Standard model; quantum mechanics (Introduction)
by David Turell 
, Tuesday, November 20, 2012, 20:43 (4387 days ago)
Great review of what it does not tell us:- http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/11/surely_its_disc066461.html
Standard model; quantum mechanics
by David Turell , Thursday, December 06, 2012, 15:19 (4371 days ago) @ David Turell
More quantum information, but still uncertainty prevails:- "The Heisenberg uncertainty principle forbids one from simultaneously discovering both the position and momentum of a particle with arbitrary accuracy," lead author Krister Shalm of the University of Waterloo told Phys.org. "EPR pointed out that, if you create a pair of entangled particles, it is possible to measure both the position and momentum of both of them with arbitrary precision. It is still impossible to learn both the position and momentum of each of the individual particles, but, instead, we can learn information about the total position and momentum they share. Entangled particles, in some sense, are the ultimate team players. They lose their own individual identity with all the information in the system contained in the correlations."- Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-12-physicists-entanglement-einstein.html#jCp
Standard model; neutrinos
by David Turell , Tuesday, July 23, 2013, 21:04 (4142 days ago) @ David Turell
Come in three flavors and are changeable:-http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=neutrino-identity-switch-confirmed-13-07-22&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20130723
Standard model; neutrinos
by David Turell , Friday, November 22, 2013, 23:56 (4020 days ago) @ David Turell
Introducing cosmic neutrinos:-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131121142259.htm
Standard model; second weak force?
by David Turell , Friday, February 07, 2014, 01:13 (3944 days ago) @ David Turell
Spinning quarks raise the issue:-http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2014/02/quarks-know-their-left-their-right
Standard model; neutrinos
by David Turell , Thursday, April 17, 2014, 15:31 (3874 days ago) @ David Turell
More on cosmic neutrinos. Some are highly charged and may come from other galaxies:-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ice-cube-detects-high-energy-neutrinos/?&WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20140416
Standard model; new quantum particle found
by David Turell , Saturday, February 27, 2016, 18:27 (3193 days ago) @ David Turell
New quantum article found, a combination of four quantum basic particles:-http://phys.org/news/2016-02-scientists-subatomic-particle.html-"Physicists have discovered a new elementary particle—the latest member to be added to the exotic species known as tetraquarks. -" The discovery was made by scientists - including Lancaster's Professor Iain Bertram - involved in the DZero international collaboration at Fermilab, the US Government's laboratory specialising in high-energy particle physics.-"Professor Bertram said: "It is exciting to discover a new and unusual particle that will help us understand the strong interaction- one of the four known fundamental interactions in physics." -"DZero is one of two experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron collider. Although the Tevatron was retired in 2011, the experiments continue to analyse billions of previously recorded events from its collisions. -"The tetraquark observation came as a surprise when DZero scientists first saw hints in July 2015 of the new particle, called X(5568), named for its mass—5568 megaelectronvolts.-"Professor Bertram worked on the analysis, developing the model used to simulate the X(5568). -"Quarks are point-like elementary particles that typically come in packages of two or three, the most familiar of which are the proton and neutron (each is made of three quarks). -"There are six types, or "flavours," of quark to choose from: up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. Each of these also has an antimatter counterpart.-"While all other observed tetraquarks contain at least two of the same flavor, X(5568) has four different flavors - up, down, strange and bottom."-Comment: This particle is simply a combination of known basic quarks with higher energy from the combination.
Standard model;muons show new quantum particle?
by David Turell , Friday, April 14, 2017, 20:24 (2781 days ago) @ David Turell
Strange muon effects suggest new particles may exist. The LHC does not show them but a smaller magnetic ring is now constructed to investigate the possibility:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/muons-bring-new-physics-within-reach/?WT.mc_...
"In the search for new physics, experiments based on high-energy collisions inside massive atom smashers are coming up empty-handed. So physicists are putting their faith in more-precise methods: less crash-and-grab and more watching-ways-of-wobbling. Next month, researchers in the United States will turn on one such experiment. It will make a super-accurate measurement of the way that muons, heavy cousins of electrons, behave in a magnetic field. And it could provide evidence of the existence of entirely new particles.
