Another week, another Sunday
Aug. 21st, 2005 09:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynWas reasonably bored today so I went to the bookstore and got to store up my weekly allotment of guilt by sitting there and reading Half Blood Prince without bothering to buy it. I thought it was rather short, the story felt rushed and I was at the climax before I was ready for it. Still, it must have been somewhat lengthy because it took me over two and a half hours to read it. Fortunately, I have nothing else to do today.
Been reading my HunterXHunter collection too, realizing in the process that a lot of potential of that series has since been wasted. That's too bad, but I can still hope for it to finish with a bang. If it doesn't just give up and die.
Also re-read some of Neil Sheehan's excellent A Bright Shining Lie. I can now point out, again, that if nothing else, the US Army has learned a lot since Vietnam, and some of it actually shows. Not that this makes the news from Iraq any better, but it does show that at least some positive reform will probably come out of it in the future. I've got to come up with a better tactical analysis of the Iraq situation at some point, but I'm extremely hampered by the fact that nobody knows what's going on. People from all over the world chime in with commentary, but even the Iraqis seem quite confused. This is expected, since being in the middle of a war zone makes things complicated, but it makes reasonable analysis tricky at best.
But I don't have a good analysis, so you'll have to settle for more Particle Physics:
When we last left I intimated that there would soon be a rather serious problem headed in our direction. By the 1920s, the problem had already developed: namely that fuzzy-haired entrepreneur of impossible ideas, Albert Einstein. Einstein was so prolific, and such a genius, that he was threatening to come up with concrete theories that would explain all of modern physics-thus putting physicists around the world out of work.
So physicists came up with a quick solution. They invented, in short order, a practical television, a Playstation 2, and an early release version of Kingdom Hearts, except they purposefully included only 98 of the 99 dalmatians in the game. Einstein spent the next ten years or so vigorously searching for the last hidden dalmatian, after which his hair had turned white and he went off to figure out how to design a giant bomb, giving physicists free reign to design the rest of physics.
The first of the problems that Einstein left behind, and the one that we're still working with today, is that his theory of General Relativity (GR) is wholly incompatible with Quantum Mechanics. In fact, Einstein really did not like Quantum Mechanics, consider it somewhat a breech of the nature of the universe, illustrating again that Einstein was a very intelligent man. But first, somebody had to create a theory of relativistic quantum mechanics, combining special relativity with quantum mechanics (for those of you who don't know, Special Relativity is like General Relativity, only less so). This dealt with the mechanics of really small objects going really fast, sort of like what happens at a day-care center, except with less squealing involved.
Dirac made it halfway through before he was confounded by a problem in his math that was probably used by your algebra teacher against you. The problem lies in Einstein's famous equation.
E = mc2
which, as any physicist will tell you, is wrong. The actual equation is:
E2 = m2c4 + p2c2
where p is momentum. Now, for a normal human being (let's guess their mass at 75kg, what the elevator manufacturers typically use) going at about 2 meters per second, the m2c4 term is 4.5 x 1037 while the p2c2 is 2.0 x 1021. So the mass term is larger by sixteen orders of magnitude. In other terms, it has sixteen extra zeroes behind it. So for an object like that you can ignore the momentum term, and take the square root of both sides to get back to E=mc2
But Dirac had a problem. He had to rearrange things and set E equal to the square root of m2c4 + p2c2. This worked fine until Dirac suddenly remembered learning about square roots in Elementary School. Some of you have noted the problem by now, but it frustrated the hell out of Dirac, and it takes a while for most students of physics to even notice it. The problem is simple:
What's the square root of 4? Well, it's two. But if you gave that answer in class your teacher would get that horribly pleased look on her face, where you just know that you've jumped feet first into her trap, and point out that your answer, although partially correct, is not completely correct. The correct answer is plus or minus two, which is probably why so many of us ended up not liking math.
