Over-complication of science

[Use Psychology]

so, to approach the question from the other direction: Gene Vincent, do electrons exist?

[nammynake]

Gene Vincent said:

Cosmic ray propagation is so different from a collider that, if you can't see the numerous and glaring differences between them, trying to enlighten you as to why they only occur in a collider is doomed.

Proton-Proton collisions in a collider versus proton (or other atomic nuclei) / air nuclei collisions in upper atmosphere. Glaring difference or am I missing something?

[FarmyardPants]

nammynake said:

Gene Vincent said:

Cosmic ray propagation is so different from a collider that, if you can't see the numerous and glaring differences between them, trying to enlighten you as to why they only occur in a collider is doomed.

Proton-Proton collisions in a collider versus proton (or other atomic nuclei) / air nuclei collisions in upper atmosphere. Glaring difference or am I missing something?

I don't think you're missing anything. A few posts up, GV uses the phrase "long lived and separable" which might be moving the goalposts but his point is (I think) they don't exist long enough to be considered to exist in any meaningful sense.

[hairykrishna]

FarmyardPants said:

nammynake said:

Gene Vincent said:

Cosmic ray propagation is so different from a collider that, if you can't see the numerous and glaring differences between them, trying to enlighten you as to why they only occur in a collider is doomed.

Proton-Proton collisions in a collider versus proton (or other atomic nuclei) / air nuclei collisions in upper atmosphere. Glaring difference or am I missing something?

I don't think you're missing anything. A few posts up, GV uses the phrase "long lived and separable" which might be moving the goalposts but his point is (I think) they don't exist long enough to be considered to exist in any meaningful sense.

They don't exist outside of a proton, inside a particle accelerator, for very long either. The only difference between high energy particles in the LHC and in the atmosphere is that in the atmosphere one particle is effectively at rest while the other is flying in at an enormous velocity. In the LHC it's two beams heading towards each other.

The reason we build accelerators is that it's a lot easier to study high energy collisions when you have a lot of them in a well defined volume, inside some massive detectors, rather than in the upper atmosphere. If I remember correctly, about 90% of cosmic rays are protons and some of them have energies much greater than those generated in the LHC. Maybe GV will stoop to explaining to us simpletons why the ones in the LHC are different.

Edited by hairykrishna on Saturday 1st September 00:37

[FarmyardPants]

hairykrishna said:

FarmyardPants said:

nammynake said:

Gene Vincent said:

Cosmic ray propagation is so different from a collider that, if you can't see the numerous and glaring differences between them, trying to enlighten you as to why they only occur in a collider is doomed.

Proton-Proton collisions in a collider versus proton (or other atomic nuclei) / air nuclei collisions in upper atmosphere. Glaring difference or am I missing something?

I don't think you're missing anything. A few posts up, GV uses the phrase "long lived and separable" which might be moving the goalposts but his point is (I think) they don't exist long enough to be considered to exist in any meaningful sense.

They don't exist outside of a proton, inside a particle accelerator, for very long either. The only difference between high energy particles in the LHC and in the atmosphere is that in the atmosphere one particle is effectively at rest while the other is flying in at an enormous velocity. In the LHC it's two beams heading towards each other.

The reason we build accelerators is that it's a lot easier to study high energy collisions when you have a lot of them in a well defined volume, inside some massive detectors, rather than in the upper atmosphere. If I remember correctly, about 90% of cosmic rays are protons and some of them have energies much greater than those generated in the LHC. Maybe GV will stoop to explaining to us simpletons why the ones in the LHC are different.

You quoted my post so I'm assumIng you read it(?). If you read it again you'll see that I'm not disagreeing with what you wrote above. I know why we build particle accelerators (thanks though). All I was saying is that quarks probably exist in nature (for 1e-12s, or something like that, I don't know exactly) as a result of naturally occurring collisions, just as they exist for a similar timespan in our own collision experiments (surprise!)

I'll reiterate my point in case it's still not clear, GV has apparently reduced the qualifications for "existence" to be LONG LIVED and SEPARABLE.

I can type it again if it isn't sinking in.

[hairykrishna]

FarmyardPants said:

hairykrishna said:

FarmyardPants said:

nammynake said:

Gene Vincent said:

Cosmic ray propagation is so different from a collider that, if you can't see the numerous and glaring differences between them, trying to enlighten you as to why they only occur in a collider is doomed.