"The particles hunted by the new experiment, at the Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, comprise part of the virtual soup that surrounds and interacts with all forms of matter. Quantum theory says that short-lived virtual particles constantly ‘blip’ in and out of existence. Physicists already account for the effects of known virtual particles, such as photons and quarks. But the virtual soup might have mysterious, and as yet unidentified, ingredients. And muons could be particularly sensitive to them.
***
"Physicists are crying out for a successor to the standard model — a theory that has been fantastically successful yet is known to be incomplete because it fails to account for many phenomena, such as the existence of dark matter. Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, have not revealed a specific chink, despite performing above expectation and carrying out hundreds of searches for physics beyond the standard model. The muon anomaly is one of only a handful of leads that physicists have.
"Measurements of the muon’s magnetic moment — a fundamental property that relates to the particle’s inherent magnetism — could hold the key, because it is tweaked by interactions with virtual particles. When last measured 15 years ago at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, the muon’s magnetic moment was larger than theory predicts. Physicists think that interaction with unknown particles, perhaps those envisaged by a theory called supersymmetry, might have caused this anomaly.
***
"To probe the muons, Fermilab physicists will inject the particles into a magnetic field contained in a ring some 14 meters across. Each particle has a magnetic property called spin, which is analogous to Earth spinning on its axis. As the muons travel around the ring at close to the speed of light, their axes of rotation wobble in the field, like off-kilter spinning tops. Combining this precession rate with a measurement of the magnetic field gives the particles’ magnetic moment.
***
"Although a positive result would give little indication of exactly what the new particles are, it would provide clues to how other experiments might pin them down. If the relatively large Brookhaven discrepancy is maintained, it can only come from relatively light particles, which should be within reach of the LHC, says Stöckinger, even if they interact so rarely that it takes years for them to emerge.
"Indeed, the desire to build on previous findings is so strong that to avoid possible bias, Fermilab experimenters will process their incoming results ‘blind’ and apply a different offset to each of two measurements that combine to give the magnetic moment. Only once the offsets are revealed will anyone know whether they have proof of new particles hiding in the quantum soup. “Until then nobody knows what the answer is,” says Roberts. “It will be an exciting moment.'”
Comment: No question, everyone feels the standard model of particles in incomplete. The virtual particles pop in and out of our reality from wherever they hide across the wall of uncertainty in a quantum reality separate from where we live. Ruth Kastner discussed this with us. If we could enter that reality, that is where we would find God in his concealment.
Standard model; new quantum particle found
by David Turell , Friday, May 25, 2018, 20:51 (2375 days ago) @ David Turell
This is another new particle from the LHC more recent research:
https://phys.org/news/2018-05-doubly-charmed-particle.html
"Less than a year after announcing the discovery of the particle going by the snappy name of Ξcc++ (Xicc++), this week the LHCb collaboration announced the first measurement of its lifetime. The announcement was made during the CHARM 2018 international workshop in Novosibirsk in Russia: a charming moment for this doubly charmed particle.
"The Ξcc++ particle is composed of two charm quarks and one up quark, hence it is a member of the baryon family (particles composed of three quarks). The existence of the particle was predicted by the Standard Model, the theory which describes elementary particles and the forces that bind them together. LHCb's observation came last year after several years of research. Its mass was measured to be around 3621 MeV, almost four times that of the proton (the best-known baryon), thanks to its two charm quarks.
"The Ξcc++ particle is fleeting: it decays quickly into lighter particles. In fact it was through its decay into a Λc+ baryon and three lighter mesons, K-, π+ and π+, that it was discovered. Since then, LHCb physicists have been carrying on an analysis to determine its lifetime with a high level of precision. The value obtained is 0.256 picoseconds (0.000000000000256 seconds), with a small degree of uncertainty. Though very small in everyday life, such an amount of time is relatively large in the realm of subatomic particles. The measured value is within the range predicted by theoretical physicists on the basis of the Standard Model, namely between 0.20 and 1.05 picoseconds.
***
"Measuring the lifetime of a particle is an important step in determining its characteristics. Thanks to the abundance of heavy quarks produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the excellent precision of the LHCb detector, physicists will now continue their detailed measurements of the properties of this charming particle. With these types of measurements, they are gaining a better understanding of the interactions that govern the behaviour of particles containing heavy quarks."
Comment: The key point is the Standard Model is still working just fine.
