Quark Strangeness and Yarn

Hello. This has strong ties with "Gauge this", but nothing is repeated, just reinforced.

Quark.

Armin Shimmerman? No.

I refer to the little people inside everything.

Here is what we have so far - - -

Atoms > > Nuclei > > protons and neutrons > > quarks?

What are they?

To illustrate, a potted history would help.

The Geeks, sorry, Greeks (bless 'em) figured out that stuff is made of smaller stuff.

They called them "atoms" and thought by reasoning alone, that nothing could be smaller. They were wrong.

Then John Dalton came along in the eighteenth century (didn't take THAT long, did it?) and did a bit more work on the idea, and came up with "elements".

There are 92 of these in nature, and what came about was that these "atoms" were not indivisible at all. Earnest Rutherford showed that by splitting them.

It turned out that they were made up of tinier bits which we called "electrons" and "protons". It took a while (until 1932 actually) to work out that there was another in there also (the "neutron"), but basically we thought we had the atom sussed.

What came about next was a mixture of conjugation and speculature ("conspecularity" if you like).

If protons were all the same electrical charge, and they were all packed together tightly in the nucleus, how come all atoms never flew apart ( a few do by themselves - this is called "radioactivity").

Think about it.

The only possible answer we could give was that there was another "force" stronger than electrostatics, but only available at very short distances ( a bit like two very passionate lovers )

To be picturesque, if I held a proton in each hand ( let's just say they were the size of tennis balls ), and tried to bring them together, I would feel an enormous force trying to keep them apart. This is called "electrostatic repulsion".

At some point, though, if I was strong enough, when these tennis balls were, say, 6cm apart, they would snap together as if there was an elastic band between them. This is called "the strong force".

Back to reality, then. This "strong force" (scientists are not heavily overvocabulariated) pulls the protons together inside the nucleus, despite the electrostatic process which asks them to go away.

But the end is NOT nigh.

It was established in the 1960's that this type of "strong" force was only a mere shadow of the strength of the "true nature of the Force" (see my post with the same title).

Okay, history lesson over.

The present case is this:

We now know that protons and neutrons are comprised of quarks. (See "three jets are better than two"). Electrons seem to have no structure at all (They may as well not be there). These quarks appear to act like electrons BUT we can never see one, simply because of this seeming cop-out of the very short range of the strong force. They remain inside the protons and neutrons and cannot get out.

They are constrained in a manner that is not unlike an elastic band.

Without going into further details, it will be sufficient to point out that it is like "electrostatic charge", but with not two but three different types of "charge".

They are called "red", "green", and "blue" (physicists are the World's Worst nomenclaturists (- apart from chemists, that is. I mean, who has ever heard of "1-bromo 3-dichloro 4-iodo pentane" for crying out loud???)

Anyway, back to the point, because this is what these "quarks" act like - points. The way of thinking now is that we imagine that inside the proton is a space as big as the earth. The three quarks in the proton will be smaller than a grain of sand each. They are free to roam, but can never get out. This is called "ultra-violet freedom".

BUT because of our quest to find the GUT (See my post "That GUT feeling"), the theory goes like this: If the quarks ever get close enough to shake hands (and we are talking two grains of sand in a container the size of the earth here), the WEAK force will assert itself and change one of them by exchanging one of the vector bosons, and the proton will effectively "decay" into a positron and an anti-neutrino. If this happens it is called "infra-red slavery" (We still are the champions of the non-vocabulary competitions - have to keep up appearances).

Because we are talking grains of sand inside a container the size of the Earth, it has been forecast that this will not happen for about :

100000000000000000000000000000000 years

(1 followed by 32 zeroes).

And I thought waiting for buses was bad

The Warped Nature of Man

WARNING - SUBJECTIVE POST


There has been recent speculation in the (non-scientific) press about space travel in general and about warp drive in particular.

Warp drive was invented by Gene Roddenberry to enable the Enterprise to travel large distances easily.

Special relativity prevents objects with non-zero mass even travelling at the speed of light,let alone exceeding it.

The idea of warp drive is that the craft does not really travel, but the spacetime around it is warped in such a way as to flip the craft forward.

One analogy is perhaps a long red carpet, the type Hollywood uses. take one end, and rapidly move it up and down vertically. A "wave" moves down the carpet if you are lucky. These waves are called "transverse waves" because the direction of the oscillation is perpendicular to the direction of the wave.

Another analogy is that these "space-waves" may be longitudinal, the direction of oscillation being along the wave direction. Examples are slinky waves or sound waves.

These are two different type of warp drive.