Proton-Proton collisions in a collider versus proton (or other atomic nuclei) / air nuclei collisions in upper atmosphere. Glaring difference or am I missing something?

I don't think you're missing anything. A few posts up, GV uses the phrase "long lived and separable" which might be moving the goalposts but his point is (I think) they don't exist long enough to be considered to exist in any meaningful sense.

They don't exist outside of a proton, inside a particle accelerator, for very long either. The only difference between high energy particles in the LHC and in the atmosphere is that in the atmosphere one particle is effectively at rest while the other is flying in at an enormous velocity. In the LHC it's two beams heading towards each other.

The reason we build accelerators is that it's a lot easier to study high energy collisions when you have a lot of them in a well defined volume, inside some massive detectors, rather than in the upper atmosphere. If I remember correctly, about 90% of cosmic rays are protons and some of them have energies much greater than those generated in the LHC. Maybe GV will stoop to explaining to us simpletons why the ones in the LHC are different.

You quoted my post so I'm assumIng you read it(?). If you read it again you'll see that I'm not disagreeing with what you wrote above. I know why we build particle accelerators (thanks though). All I was saying is that quarks probably exist in nature (for 1e-12s, or something like that, I don't know exactly) as a result of naturally occurring collisions, just as they exist for a similar timespan in our own collision experiments (surprise!)

I'll reiterate my point in case it's still not clear, GV has apparently reduced the qualifications for "existence" to be LONG LIVED and SEPARABLE.

I can type it again if it isn't sinking in.

Sorry. I was more replying to GV's post - I wasn't arguing with you, I was agreeing!

Changing it to long lived and separable doesn't really seem to change anything. All we're doing in the LHC is recreating collisions that effectively happen all the time. The resulting particles are lower in velocity wrt earth in the LHC than cosmic ray produced ones but I don't really see what difference that makes to if quarks exist or not. If they exist in the LHC it would seem they exist in nature.

Edited by hairykrishna on Saturday 1st September 00:39

[FarmyardPants]

Fair enough. It seems we are all in agreement then , and that the original assertion as posed has been proved or agreed to be false: quarks do actually exist in nature.

But in the diluted form of this assertion, namely that to really exist they must be long li.. (I can't bring myself this phrase a third time), they may well exist but they do not 'persist'. Depends how you define existence.

Maybe it's a moot point, dunno. I can see no reason why the things we observe with highly sensitive instruments in the LHC don't also happen as a result of cosmic particle collisions. Or...if there's nobody there to measure them.......

[Gene Vincent]

FarmyardPants said:

Fair enough. It seems we are all in agreement then , and that the original assertion as posed has been proved or agreed to be false: quarks do actually exist in nature.

Ignorance is bliss.

No one on earth has ever observed an isolated quark.

If you try to get one, no-one ever has, they transfigure before they appear!

To use HKs favourite term, they annihilate before they exist (yet another nail in the coffin of 'annihilation') this happens because the energy to produce a 'transfiguring pair' is less than that that is required to liberate them.

This what sustainability is to a mathematician, it is not time based.

Quarks are nothing more or less than interpolation, the interpolation also allows a different solution, but parsimony means we err toward a singular new elemental particle.

As to them having any singular or corporeal existence in this Cosmos today, not a chance.

[Gene Vincent]

You might want to look at this:-
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particl...

But the 'problems' regarding the actual existence of quarks as shown in that visualisation are gaining ground.

Quarks may be under fire from the very principle of parsimony that 'created' them, as we attack a proton in an accelerator more and more vigourously we find more of them and this multitudinous nature of the apparent quark phenomenon is precariously close to the other less well known model that completely changes the quark part of the accepted model.

It's not there yet, but if we continue to add to the types of quarks (see bedazzled answer to my question under a 'reveal') there will be increasing doubts.

[Gene Vincent]

Use Psychology said:

so, to approach the question from the other direction: Gene Vincent, do electrons exist?

Yes they do, but what we are seeing increasingly is that quarks 'may' be simply groups of neutron and positrons, it also is a better fit to the evidence of decay states.

The 'difficult' bit is the early soup just prior to the inflationary period, that type of p/n grouping is an awkward fit in the maths there...

[nammynake]

Gene Vincent said:

You might want to look at this:-
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particl...

