for it. See section 1.2 where he says Although the thing that eventually gets measured is a force and At the moment the electric field can be defined as the force per unit charge acting at a given point. Then see see section 11.10 where he says one should properly speak of the electromagnetic field Fuv rather than E or B separately. The field concerned is the electromagnetic field. E and B aren't really fields, they're just ciphers for linear and rotational forces resulting from electromagnetic field interactions.

Originally Posted by Reality Check
Wow - what astounding ignorance, Farsight !
An electron is a fundamental particle. There is nothing inside it to come apart!
Enough.
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Old 19th February 2013, 01:09 PM   #951
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Originally Posted by ben m View Post
The proton is a composite particle containing three quarks, and we know what holds these quarks together. The quarks are fundamental. No known theory or experiment requires any substructure "held together" inside a quark. Electrons are also fundamental. No known theory or experiment requires any substructure "held together" inside an electron. That answers the question as far as I'm concerned, until someone points out a problem in these details, which you have (still) not done.
One problem is that in proton-antiproton annihilation we never see quarks. Another is that the lack of electron substructure does not account for the Einstein-de Haas effect or magnetic dipole moment. Another problem is that we can create so-called fundamental" particles via say pair production, but what you call "known theory" does not explain the mechanism involved. The overriding problem is that people like you are essentially fundamentalists.
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Old 19th February 2013, 01:28 PM   #952
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Originally Posted by lpetrich View Post
Problems with the Higgs particle are well-known to theoretical particle physicists, so it's not like you are revealing some great secret that they are keeping.
Exactly. I'm telling it how it is. And the true picture is very different to the cosmic-treacle nonsense which many people take as a given.

Originally Posted by lpetrich View Post
He did not, and no amount of text-thumping can change that.
Yes he did. In his 1905 paper Does the Inertia of a body depend upon its energy content?. It depends upon its energy content, not something else. You'll be dismissing E=mc˛ as cherry-picking text-thumping next.

Originally Posted by lpetrich View Post
News to me. Everybody in this business thinks that they are fields,
No they don't. Everybody in the business who knows anything about electromagnetism knows that the field concerned is the electromagnetic field.

Originally Posted by lpetrich
even Maxwell and Einstein and Minkowski and others whom you are treating as prophets of revealed truth.
Wrong again. In his 1920 Leyden Address Einstein said "Of course it would be a great advance if we could succeed in comprehending the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field together as one unified conformation. Then for the first time the epoch of theoretical physics founded by Faraday and Maxwell would reach a satisfactory conclusion". He said electromagnetic field. Not electric field. Not magnetic field. Electromagnetic field. And in Space and Time Minkowski said "Then in the description of the field produced by the electron we see that the separation of the field into electric and magnetic force is a relative one with regard to the underlying time axis". And in 1864 Maxwell wrote A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. Not electric field. Not magnetic field. Electromagnetic field. Sounds like you're preaching ignorance, lpetrich. Not a good thing to do on a skeptics forum.

Originally Posted by lpetrich
Thumping snipped. He was trying to explain something in nontechnical terms, not reveal some great truth that the equations cannot supply.
As ever you attempt to dismiss bona-fide physics using a "text thumping" excuse. Here, read what the guy said, and this time pay attention to it: "Then in the description of the field produced by the electron we see that the separation of the field into electric and magnetic force is a relative one with regard to the underlying time axis; the most perspicious way of describing the two forces together is on a certain analogy with the wrench in mechanics, though the analogy is not complete".
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Old 19th February 2013, 01:30 PM   #953
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Calculations based on a model of electron spin as a circulating electric charge underestimate this magnetic moment by a factor of approximately 2, the Landé g-factor. A correct description of this magnetic moment requires a treatment based on quantum electrodynamics.
LINK
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Old 19th February 2013, 01:39 PM   #954
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Yes he did. In his 1905 paper Does the Inertia of a body depend upon its energy content?. It depends upon its energy content, not something else. You'll be dismissing E=mc˛ as cherry-picking text-thumping next.
And what gives it that energy content?

Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
No they don't. Everybody in the business who knows anything about electromagnetism knows that the field concerned is the electromagnetic field.

Wrong again. In his 1920 Leyden Address Einstein said "Of course it would be a great advance if we could succeed in comprehending the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field together as one unified conformation. Then for the first time the epoch of theoretical physics founded by Faraday and Maxwell would reach a satisfactory conclusion". He said electromagnetic field. Not electric field. Not magnetic field. Electromagnetic field. And in Space and Time Minkowski said "Then in the description of the field produced by the electron we see that the separation of the field into electric and magnetic force is a relative one with regard to the underlying time axis". And in 1864 Maxwell wrote A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. Not electric field. Not magnetic field. Electromagnetic field. Sounds like you're preaching ignorance, lpetrich. Not a good thing to do on a skeptics forum.

As ever you attempt to dismiss bona-fide physics using a "text thumping" excuse. Here, read what the guy said, and this time pay attention to it: "Then in the description of the field produced by the electron we see that the separation of the field into electric and magnetic force is a relative one with regard to the underlying time axis; the most perspicious way of describing the two forces together is on a certain analogy with the wrench in mechanics, though the analogy is not complete".
None of that suggests that Einstein didn't view electric fields and magnetic fields as fields.
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Old 19th February 2013, 01:52 PM   #955
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Originally Posted by W.D.Clinger
Farsight: I am fully aware that decompositions of the electromagnetic fields into the E and B fields are relativistic, just as decompositions of spacetime into space and time dimensions are relativistic.
Electromagnetic fields Clinger? It's the electromagnetic field. And see above, like Minkowski said, E and B denote linear and rotational force. They aren't actually fields, because like Jackson said, one should properly speak of the electromagnetic field Fuv rather than E or B separately. And the electromagnetic field isn't like spacetime. You can move through space where an electromagnetic field is, you can't move through spacetime. It's a totally different animal. It's a mathematical space in which there is no motion because the time dimension is included. The Earth isn't surrounded by spacetime you know. It's surrounded by space. Yes we talk of curved spacetime, but things don't move through it.

Originally Posted by W.D.Clinger
In other contexts, you have claimed that gravitational fields are real, even though gravitational fields are observer-dependent.
They are real Clinger. Things fall down. An observer in a falling lift might beg to differ with me, but when he hits the ground he will be promptly disabused of that notion.

Originally Posted by W.D.Clinger
(That's Einstein's equivalence principle, BTW, which you have taken such great pains to deny.)
I haven't denied it at all. I've pointed out its limitation wherein a true gravitational field is only exactly equivalent to a pseudo-gravitational field resulting from acceleration in a region of zero extent. It's a principle, not something that claims you can create a gravitational field in space by moving through it in some particular way.

Originally Posted by W.D.Clinger
The E and B fields are observer-dependent also, but they're just as real as gravitational fields.
No they aren't. That's why Einstein said "Of course it would be a great advance if we could succeed in comprehending the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field together as one unified conformation".

Originally Posted by W.D.Clinger
You understand neither electromagnetism nor relativity. If you did understand those things, you'd know what a field is, and you'd know that E and B are fields...trivially...by the very definition of the word field.
No Clinger, I understand it. You don't. And you are resisting my efforts to tell you that Maxwell unififed electricity and magnetism a hundred and fifty years ago. Into the electromagnetic field.

Originally Posted by W.D.Clinger
I provided that link in my post above. You must not have read the Wikipedia article on fields in physics, because you're still making the same absurd claim.
Read your own link. Defining the field as "numbers in space" shouldn't detract from the idea that it has physical reality. The field creates a "condition in space". Like I said to edd, the field is a condition of space.
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Old 19th February 2013, 01:58 PM   #956
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Originally Posted by Pixel42 View Post
Back on topic:

Cosmos may be 'inherently unstable'

Fascinating stuff.
I think it's sensationalist headline-grabbing speculation myself, and potentially dangerous talk:

"What happens is you get just a quantum fluctuation that makes a tiny bubble of the vacuum the Universe really wants to be in. And because it's a lower-energy state, this bubble will then expand, basically at the speed of light, and sweep everything before it," the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory theoretician told BBC News.

