Fusion, Fission, Quarks and such nonsense.

Discussion in 'Discussions' started by OmniaNigrum, Apr 2, 2012.

  1. Lorrelian

    Lorrelian Member

    I always had a hunch that psychotropic drugs might have been involved...
     
  2. DavidB1111

    DavidB1111 Member

    "The most recent such experiments suggest that monopoles with masses below 600 GeV/c2 do not exist, while upper limits on their mass due to the very existence of the universe - which would have collapsed by now if they were too heavy - are about 10^17 GeV/c2."

    If the Large Haldron Collider can barely reach 3.5 TeV, I think we're a far cry away from reaching 10^17 GeV/c2

    Now, maybe my mind is playing tricks on me, or maybe it's some outdated theory on monopoles. "1 GeV is equivalent to the mass of a proton or the mass of one gold atom."
    THere you go, that's how much the mass of a gold atom is. So, yeah, they're heavy. They're a single particle that weighs possibly several hundred pounds. Okay, so maybe you need a "lot" to have half the mass of the universe. But still, they're not light.

    For what it's worth, I got most of my information from Civ 2: Test of Time's Science Fiction description on them. Many years ago, and that's where the idea stuck. While it could be wrong, I'm hoping it's not.

    And Omni, I don't know what you read, but" A magnetic monopole is a hypothetical particle in particle physics that is a magnet with only one magnetic pole (a north pole without a south pole or vice-versa)."
    "A magnetic monopole cannot be created from normal matter such as atoms and electrons, but would instead be a new elementary particle."

    So, yeah, one pole only. Super massive, compared to any normal atom sized objects, etc.

    I'd still prefer Tesseract Storage devices, theoretically, they do warp space-time to make an inside much larger than the outside.
    So, maybe you could use one to travel back in time?
     
  3. mining

    mining Member

    http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/MagneticMonopole.html

    Some grand unified theories (GUTs) predict the existence of small numbers of these particles (t'Hooft 1974, Polyakov 1974). The charge on magnetic monopoles predicted by GUTs is either 1 or [​IMG] (Jeon and Longo 1995). The best experimental upper limit, obtained by searching for induced currents in superconducting wires, is 1 monopole per 1029 nucleons (Jeon and Longo 1995). The upper limit on the monopole mass is 1026 eV, or 0.2 [​IMG]g.

    So yeah, 2x10^-7 grams - that's not particularly weighty, especially if there's only 1 monopole per 10^29 nucleons. That means that if we take, say, one mole of nucleons... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+Avogadro's+Number/2*10^29+
    We'd get 3.011071×10^-6 monopoles. Standardizing this for 1 monopole and the number of nucleons thus required:
    332107 moles of nucleons would thus have ~~ 1 monopole.

    Standardizing for masses:
    334524g of nucleons for every 2*10^-7 grams of monopole - yes each one is bloody massive compared to a nucleon, but in terms of their rarity, they make up a tiny mass.
     
  4. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

  5. Quarky

    Quarky Member

    As for the flavors, Lorrelian, as far as I know, 'flavor' is just a fancy (unfancy? so fancy that it's just a normal word?) word for quantum numbers. If you don't remember from the last chemistry or physics class you took, those are a series of numbers that describe particles in a quantum situation, like the Bohr model of the atom, where electrons aren't in a certain place, but are most likely to be in orbitals around the atom. Electrons are described with the quantum numbers n, ℓ, mℓ, and ms, which correspond to the shell, the subshell, the energy shift, and the spin of the electron, respectively. Similarly, quarks have quantum numbers for spin, strangeness, charm, bottomness, and topness. Quarks all quickly decay to up and down quarks, so each number just describes some properties of the quark. I'm typing this in a hurry, so tell me if I left something unexplained.
    Here's some more specifics about quark flavors as well.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavour_(particle_physics)#Quarks
     
  6. Lahalito

    Lahalito Member

    mining's right =D

    Up and Down were named after spin components. It turns out that, since the up and down quark are so similar in mass, you can pretend that they represent two states of a single particle when you're doing strong interaction calculations (they have different charges, so electromagnetism kind of messes this up, but strong is much stronger anyway). Scientists thought that might be it for quarks, declared them members of the "isospin singlet" and left it at that. Then along come strange quarks. They're much heavier, so they break this symmetry a bit. But math could still be performed that produced useful results if you allowed the strange quark to have no isospin, and a quantum number "strangeness." But then we went on to discover more and more quarks, and people started disagreeing on the whimsical nature with which some of them were named. Charm made it in to the vernacular. There was a third set of quarks theorized, but different scientists liked different names. That's how you get "bottom" and "beauty." "Top" also had an alternate name, although it's less popular even than beauty: "Truth"