It goes without saying that the technology to manipulate spacetime in this manner is only fiction and in reality, maybe a million years away, a fact that the warped news reports were happy to omit.

As such, I treat these ideas not as science fiction, but science fantasy, but I will admit that at some time in the very far future, it may be possible.

Having said that, this post is firmly labelled as "subjective"

Primordinal Soup

Time and again here, we will be returning to THAT man, Kurt Godel, the guy who proved that not everything is provable within mathematics.

A simple example follows, it is called "The Goldbach Conjecture", and involves prime numbers.

Now, a prime number is a number which has no factors, that is, can only be divided by itself and 1.

Obviously, no even number (apart from 2) can be a prime number, since all even numbers are divisible by 2.

Which of these are prime numbers? 3, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51.

The answers are 3, 11, 31, and 41, because 21 is 7x3, 51 is 17x3. These are called "composites".

The Goldbach Conjecture says this:

"Every even number is the sum of two (odd) prime numbers" (the word "odd" is there because 2 is excluded).

Let's call this the "GC" property of a number

Examples:

12 = 5 + 7
22 = 19 + 3 = 17 + 5
32 = 19 + 13 = 29 + 3
42 = 19 + 23 = 29 = 13 = 31 + 11 = 37 + 5

are all "GC".

The question arises: Is the Goldbach Conjecture true?

That is, is EVERY even number like this? Actually, it has never been proved or disproved. We just know that there are lots of them. No highest even number has ever been found, yet there is no proof that that there are infinitely many of them.

It has been speculated that this is one of those truths which can never be proved, the existence of which was showed by Godel in 1931.

There IS stuff out there that is true, but nevertheless cannot be proved.

Let's introduce a similar concept - the "Reverse Goldbach Conjecture". This says:

"Every even number is the difference of two (odd) prime numbers".

Let's call this the "RGC" property.

This has ramifications for computers.

Let's pick a number, say a trillion.

Is It GC or RGC or both, or neither?

You can write a program to test all primes up to a trillion to test if it is GC, and the program will finish at 1 trillion with an answer, YES, or NO. This called a "bounded" test.

However, testing for RGC is a bit more complicated, simply because a subtraction is involved. Testing for RGC has to start at 1 trillion and go UP, trying to find two odd primes which, when the smaller is subtracted from the larger, a trillion emerges.

It is not obvious how far up the number ladder we will have to go to get such a pair, if we ever find one.

For being GC, the testing process terminates in a finite amount of time, always.

For being RGC, the testing process may take us to numbers so high, it may take decades to find the pair, but there also exists the possibility that such a pair does not exist. Either way, we may never know. This kind of test is called "unbounded".

I mentioned computers because computers are particularly good at making loops to test for ever-increasing numbers.

The ramification is that the programmer must make sure his "loops are "bounded", and never "unbounded".

I have made that mistake myself with simple FORTRAN programs.

The Heat of the Moment

This one is very basic, but delves into one of the most fundamental concepts in all physics.

Energy.

We have all heard that word, but what does it mean, really?

For Physics fans, the word "energy" means "the ability to do something else".

For all others, it may mean "something to keep you going".

Both are correct.

To actually understand what "energy" is, though, a journey into how the word came about may be in order.

Way back when science was fairly young, but there were thinkers with labs (1800-1900 will do), they investigated heat and what it did. They discovered that in general, the hotter something was, the bigger it got (expansion) ( Due to something called the Lennard-Jones 6-12 potential, but that is beyond the scope of this post )

So, what was heat? Well, by careful experiments , a lot by Lord kelvin, they found out that if you cooled something down, the heat would go somewhere else. They also found that you could actually convert mechanical movement into heat AND BACK again. ]

They did a collective "Hmmmm", and the idea was born that there must be something that cannot be created or destroyed, but only converted. They called this the more general name of "energy".

There are many different types of energy, but all are equivalent and interchangeable. You have kinetic energy (from movement), potential energy (from position), but the most common one is known as heat. Heat comes about by something jiggling the atoms in a thing. The more hot it is, the bigger the jiggling, and if the jiggling is larger, the things expands because the atoms need more room to jiggle.

Ok, so that's heat. Movement in other words, but then again there are different types of movement. Travel in a car is one of the best examples. We say the car has "kinetic" energy because it is moving. Where does this energy come from? Again, the car is one of the best examples of energy conversion.

What makes it go? Why, the gas, of course. Gas has energy tied up in the long hydrocarbon molecules ( a molecule is simply two or more atoms bound together chemically )So what does the engine do?