Standard model; 3 neutrinos, could there be four?
by David Turell , Sunday, January 13, 2019, 05:26 (2143 days ago) @ David Turell
Fast moving, very fast through everything. tiny mass and always associated to other particles:
https://www.livescience.com/64483-hunting-ghost-particles-neutrinos.html?utm_source=ls-...
"Every single second of every single day, you are being bombarded by trillions upon trillions of subatomic particles, showering down from the depths of space. They blow through you with the strength of a cosmic hurricane, blasting in at nearly the speed of light. They're coming from all over the sky, at all times of the day and night. They penetrate the Earth's magnetic field and our protective atmosphere like so much butter.
***
"These tiny little bullets are called neutrinos, a term coined in 1934 by the brilliant physicist Enrico Fermi. The word is vaguely Italian for "little neutral one," and their existence was hypothesized to explain a very curious nuclear reaction.
***
"Physicists noticed that decay reactions that suggested the existence of the neutrino always had an electron pop out, and never a muon. In other reactions, muons would pop out, and not electrons. To explain these findings, they reasoned that neutrinos always matched up with electrons in these decay reactions (and not any other kind of neutrino), while electron, the muon must pair with an as-yet undiscovered type of neutrino.. After all, the electron-friendly neutrino wouldn't be able to explain the observations from the muon events.
"And so the hunt went on. And on. And on. It wasn't until 1962 that physicists finally got a lock on the second kind of neutrino. It was originally dubbed the "neutretto," but more rational heads prevailed with the scheme of calling it the muon-neutrino, since it always paired itself in reactions with the muon.
"Okay, so two confirmed neutrinos. Did nature have more in store for us? In 1975, researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center bravely sifted through mountains of monotonous data to reveal the existence of an even heavier sibling to the nimble electron and hefty muon: the hulking tau, clocking in at a whopping 3,500 times the mass of the electron. That's a big particle!
"So immediately the question became: If there's a family of three particles, the electron, the muon and the tau … could there be a third neutrino, to pair with this newfound creature?
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there are just the two neutrinos. Maybe there are four. Maybe 17. Nature hasn't exactly met our expectations before, so no reason to start now.
"Skipping over a lot of gruesome details, over the decades, physicists convinced themselves using a variety of experiments and observations that a third neutrino ought to exist. But it wasn't until the edge of the millennium, in 2000, that a specifically designed experiment at Fermilab (called humorously the DONUT experiment, for Direct Observation of the NU Tau, and no, I'm not making that up) finally got enough confirmed sightings to rightly claim a detection.
***
"The reason is that neutrinos continue to live outside our expectations. For a long time, we weren't even sure they existed. For a long time, we were convinced they were completely massless, until experiments annoyingly discovered that they must have mass. Exactly "how much" remains a modern problem. And neutrinos have this annoying habit of changing character as they travel. That's right, as a neutrino travels in flight, it can switch masks among the three flavors.
"There might even still be an additional neutrino out there that doesn't partake in any usual interactions — something known as the sterile neutrino, that physicists are hungrily hunting for."
Comment: particle physics finds these weird things, identifies them, but there is no theory to explain why they are what they are. No more explanation as in quantum theory which no one can explain why it is the way it is. So we describe but don't understand the underlying plan or reason. God may not be revealed, but His plan isn't either.
Standard model; why is it as it is?
by David Turell , Sunday, June 12, 2022, 01:13 (897 days ago) @ David Turell
We don't know:
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/why-3-generations-particles/?utm_source=mailchi...
"Everything that exists in our Universe, as far as we understand it, is made up of particles and fields. At a fundamental level, you can break everything down until you reach the limit of divisibility; once things can be divided no further, we proclaim that we’ve landed upon an entity that’s truly fundamental. To the best of our current understanding, there are the known elementary particles — those represented by the Standard Model of elementary particle physics — and then there are the unknowns: things that must be out there beyond the confines of the Standard Model, but whose nature remains unknown to us.
"In the latter category are things like dark matter, dark energy, and the particle(s) responsible for creating the matter-antimatter asymmetry in our Universe, as well as any particles that would arise from a quantum theory of gravity. But even within the Standard Model, there are things for which we don’t quite have an adequate explanation. The Standard Model consists of two types of particles: (my bold)
"...the bosons, which mediate the various fundamental forces,
and the fermions, from which all the normal matter in the Universe is composed.