    BONUS QUARK KNOWLEDGE:
    The strong interaction has so far confined quarks to the nucleus of particles. We've never isolated a quark. But we can still perform deep inelastic scattering experiments that produce diffraction patterns suggestive of 3 objects contained in, for instance, a proton. Also, the strong interaction cannot change the isospin of a particle. This is part of the reason people liked it as a quantum number. The weak interaction can, however. So that's cool. The weak force is not as well understood as either the strong or E&M force. This is due to both its short range as well as its relative strength. Compared to electromagnetism, it's actually fairly strong, but E&M acts over an infinite range via the exchange of photons (yep! The particles that make up light also mediate electromagnetic forces!), whereas the weak interaction exchanges very heavy W (+/-) and Z (electrically neutral) bosons.

    Monopole:
    I don't know. It would be dishonest of me to try to say much at all. I don't know why some people say that finding even a single magnetic monopole would explain mass, or the predominance of matter over antimatter, or any of that. But to get an idea of what is meant by "monopole," make the analogy to electric forces: A monopole in electricity is a single isolated charge. An electron, for instance, is an electric monopole. These things are all over the place. If you take another opposite charge and position it near the electron (let's use a positron for simplicity), we have created an electric field that resembles all of the diagrams of magnetic fields that we know: there are field lines emanating from the positively charged positron, and they terminate on the negatively charged electron. It takes on the shape of a pile of metal filings on a sheet of paper when you place a bar magnet underneath it. Now take those two sources and move them together until they're on top of each other, but don't let them cancel out. Use magic to do this, since, were an electron to interact with a positron, it is likely to annihilate. Notice that the field lines stay in place, keeping that bar magnet quality? That's a dipole. Most magnetized things we are familiar with are dipoles.
    So by analogy, imagine the reverse, where we separate the components of the dipole magnetic field in to two monopoles, and get rid of one of them. Now you have a single magnetic "charge."
    The pointlike property of dipoles factors in to the math that you have to do to think about physics. The manual for elecrodynamics is "Classical Electrodynamics" by John David Jackson. He is very good at physics. You'll have to know calculus pretty well to do anything in this book e.g. partial differential equations, integration, and, if you're really hardcore, some complex analysis. (I, for instance, was lacking some important background knowledge! Very exciting first few months of grad school!) He doesn't say anything about magnetic monopoles.
     
  7. Lorrelian

    Lorrelian Member

    See, what bothers me is, how to fundamental particles exhibit strangeness or charm? I mean, they're pretty strange to start with, but charming? Not so much...

    Basically, I'm more interested in knowing how what they describe got its name than I am exactly what they're describing, which I understand in a vague sense already.

    EDIT: Whoa! Physics ninjas. The above was for Quarky, who tried to answer my question but wasn't exactly getting at what I wanted to know.

    Lalah: Thanks for the history lesson! I had hoped for something a little more exciting but I can understand calling a quark strange just because it broke the rules. And I know all too well that once the gates are open how hard it is to stop a flood of silly names, so I guess the others aren't too far out. Also, thanks for another useless bit of trivia to annoy people with! Truth quarks... awesome.
     
  8. mining

    mining Member

    Lorellian: Its just a name. It'd make no difference if we called electrons neutral, neutrons positive and protons negative, for example. The universe would keep running as it did.

    They got there name, I'm not even kidding, because lots of quark research was done in the 60s and 70s.

    Its not an accident that "WIMP"s (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) and MACHOS (MAssive Compact Halo ObjectS) managed to get those specific names ;).
     
  9. Lorrelian

    Lorrelian Member

    Well called, Shakespear! A rose by any other name, and all that.

    However, while physicists have incredibly arcane methods of arriving at the conclusion that things fall down, so writers have incredibly obscure tendencies to associate names (and colors and a whole crapton of other things) with greater abstract concepts. Books could be written on proper name choice, color symbolism, number choice, you name it. So when I see something with an odd name somewhere the first thing I try to find out is, when that thing got its name, what was the person thinking? How can I abuse this linguistic fact in the future? Ect.

    Sadly, quarks don't seem to offer much in that direction. But at least my curiosity is mostly satisfied.
     
  10. DavidB1111

    DavidB1111 Member

    Ah. Thank you mining.
    Again, you are very good at providing good scientific basis for many things, including crushing my hopes and dreams. :)
     
  11. mining

    mining Member

    You can get a lot out of a little knowledge - I recommend anyone interested in the sciences to read Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". It has figuratively everything you could ever need to know within its pages.
     