So Dirac had a problem. Every time he measured the mass and momentum of a particle he came out with two values for the energy, one positive and one negative. Physicists had evolved a method for dealing with this problem long ago called "discarding un-physical solutions", which is a polite euphemism for tossing whatever answer troubles you into the garbage and forgetting about it on the assumption that it is just mathematical gobbledegook. Unfortunately Dirac had this thing called a "conscience" and he couldn't justify for himself why those negative energy terms were unphysical.
At this point he made thing infinitely worse by inventing an answer known as the Dirac Sea, which requires an infinite amount of negative energy particles running around and occasionally showing up in real life. The Dirac Sea was so ridiculous that it was tossed out as soon as someone had a better answer, and would have fallen into obscurity if it hadn't been resurrected as high quality technobabble for Neon Genesis Evangelion.
The real answer, based on theories proposed by Stuckelberg and Feynman, was even worse, but it was so preposterous that it had to be correct. They proposed, and experimental results backed them up, that the negative energy states actually represented a different particle, a separate twin to the real particles that, if they came into contact with regular particles, would disappear in a flash of energy.
Of course, what they proposed was anti-matter, the evil twin (goatee possibly included) of every regular particle, a sinister force of nature that, if exposed to the Light Side, would disintegrate in an explosion that made dynamite look like a variety of ice cream. So suddenly the universe was filled not only with the very peculiar particles that we had found so far, but also these uber anti-particles, and if ever the twain should meet, the universe would be filled with a whole lot more something: smaller something though. Of course this set off the usual hysteria, and fears that there were somehow huge masses of this anti-matter stuff floating through the universe and waiting to sneak up behind us and tap us on the shoulder, at which point our shoulder would explode.
However, even though a lot of antimatter particles were discovered, not much antimatter was discovered in the universe as a whole, illustrated by the fact that I'm still here typing this. So the universe settled down from its state of temporary panic with a whole new staple for science fiction stories. And the fact that the number of elementary particles had just doubled-giving everything its own antiparticle.
Well, everything was settled except for that damn muon, which was still the particle that didn't belong. Except that the muon now had rather strange cousins-whom we'll meet next time.
Been reading my HunterXHunter collection too, realizing in the process that a lot of potential of that series has since been wasted. That's too bad, but I can still hope for it to finish with a bang. If it doesn't just give up and die.
Also re-read some of Neil Sheehan's excellent A Bright Shining Lie. I can now point out, again, that if nothing else, the US Army has learned a lot since Vietnam, and some of it actually shows. Not that this makes the news from Iraq any better, but it does show that at least some positive reform will probably come out of it in the future. I've got to come up with a better tactical analysis of the Iraq situation at some point, but I'm extremely hampered by the fact that nobody knows what's going on. People from all over the world chime in with commentary, but even the Iraqis seem quite confused. This is expected, since being in the middle of a war zone makes things complicated, but it makes reasonable analysis tricky at best.
But I don't have a good analysis, so you'll have to settle for more Particle Physics:
When we last left I intimated that there would soon be a rather serious problem headed in our direction. By the 1920s, the problem had already developed: namely that fuzzy-haired entrepreneur of impossible ideas, Albert Einstein. Einstein was so prolific, and such a genius, that he was threatening to come up with concrete theories that would explain all of modern physics-thus putting physicists around the world out of work.
So physicists came up with a quick solution. They invented, in short order, a practical television, a Playstation 2, and an early release version of Kingdom Hearts, except they purposefully included only 98 of the 99 dalmatians in the game. Einstein spent the next ten years or so vigorously searching for the last hidden dalmatian, after which his hair had turned white and he went off to figure out how to design a giant bomb, giving physicists free reign to design the rest of physics.