While there’s only one copy of each of the bosons, for some reason, there are three copies of each of the fermionic particles: they come in three generations. Although it’s long been accepted and robustly experimentally verified, the three-generational nature of the Standard Model is one of the great puzzles of nature. Here’s what we know so far. (my bold)
"Although the Standard Model possesses an incredibly powerful framework — leading to, by many measures, our most successful physical theory of all-time — it also has limitations. It makes a series of predictions that are very robust, but then has a large number of properties that we have no way of predicting: we simply have to go out and measure them to determine just how nature behaves.
***
"But what the Standard Model doesn’t tell us is also profound.
"1)It doesn’t tell us what the masses of any of the fundamental particles are; we have to go out and measure them.
"2)It doesn’t tell us whether the neutrinos are massive or massless; we had to measure their properties to determine that they are, in fact, massive, but with tiny masses compared to the rest of the Standard Model’s massive particles.
"3)It doesn’t tell us whether there will be multiple copies of the fermions in the Standard Model, how many of those copies there will be, or how the quarks and leptons from different generations will “mix” together.
"All of these things can only, at least as we currently understand it, be measured experimentally, and it’s from those experimental results that we can determine the answers.
***
"If you apply the Koide formula to the up, down, and strange quarks, you get a fraction that’s consistent, within the measurement errors, of 5/9.
"If you apply it to the charm, bottom, and top quarks, you get a fraction consistent with 2/3.
"And if you apply it to the W, Z, and Higgs bosons, you get a fraction consistent with 1/3.
"But even with all that said, there’s no underlying reason for any of this; it’s just a suggestive correlation. There may be a deep reason as to why there are three generations — no more, no less — of fermionic particles in the Standard Model, but as far as what that reason might be, we have no indicators or evidence that are any better than these tenuous connections.
"The experimental data and the theoretical structure of the Standard Model, combined, allow us to conclude with confidence that the Standard Model, as we presently construct it, is now complete. There are no more Standard Model particles out there, not in additional generations nor in any other yet-undiscovered place. But there are, at the same time, certainly puzzles about the nature of the Universe that require us to go beyond the Standard Model, or we’ll never understand dark matter, dark energy, the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry, and many other properties that the Universe certainly possesses. Perhaps, as we take steps towards solving those mysteries, we’ll take another step closer to understanding why the Standard Model’s particle content is neither greater nor lesser than it is."
Comment: his point is important: we can measure and correlate, but have no idea why things are arranged as they are. The deesigner knows, but He doesn't explain it. Just as He does not explian why He conducted the evolution of humans the way that He did. All that hapens is dhw wants answers that do not exist for his own analysis that confuses him about why God did it the way He did it. The best way to think about it is early on there were bacteria at the start of life. There followed a whole continuous series of increasingly complex steps until humans arrived. That is what happened. We can analyze it for clues of purpose. But the method happened and cannot be questioned in and of itsslf since it represents pure historical fact.
Standard model; the w boson
by David Turell , Tuesday, September 10, 2024, 18:57 (75 days ago) @ David Turell
Carries the weak force:
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/explain-it-in-60-seconds-w-boson
"Visible matter is made from only a handful of particles, but many more are behind the scenes, affecting what those matter particles do. The W boson, predicted in the 1960s and discovered at CERN in 1983, is one of these cosmic masterminds. And without it, the entire universe would be in the dark.
"The W boson is a short-lived particle that carries the weak force, one of the four fundamental forces. While the other fundamental forces can push or pull, the weak force enables particles to change their identities. The power of the weak force can flip protons into neutrons and vice-versa. This process, called radioactive decay, is essential to the nuclear fusion that allows the sun to shine.
"W bosons have a few characteristics that make them unique. First, they are incredibly massive, about 80 times more massive than protons. This large mass means that W bosons can act only over very short distances.
"Second, W bosons come in two different charge varieties: W- and W+. The plus-and-minus variations allow W bosons to flip neutral particles into charged particles (and vice-versa) without breaking a symmetry in nature called charge conservation.
"Finally, W bosons are sensitive to helicity, or “handedness,” which is determined by a particle’s spin in relation to its direction of motion. W bosons interact only with left-handed particles and right-handed antiparticles, which could make W bosons a key in understanding the asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the universe."
Comment: As in biochemistry with lefthanded proteins, w bosons prefer left handedness. The standard model describes how all the particles work but does not tell us why each particle exists exactly as it does.