Interesting/promising measurements at CERN

Namely after they cease to be contrarians.

Oh sure, I'm glad you shared it. I just figure that the guys at CERN are desperate to find something new and every bump looks good. It's easy to fool yourself, when you're searching for an unknown signal in the noise.

George H.

Back in the '60s when the number of meson resonances being discovered was going through the ceiling, there was a short-lived theory called "Nuclear democracy" that said sort of the same thing.

It went away when the gauge symmetry folks started finding regularities.

I think that's very unlikely, not least because then they wouldn't be fundamental. More likely IMO is that the unification regime is up near the Planck energy scale, which we'll never reach. But who knows, it might be only a factor of 10 away from LHC energies.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I'm not sure when the 'Standard model' of HEP condescended. I went to a bunch of HEP talks in the mid to late 1990's at Vanderbilt. We solid state physics types would joke that the end of every talk was the same. "and this cool bump resonance thing we found is all within the Standard Model" It seems we should be looking at low energy and not high energy. The things not fitting in the SM are neutrino mass, (very small) dark matter and dark energy (the weakest QM effect ever, maybe?) I'm not sure why anything beyond the Higgs boson should be expected.... but if there is it's even more worthless than quarks (at the moment). If I get a vote it's for more telescopes. LIGO is a telescope that looks at gravity waves... definitely more of that! And there are all sorts of other cool space telescope ideas. I never hear much about the neutrino telescope made with pmt's buried in the ice.

George H.

Progress is glacial by all accounts. ;)

I'm all for new windows like LIGO, for sure.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Not entirely.

Aren't we all?

"general philosophical convictions" (page 240) guiding physics sounds like faith to me.

It would. John Larkin has lot to learn, and doesn't seem to have any idea how much he needs to learn.

General philosophical principles are the tools that you use to put an argument together. Humans invented them - in much the same way that they invented gods - but if the arguments they under-pin don't stand up, the principles get corrected. Gods are are hard to reformulate.

One hopes that's a humorous suggestion, not a philosophical one; the periodic table of elements, for instance, does NOT support the concept that there's lots of alternative nuclear particles; basically just protons and neutrons.

We don't need no stinkin' weird particles. Two is plenty.

Proton, neutron, anti-proton, anti-neutron, electron, positron, neutrino, muons, pions, quarks, photons. And there's always the Higgs boson (or has been since we found out roughly how heavy it was - back in 2012).

John Larkin's grasp of reality is decidedly limited, but then again he doesn't pay much attention to most of it.

This from somebody who claims to have been doing EXAFS research at SSRL thirty years ago.

Were you actually doing research there, or were you the IT person?

Your "basically just protons and neutrons" would have got a few laughs at the cafeteria over lunch, for sure.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

It's all you need for the periodic table. Each isotope has a different number of neutrons, and each element has a different number of protons.

Explaining how the elements behave does mean that you need to pay attention to the electrons that match the protons, and keeping track of the transitions amongst the unstable isotopes keeps you even busier.

Rephrasing the original claim to make it look ridiculous is a form of text-chopping, Consider yourself reprimanded.

Virtual particles don't count; they don't reside in the nucleus. Neither do photons. Electrons are particles, but not nuclear particles. Antiparticles aren't distinct, positrons are just another flavor of electron.

The listing which is the periodic table (you can add 'neutron' if you want) are all of normal matter.

Mesons aren't virtual particles. They're just not very stable.

Virtual particles mediate fields. It's not a great name, but they enter into perturbation calculations (systematized by Feynman diagrams) in a way similar to that of real particles.

(Okay, you were the IT guy, got it. You sure don't know much physics.)

But that wasn't what was being discussed--we were discussing whether there was a potentially endless number of fundamental particles at higher and higher energy scales.

Thanks for playing.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

With the same mass and crucially opposite charge. And a tendency to annihilate with the first electron they ever get close to emitting a pair of characteristic gamma rays. Very handy for positron tomography.

Free neutrons decay into proton + electron + gamma with a half life of about 10 minutes. They are only really stable when in combination with protons or a hell of a lot of gravity and virtual particle soup.

Not irrelevant at all; in studying normal matter, we got to the bottom of the list of particles rather quickly. First a short list of elements, then a slightly longer list of important isotopes, and eventually, a very short list of component parts (called, at one stage, 'elementary'). At no point was there any indication of a useful model that would encompass infinite variety of the tiniest bits.

Oh, really?

The subject of this thread is, "Interesting/promising measurements at CERN".

If you look at the top of the quoted text in this post, you'll find the statement you originally responded to:

Which of course is exactly what you claim not to have been talking about.

We don't need to discover protons and neutrons. We already know about them.

Thanks again for playing.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Don't be obtuse: when 'particles' was natural atomic elements, there was a limit and it was not funding.

When 'particles' was isotopes, there was a limit, and not funding.

When 'particles' was subatomic particles, there was a limit, and not funding.

If you want to redefine elementary particles as quarks, or strings, I'm thinking there's no future with a model that includes an unlimited number of 'em.