Well, you put the gas in, and inside the car, a piston squashes the air/gas mix, and when done, a spark makes a bang in it. This bang is a small explosion and releases energy from the chemical bonds and this "internal combustion" is powerful enough to push the piston down very hard in it's tube. So now the piston has converted the energy of the bang into kinetic energy.

The piston is attached via a gudgeon pin and this pin converts the linear energy (straight line) to rotational energy of the crankshaft. The downward motion of the piston has now been converted to a spinning motion. But how does this spinning motion get to the wheels? Engines come in two basic types, depending on the relative orientation of the crankshaft (the spindle that gets the energy from the piston) and the drive shaft ( the spindle that drives the wheels). They can either be parallel or at right angles. The part that connects these two spindles is called the "differential".

So, we have now converted the piston energy to the crankshaft energy, and now the differential converts this energy to the drive shaft.

Not finished yet! The drive shaft turns the wheels and the wheels trundle the car along. However, the wheels only move the car because the rubber on the tyres stops the wheels slipping. This is called "friction" and is a major source of energy loss. Hang on! LOSS? But didn't I just say that energy cannot be destroyed? Yes, I did and when I say "lost" I really mean "lost from the source of the energy" ie the gasoline.

So where does it go? Well, as intimated, energy has lots of forms, and the lost energy is lost as sound energy, friction energy, and believe it or not, heating of the road, heating of the rubber, and worst of all, energy is even given to the earth to increase it's rotation! Ok, Ok, so that effect is very small, and may not even be measurable, but it is there.

In all, the internal Combustion Engine is very inefficient, in other words, you can never get all the energy from the gas, and in fact, it is impossible even in principle ( this is called the 2nd law of thermodynamics - see next post)At most, cars only get about 15% of the energy available from the gas. It's a bit like travel. You cannot convert ALL your cash to a different currency, because the exchange people take commission.

In a car, lots of processes take commission. Lets' list some places where energy is lost:

1. Friction inside the supply pipes that bring the gas to the piston.
2. Friction inside the piston.
3. Inefficiency of the combustion.
4. Friction between piston and crankshaft.
5. Friction between crankshaft and differential.
6. Friction between differential and driveshaft.
7. Friction between driveshaft and wheel.
8. Friction on the road.

As can be seen, energy is a complicated business.

As an exercise, try this. A light bulb is held at arms length and released. There are two main energy processes, what are they?

PLUS - how many more subsidiary energy processes can you figure out (hint - think of the car above)? There are at least four!

Super Energy Idea?

My ruminations have now led to this:

The uncertainty principle says that you can never know the exact momentum AND position of a particle at the same time.

This has been proven and the Fat Lady has sung.

It also led to the veneration of the third Law of thermodynamics, which says that "Absolute Zero can never be attained"

Why?

Because if it were, and because heat is defined as movement/vibration of atoms, they would all be still at Absolute Zero.

Since quantum mechanics rules all at microscopic levels, we have to conclude that the uncertainty principle says that atoms MUST vibrate no matter how cold it is. They can't do anything else, because if they were still (at Absolute Zero), it would violate the uncertainty principle.

Therefore all atoms must always vibrate.

At all times.

Forever.

Aside from the question as to where this energy came from, may it not be used to source an unlimited supply of free power? After all, it's there to be tapped.

Why has it not been done?


Is this limitless power from almost nothing?

Gedanken for the Memory part 3

There's more. IF a space station that big is ever built( and a couple of light days across is PRETTY big!), as was intimated, the broom would have to be at least a couple of dozen light-hours long to even feel the ceiling curving towards it.

The question now changes - would you be able to see this far such detail with the naked eye?

The answer is a resounding "No!", assuming it was of zero weight of course( is this assumption number 3 or just unrealistic?)

My first thought upon realising this was "Is this some sort of limiting principle, akin to the uncertainty principle, whereby in order to "see" the broom hit the ceiling, you'd be too far away that the resolution of the eye prevented the viewing?" But then I remembered telescopes. But then I also remembered that light would take up to 12-24 hours to reach you to tell you of the event. Is this relevant also? Had I hit upon an undiscovered principle here without knowing it?

I was right in the first place...there IS more to this than meets the eye...

Here's another one; What if the broom was curved just enough to allow for the curve of the station? then what?

Well, you would push it all the way around the station, and it would poke you in the back (or bum in my case) . Would you feel it or see it first?

And then there's the problem that the actual critical radius is along the middle of the corridor, ie, you are not actually looking along it.

More to come, I think!