  12. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    All physicists are hippies. Quarks confirm this. They told me in a dream or something. :)

    3/4 of the thread is a mystery to me even with explanation.

    And I suck badly at mathematics. I would have attempted to name the quarks things more crazy and less insightful. Up, down, top, bottom, strange? Nope. I would have called them things like Sally, Potato, Bitchlet, Rainbow, and Meow. Why? No real reason. I just like crazy names for stuff that means nothing and makes it less likely that anyone will figure it out or care to even try.
     
  13. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    As I have said before in this very thread, all things are relative.

    Time is as well. While certain things take known, seemingly fixed amounts of time to happen, this is an illusion. A second is not a fixed amount of the substance known as time. It is a variable. In another Galaxy, it may even be measurably different for Humans. There is no evidence whatsoever that time moves forwards only. It can reverse and go back and forth or even jump around in all manner of ways without ever being apparent to us. This is due to the fact that our perception of time is relative and is fixed in direction.

    If a moment ago time were to jump back to just after the big bang, it would not be noticeable to us in any way. If it slowed to a millionth the "Normal" speed, that would also be undetectable. To date, Humans have not determined any way to reliably measure time except in relative units.

    I recently watched an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where "Pockets of differential time" were causing all manner of nonsense to happen. I enjoy watching these things although I *Hate* fake physics used by science fiction. They make me consider what is real and known, as well as what common misconceptions exist.

    One of the biggest misconceptions Humans have is that of time itself. Time is a dimension. It has no substance we are aware of. You cannot hold it in your hand or measure it's size. You can only measure the effect things have during a period of time. There is some evidence that I am puzzled by, that suggests there may be dimensions unaffected by time, or effected differently at least.

    Thoughts?
     
  14. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    I wanted to take a moment to spew out something I learned about a decade ago. I found it so amazingly useful that I memorized it that very day I read it.

    "The Convection Coefficient is based upon Velocity, not Volume."

    That is simple and easy to understand for this complex thread. But in reading it I was shocked to suddenly understand why so many devices used tiny pathetic fans spinning so fast they risked self destruction for cooling rather than larger fans that could blow more air at much less speed.

    They simply have to spin really fast to get air moving fast.

    That said, I have been looking into liquid cooling devices recently. I hate ever letting my CPU and GPU get hot, yet the fans are annoyingly loud at anything more than a low idle speed. I think a good water cooler could keep either or even both my CPU and GPU cool and keep the noise quite tolerable while dissipating heat from its radiator via fan assisted radiation.

    I still have much reading to do, and no way to pay for the hardware to do this, but I am always looking for something else to want to buy even though I may never manage it.

    A fan twice the size spinning as fast will blow much more air about as fast as the tiny one, but it may be overkill and unneeded, not to mention loud as a jet engine. A large radiator will simply need an impeller to circulate the liquid with no particular haste since there is so much more density to absorb heat and so much more space in matter to radiate it away.
     
  15. Lorrelian

    Lorrelian Member

    For the purposes of this post, when I say "C" I am referring to the speed of light unless I say otherwise.

    Actually, Omni, as I understand it, your statement is not entirely true. Einstein did a thought experiment where he imagined two people in elevators, one going up and one going down, and one person standing on a balcony watching them. To the person on the balcony, each elevator seems to be moving at a rate of 10 ft/sec (this is a speed chosen at random, I'm not sure exactly how fast elevator's really move). But if one of the people on the elevators looked out at the other, he would see it approaching at 20 ft/sec. Observed speed is relative.

    However if you take two particles and accelerate them to 0.75C and fling them at each other they would still collide with a velocity of C. Why? I'm sure others could explain better than I, 'cause I'm not really clear myself.

    The fact is, the speed of light is called "C" because it is a Constant. A million hypothetical ways exist to cheat it, but all of them are more like magic than science. For most of human history it was thought we understood mass and space/time, but the fact is we only understood a small facet of them. Our understanding worked because we never approach even a small fraction of C in our day to day, but it was incomplete.

    From Absolute Zero, when an object is not moving at all, all the way up to C, space/time and mass appear to behave in predictable fashions. Everything is not relative to everything else, everything is relative to C.
     
  16. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Ah. But we cannot prove that light behaves the same in other parts of what appears to be a huge Universe filled with hundreds of billions of Galaxies each containing potentially hundreds of billions of stars.

    We may very well be inside a tiny Snow Globe on a shelf somewhere. Or it may be even bigger than we presume. We have yet to find an edge to the Universe, and I rather doubt one can exist. As time goes on, the boundaries enlarge (Due to light and other things in motion continuing to travel in all directions.) and the matter becomes thinner and thinner until what? I have no answer.