But the 'problems' regarding the actual existence of quarks as shown in that visualisation are gaining ground.

Quarks may be under fire from the very principle of parsimony that 'created' them, as we attack a proton in an accelerator more and more vigourously we find more of them and this multitudinous nature of the apparent quark phenomenon is precariously close to the other less well known model that completely changes the quark part of the accepted model.

It's not there yet, but if we continue to add to the types of quarks (see bedazzled answer to my question under a 'reveal') there will be increasing doubts.

Ahh that's ringing some bells. I recall learning about this on a particle physics module at Uni.

Going back to my earlier question though - why do you state that collider collisions are different to natural cosmic ray collisions? Hit me with details, we're not as dim as you might presume.

[Gene Vincent]

nammynake said:

Going back to my earlier question though - why do you state that collider collisions are different to natural cosmic ray collisions?

The reason they are different is due to impetus and reaction, a Cosmic ray hitting the atmosphere or a star or anything is not met with an equal resistance to its kinetic energy, the thing in its path will move along with it.

You might see this better with a car analogy... if two cars hit each other head on at 60mph (both doing 30mph) the damage is very different to a collision of (using a cosmis ray/collider number parity) one car doing 60mph hitting one that is travelling in the same direction that is only doing 10mph but the difference is that the car doing 10mph is weighs only 1/1,000,000th that of the car doing 50mph, their is a huge closing speed, but the effect is different.

That is why only muons/kaons escape such collisions, there simply isn't enough of a resistance put up by the things being hit to dismantle the proton fundamentally enough.

[hairykrishna]

Gene Vincent said:

The reason they are different is due to impetus and reaction, a Cosmic ray hitting the atmosphere or a star or anything is not met with an equal resistance to its kinetic energy, the thing in its path will move along with it.

You might see this better with a car analogy... if two cars hit each other head on at 60mph (both doing 30mph) the damage is very different to a collision of (using a cosmis ray/collider number parity) one car doing 60mph hitting one that is travelling in the same direction that is only doing 10mph but the difference is that the car doing 10mph is weighs only 1/1,000,000th that of the car doing 50mph, their is a huge closing speed, but the effect is different.

That is why only muons/kaons escape such collisions, there simply isn't enough of a resistance put up by the things being hit to dismantle the proton fundamentally enough.

Sorry, but this is nonsense. In terms of what's produced, total KE of the particles is what matters. The highest energy cosmic rays are massively more energetic than LHC beams. If you do the calculation, it works out that a ~10^17eV proton colliding with a stationary proton is equivalent to the LHC beams colliding head on.

Edited by hairykrishna on Saturday 1st September 14:03

[Gene Vincent]

hairykrishna said:

Gene Vincent said:

The reason they are different is due to impetus and reaction, a Cosmic ray hitting the atmosphere or a star or anything is not met with an equal resistance to its kinetic energy, the thing in its path will move along with it.

You might see this better with a car analogy... if two cars hit each other head on at 60mph (both doing 30mph) the damage is very different to a collision of (using a cosmis ray/collider number parity) one car doing 60mph hitting one that is travelling in the same direction that is only doing 10mph but the difference is that the car doing 10mph is weighs only 1/1,000,000th that of the car doing 50mph, their is a huge closing speed, but the effect is different.

That is why only muons/kaons escape such collisions, there simply isn't enough of a resistance put up by the things being hit to dismantle the proton fundamentally enough.

Sorry, but this is nonsense. In terms of what's produced, total KE of the particles is what matters. The highest energy cosmic raves are massively more energetic than LHC beams. If you do the calculation, it works out that a ~10^17eV proton colliding with a stationary proton is equivalent to the LHC beams colliding head on.

Oh... so where are the quarks?

None are ever produced in our upper atmosphere, yet they are in an accelerator... can you see that perhaps your rather simplistic notions are wrong?

You should read up on accelerators and what they do and how it relates to or rather doesn't relate to natural phenomena.

I think a thread about accelerators might be in order at some point, because the huge lack of understanding exhibited here needs addressing.

Spa q2 is on... back later.

[Catatafish]

Gene Vincent said:

The reason they are different is due to impetus and reaction, a Cosmic ray hitting the atmosphere or a star or anything is not met with an equal resistance to its kinetic energy, the thing in its path will move along with it.