The first of the problems that Einstein left behind, and the one that we're still working with today, is that his theory of General Relativity (GR) is wholly incompatible with Quantum Mechanics. In fact, Einstein really did not like Quantum Mechanics, consider it somewhat a breech of the nature of the universe, illustrating again that Einstein was a very intelligent man. But first, somebody had to create a theory of relativistic quantum mechanics, combining special relativity with quantum mechanics (for those of you who don't know, Special Relativity is like General Relativity, only less so). This dealt with the mechanics of really small objects going really fast, sort of like what happens at a day-care center, except with less squealing involved.
Dirac made it halfway through before he was confounded by a problem in his math that was probably used by your algebra teacher against you. The problem lies in Einstein's famous equation.
E = mc2
which, as any physicist will tell you, is wrong. The actual equation is:
E2 = m2c4 + p2c2
where p is momentum. Now, for a normal human being (let's guess their mass at 75kg, what the elevator manufacturers typically use) going at about 2 meters per second, the m2c4 term is 4.5 x 1037 while the p2c2 is 2.0 x 1021. So the mass term is larger by sixteen orders of magnitude. In other terms, it has sixteen extra zeroes behind it. So for an object like that you can ignore the momentum term, and take the square root of both sides to get back to E=mc2
But Dirac had a problem. He had to rearrange things and set E equal to the square root of m2c4 + p2c2. This worked fine until Dirac suddenly remembered learning about square roots in Elementary School. Some of you have noted the problem by now, but it frustrated the hell out of Dirac, and it takes a while for most students of physics to even notice it. The problem is simple:
What's the square root of 4? Well, it's two. But if you gave that answer in class your teacher would get that horribly pleased look on her face, where you just know that you've jumped feet first into her trap, and point out that your answer, although partially correct, is not completely correct. The correct answer is plus or minus two, which is probably why so many of us ended up not liking math.
So Dirac had a problem. Every time he measured the mass and momentum of a particle he came out with two values for the energy, one positive and one negative. Physicists had evolved a method for dealing with this problem long ago called "discarding un-physical solutions", which is a polite euphemism for tossing whatever answer troubles you into the garbage and forgetting about it on the assumption that it is just mathematical gobbledegook. Unfortunately Dirac had this thing called a "conscience" and he couldn't justify for himself why those negative energy terms were unphysical.
At this point he made thing infinitely worse by inventing an answer known as the Dirac Sea, which requires an infinite amount of negative energy particles running around and occasionally showing up in real life. The Dirac Sea was so ridiculous that it was tossed out as soon as someone had a better answer, and would have fallen into obscurity if it hadn't been resurrected as high quality technobabble for Neon Genesis Evangelion.
The real answer, based on theories proposed by Stuckelberg and Feynman, was even worse, but it was so preposterous that it had to be correct. They proposed, and experimental results backed them up, that the negative energy states actually represented a different particle, a separate twin to the real particles that, if they came into contact with regular particles, would disappear in a flash of energy.
Of course, what they proposed was anti-matter, the evil twin (goatee possibly included) of every regular particle, a sinister force of nature that, if exposed to the Light Side, would disintegrate in an explosion that made dynamite look like a variety of ice cream. So suddenly the universe was filled not only with the very peculiar particles that we had found so far, but also these uber anti-particles, and if ever the twain should meet, the universe would be filled with a whole lot more something: smaller something though. Of course this set off the usual hysteria, and fears that there were somehow huge masses of this anti-matter stuff floating through the universe and waiting to sneak up behind us and tap us on the shoulder, at which point our shoulder would explode.
However, even though a lot of antimatter particles were discovered, not much antimatter was discovered in the universe as a whole, illustrated by the fact that I'm still here typing this. So the universe settled down from its state of temporary panic with a whole new staple for science fiction stories. And the fact that the number of elementary particles had just doubled-giving everything its own antiparticle.
Well, everything was settled except for that damn muon, which was still the particle that didn't belong. Except that the muon now had rather strange cousins-whom we'll meet next time.
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Date: 2005-08-22 03:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-22 04:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-22 07:08 am (UTC)