    I still say all is relative, more because it is my opinion and cannot be absolutely disproven than any evidence supporting the position.
     
  17. DavidB1111

    DavidB1111 Member

    Actually, it would be very noticeable, because for like a thousand years after the big bang, matter itself could not form because it was too damn hot. :)
    Seriously, matter did not exist, it was all energy. It was simply too hot for any matter to exist.
    So, we would notice, because we would all vaporize immediately...:)
     
  18. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Are you joking David? I cannot always tell.

    It could happen a million times every day and we would still be oblivious. What you said would still be true about matter and heat and all that, but we never existed in that time anyway, so we would not have a means to notice it. And if time reversed for a while, we would still only perceive it going forward. We simply have no means of understanding it otherwise.
     
  19. Lorrelian

    Lorrelian Member

    When you get to the point where we don't know you're engaging it what is known as "rampant speculation" as opposed to hypothesizing. I agree, things could be just about anything beyond what we've observed. That doesn't mean it has to be. =/
     
  20. Lahalito

    Lahalito Member

    Aha! I believe I can access your confusion! When you're talking about time jumping around, it is as if you are imagining a shift in time at any point during the day.
    Put another way, you are trying to say that time can jump around at any time.
    Time as it changes in time. What time, though? If you take a distance variable x, and set it to 6, then go and set it to 1 after that, you might say that you changed that variable in time. But you wouldn't say that you changed that variable in distance. Furthermore, this is a fairly arbitrary and discontinuous thing to say. It isn't the action of the variable x that changed it from 6 to 1, it was you.
    I get you though. There is no reason to choose some particular point on a curve to assess. We may as well be measuring everything that has happened at a time t, or maybe time t+50. So you want to know why time appears to move forward from a cognitive standpoint. Some people think it has to do with statistics. We're just following an increase in entropy. I think that's just conjecture. I don't think anyone knows. What would really be revolutionary is to find some charge-parity-time asymmetric process. THEN you can talk about something that can happen in only ONE direction in time. We haven't yet, but there are plenty of reasonable theories that contain CPT-violating terms. We only like symmetries as an experimental fact. This was to our discredit when people started investigating the weak force. It ended up violating a symmetry we expected to be inviolable.

    Relativity!
    Two massive particles moving at .75 c collide at nearly c. But I think you probably already knew that. Grabbing an equation for lorentz transformations of velocities, we can see that it is in fact .96c. That's cool though. Still fast.

    I think we CAN prove how it acts in other parts of the universe. Everything we get from elsewhere is all light. If it is internally consistent with predictions, then we're right. We can measure some important coefficients related to light by observing emission spectra of well know atoms like hydrogen. We can independently measure the distance to the object in paralax-seconds (parsec). There's also the eminently useful "Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation" (CMB or CMBR) field in any direction you look. This is a homogenous field of photons that are all the same temperature at...like...2.2K? 2.7? Something on the order of 2 kelvin. It's been hanging around ever since the universe became transparent (about 400,000 years after the big bang? I don't remember.) and, much to our surprise, must have been cooling off since then. This is motivation for thinking about the expansion of the universe.
    MOREOVER, this is motivation that it's the coordinate points of the universe moving apart. This is...confusing...to think about. The favored analogy is blowing up a balloon: Take a balloon, and draw a bunch of dots on it. These are the coordinate points. Now blow the balloon up and watch as each point moves away from the others in a symmetric way. This is the distance between two points changing without changing the locations of those points in the universe. For the CMB, this sort of "stretches" the wavelengths, making them colder.

    Big bang:
    So I took out my cosmology notes here from the other day to try to think about this. The coolest thing is that we can actually start measuring coefficients and properties that go in to cosmological theory, and we can do it well. Anyway, the big bang shouldn't be thought of as an explosion of matter in to a space, in part from the balloon analogy above. It is also the genesis OF the space to begin with. That includes time coordinates, since space and time are all dimensional coordinates of the same group. So it doesn't really make sense to say "before" the big bang, since that term is temporal in nature. There's no such thing as time, as we know it, before the big bang.
    Although, there is another "mode" for universes kinda like ours. In this scheme, things would have been coming together up to a point in time at which they would begin to move apart in the same way. It's named the "Big Crunch" and we're on the far end, at least.

    As for an edge of the universe, we don't really know what its boundaries looked like. At some early point the universe underwent a period of rapid expansion which pushed its boundaries outside of our vision. It might be toroidal, for instance, such that there's no terminal edge. Or spherical in some 4-D way. It looks really flat in general, though (on gigaparsec scales)
     
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