This is the sort of thing that will have the public demanding that high-energy physics experiments be curtailed forthwith.
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Old 19th February 2013, 01:58 PM   #957
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There are multiple electromagnetic fields, so I'm not sure why you're concentrating on the singular/plural distinction.
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Old 19th February 2013, 01:58 PM   #958
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Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
One problem is that in proton-antiproton annihilation we never see quarks.
Proton-proton annihilation is in complete agreement with QCD. QCD predicts that quarks are confined at low energy and free at high energy. In low-energy p-pbar annihilation, this predicts mesons; in high-energy annihilation, it predicts jets. Both of these are seen.

Quote:
Another is that the lack of electron substructure does not account for the Einstein-de Haas effect or magnetic dipole moment.
We know you don't like the accounting. This doesn't mean it hasn't been accounted for.

And so on.
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Old 19th February 2013, 03:13 PM   #959
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Originally Posted by ben m View Post
You didn't provide evidence, or argument, or anything...
Oh here we go again. I refer to the evidence and bona-fide papers and articles, and I give explanations you can understand, and you just take the that's not evidence line, you've provided nothing. Reminds me of when I was telling a bunch of YECs about fossils and strata and carbon dating. All they ever said was that's not evidence, you've provided nothing.

Originally Posted by ben m View Post
The Einstein-de Haas experiment proves that intrinsic angular momentum is a type of angular momentum, and goes into the same conservation law. In the real world
In the real world the ferromagnetic material rotates.

Originally Posted by ben m View Post
Dirac (among others) was able to describe this momentum without assuming anything "going round", and that's perfectly consistent with all known facts about these particles.
In the real world a Dirac spinor isn't called a spinor for nothing.

Originally Posted by ben m View Post
Your[/i] mental picture already contained "something going round", and you read about de Haas and thought it agreed with your picture. That's all the argumentation you have here, and indeed it's fairly typical of you.
Not so. I've referred to electron models which have received scant publicity and which people like you dismiss. Because it doesn't fit in with your textbook bible which tells you the electron is a fundamental particle, don't worry about pair production or magnetic dipole moment, it's all just intrinsic point-particle magic.

Originally Posted by ben m View Post
"something going round" is so important, why can't you find an error (or a failed prediction) in Dirac's treatment?
I haven't tried. And I'm not minded to. See above. We can't get past first base on E=mc˛ or the electromagnetic field, so I don't think we'd get anywhere on what sort of a wave equation we have or what kind of current we're talking about or what a spinor is and how the hard scientific evidence tells us what we're dealing with. Besides, if I did come up something that Dirac said to support my case, lpetrich will dismiss it as text-thumping. There's no point, I'd be knocking myself out on what would turn out to have been a deliberate distraction with no sincerity behind it.

Originally Posted by ben m
Proton-proton annihilation is in complete agreement with QCD. QCD predicts that quarks are confined at low energy and free at high energy. In low-energy p-pbar annihilation, this predicts mesons; in high-energy annihilation, it predicts jets. Both of these are seen.
Mesons are seen, jets are seen, but we've never seen a free quark. And remember that gluons are virtual particles. They aren't real particles. Remember that when you think of a quark-gluon plasma. Note that "the resulting matter does not behave as a quasi-ideal state of free quarks and gluons, but, rather, as an almost perfect dense fluid." Note this too: "some mesons built from heavy quarks (such as the charm quark) do not dissolve". See the words fluid and dissolve? A quark-gluon plasma is a bit like pea soup. There ain't no peas in it.

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Old 19th February 2013, 03:30 PM   #960
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"Fundamental particle" is not synonymous with "point particle"
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