ABYSS (Akiko's Black Hole Space Station)

Welcome to Akiko's Black Hole Space Station (or ABYSS), the result of the previous 2 Gedanken experiments.

The image is in 3 parts. (download and enlarge - I have given a lot of thought to this one so there is a lot on the image)

The Diagram (What is happening). A circular (torus or donut) shaped space station is constructed around a black hole. But not at just any old radius. A black hole pulls light into it like everything else, but there is a critical radius past which light escapes. The ABYSS is constructed around this. if you stand on the floor, your feet will point toward the center, making the ceiling, just above your head, the outer radius of the ABYSS.

1. The Action ( As you see it) Because the critical radius along which light orbits is in the middle of the corridor, if you stand there and say "Hello", you will see an infinitely long, but STRAIGHT ABYSS, with infinitely many views of the back of your head.

The dark area happens because light cannot escape from "below" the critical radius. You are now holding an extendable sweep's broom, pointed in front of you, and you push it forward.

2. The Reality (what actually happens). As you extend the broom, you know the broom is straight, and you know the ABYSS is curved, so you would expect the broom to "hit" the ceiling if you extend it parallel to the floor.

BUT what do you see, if you perceive the ABYSS to be "straight"?

My answer is that you will see the broom apparently curve upwards to meet the ceiling, even though it is straight.

Or do you? Since your head is NOT exactly in line with the critical radius, do you actually see the ABYSS at all, and is it straight or curved?

This thought experiment makes assumptions, two of the biggest are;

1. The feat of making the ABYSS is technically possible.

2. There are NO tidal effects.

Te last one bears a little thought. To reduce tidal effects to a negligible amount, you'd have to find a black hole at least (my guess) a few light-days across. This makes the perception that the curved ABYSS is curved or straight redundant, as it would be so big as to LOOK straight anyway. Thus you'd need a broom at least a dozen light-hours in length for it to hit the curved ceiling.

This is why it is called a thought experiment.

Gedanken for the Memory Part 2

This thought experiment requires a lot more thought than at first meets the eye. Watch for part three for a set of diagrams IN MY HANDWRITING!!!

First you have to remember that the space station is built around a huge black hole so that tidal effects are minimal.

Remember that there is a light orbit, that is, at a certain radius from the center, light neither falls into nor out of the black hole. A little more thought tells you that this "orbit" is extremely thin, and let us further say that this radius is at the center of the station. Now, you are standing in the station with your feet pointing towards the center, and this "radius" goes right through your middle. Even without the broom, what would you see?

Well, since any light below the radius cannot get out, anything below your waist is completely black, and although you do not know it, you cannot get your legs back!

Also, the space station my be curved, but because the light in it is curved, all you will see is half a straight corridor.

Now, imagine your broom is one of the old-fashioned sweep's brooms, that is, is extendable. As you tacked on extensions, what would you see at the tip of the broom?

It gets weirder, as I have now worked it out!

Gedanken for the Memory

A thought experiment.

A black hole is a place where light cannot escape from, that is, the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.

But from the equations, there is a distance from the center of the Black Hole where light can "orbit". Light can literally "flow" around the Black Hole just like any other object in orbit.

Consider this: What would happen if a circular space station around this black hole were constructed at about the same distance as this critical distance?

What would happen?

More elaboration is needed. Ignoring any engineering problems, or tidal effects (the former can be conquered over time, the latter by finding an extremely large black hole), you will have this: a hoop-shaped space station with a black hole at it's center. The radius of this "hoop" is the same radius as the critical radius for light. That is, light at this radius neither enters or leaves the black hole, it just circulates around it.

And the space station is built around this critical radius.

The question is.....if you were "on" this exact critical radius, which is now inside the space station, what would you see?

Two things are clear:

First, the space station will look straight, and not curved in any way.

Second, since the light goes around the black hole and will actually hit you on the back of your head, the REAL effect (not illusion) will be that at some distance away along the "straight" corridor, you really will be looking at the back of your own head. Or rather, an infinite many of them at regularly spaced intervals.

It is a weird, but real, effect, caused by the equations of General Relativity.

Here is the rub, and a question for which I have no answer:

Knowing that the space station is circular, yet seen as straight, what would happen if a broomstick was slowly pointed forward along the "straight" corridor? What would you see as you pushed the long stick further out from you?

Was Einstein Right or Wrong?

Good question. Here are two answers:

To non-scientists who have not been trained in physics and who have nothing better to do: "EINSTEIN IS WRONG".

To scientists who use Enstein's equations almost every day, having used them practically : "EINSTEIN IS RIGHT".

Make up your own mind, the comment box is free for anyone.