You might see this better with a car analogy... if two cars hit each other head on at 60mph (both doing 30mph) the damage is very different to a collision of (using a cosmis ray/collider number parity) one car doing 60mph hitting one that is travelling in the same direction that is only doing 10mph but the difference is that the car doing 10mph is weighs only 1/1,000,000th that of the car doing 50mph, their is a huge closing speed, but the effect is different.

That is why only muons/kaons escape such collisions, there simply isn't enough of a resistance put up by the things being hit to dismantle the proton fundamentally enough.

Utter gash. Muons penetrate deep into matter due to their larger mass and correspondingly reduced deflection by EM fields - lower bremsstrahlung energy loss.

As far as the LHC versus cosmic ray conditions go, there is no difference in terms of energy available to produce particles. Its just two reference frames closing on each other at high % of the speed at light. Cosmic rays with up to 3x10^20 eV have been observed which are assumed to be protons

Colliding beams are useful because the momentum cancels out somewhat, so that the interesting things happen within the detector, but seeing as we're discussing cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere anyway, this is irrelevant.

Fine, go ahead and make a thread about accelerators, but you'll need a lot of help getting the details right.

[hairykrishna]

Gene Vincent said:

Oh... so where are the quarks?

None are ever produced in our upper atmosphere, yet they are in an accelerator... can you see that perhaps your rather simplistic notions are wrong?

You should read up on accelerators and what they do and how it relates to or rather doesn't relate to natural phenomena.

I think a thread about accelerators might be in order at some point, because the huge lack of understanding exhibited here needs addressing.

Spa q2 is on... back later.

Yet again you seem to just be arguing from a position of assumed personal authority rather than having anything to back up your assertions. I'm no particle physicist, but I can do the calculation to compare the energies of the LHC with cosmic rays, accounting for special relativity. Everything in the literature suggests there's nothing special about the LHC collisions other than the fact that we're right on top of the collision event to observe it carefully. Can you produce a reference or a calculation to show me that my assumption is wrong?

[Gene Vincent]

If you can't grasp the plain fact that what you are saying is not evidenced in the real world, the maths of collisions would not do anything other than confuse you more.

I think a thread on what an accelerator really does is essential and next week I'll put one up.

Cosmic rays do not ever produce quarks, they simply can't, the nature of this Cosmos mitigates against it.

An accelerator provides the precise conditions to.

Cosmos = Chalk, Accelerator = Cheese.

Great debate though.

Next week, you'll understand.

[hairykrishna]

Gene Vincent said:

If you can't grasp the plain fact that what you are saying is not evidenced in the real world, the maths of collisions would not do anything other than confuse you more.

I think a thread on what an accelerator really does is essential and next week I'll put one up.

Cosmic rays do not ever produce quarks, they simply can't, the nature of this Cosmos mitigates against it.

An accelerator provides the precise conditions to.

Cosmos = Chalk, Accelerator = Cheese.

Great debate though.

Next week, you'll understand.

What I'm am saying is that everything produced by the LHC can be, and is, produced in cosmic ray collisions. As you obviously disagree with this statement you may be better off explaining why rather than starting a new thread. Your car analogy was not helpful. As I said - work out the energies. Two 7 TeV protons head on is equivalent to 1 10^17 eV proton hitting a stationary one. The only difference is that the head on reaction products will be more or less at rest, while the others won't.

It is also perhaps relevant that when CERN produced their comprehensive safety report, explaining why the various fruitcakes who had decided it would destroy the world were wrong, they made the statement;
"Over the past billions of years, Nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments – and the planet still exists."

You suggest this was a spurious argument, as the cosmic ray collisions are different from the CERN ones?

[Gene Vincent]

HK... where do I start...

I won't, believe what you want.

I point you in the right direction and you immediately turn on your heels and face where you were.

I'll keep trying... start here:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_epoch

...and follow the epoch links, read them carefully, take your time, absorb what they have to say about the Cosmos.

[hairykrishna]

Gene Vincent said:

I point you in the right direction and you immediately turn on your heels and face where you were.

Pointed me in the right direction? I must have missed that. You gave a hand wavy car analogy that was entirely useless and then insisted that the problem was that I don't understand enough about particle accelerators. Now you're giving me a wikipedia link to the basics of quarks in the early universe.

For someone who wants to style themselves as some kind of physics guru, providing knowledge to the ignorant, you seem find it remarkably difficult to give a answer of any substance to physics questions.