questionposter

Why would the government and investors spend billions of dollars to build a collider to make electrons go into a proton if it happens that naturally? It would have to happen pretty rarely on Earth, but still why doesn't it actually happen more often if the two particles actually come into contact with one another? So your saying the wave function is just to describe it's probability and not the particle itself, but then what is the actual mathematics for an actual particle? Why does it have that probability in the first place? And as I understand it, spin isn't a classical notion either. It has to be more complex than that, and I've run into multiple sources referring to wave-particle duality to describe the existence of particles. If an electron isn't a wave in any shape or form, why does it have the probability of one? It seems kind of weird to say a particle isn't anything like a wave when there are specific places it can't possibly exist that perfectly match the nodal surfaces predicted by wave mechanics.

I see, so your saying the meteor has to be quite large to not completely vaporize, but there's small meteors all over the planet that weren't a ton bigger when they entered the atmosphere or they would have been on the news. I guess maybe that one in Chile. There's also when meteors explode, which is that sometimes meteors will spontaneously explode when heated up like that. We can't say for sure that half of a meteor's energy will be thermal and the other half will be kinetic though, because some vaporize completely and others don't vaporize that much at all, we need an actual number for the rate at which a meteor vaporizes and releases thermal energy.

I don't know what google is thinking, but I talked to someone who got a Masters in world history from the University of Madison in Wisconsin and he told me the Mayan Calender itself does not predict the "end" of the world, just the coming of a new one meaning the same as the coming of another day, and that the Mayans themselves said they had recorded 8 of these world changes but they world didn't end 8 times.

That's 50 meters across though which is pretty big, I as thinking more like 1 meter across at most. Most of the meteors that burn up into the atmosphere are around the size of dust particles, maybe a few cubic centimeters sometimes too. If maybe there was some approximate number for the rate that a meteor converts kinetic energy to thermal energy via friction with the atmosphere, I could use it.

I guess it works, but there's another solution too.

I know, but what does it mean if I say I have a 1/i chance of picking a green marble?

Right, but if time stopped, it doesn't matter how many seconds ago a photon was emitted does it? It still wouldn't travel distance over time, and thus, how would it ever make it to you?

Yes, and there's apparently a minimum energy required to force an electron and proton together for that interaction to take place, since as you said before that weak force interaction happens over a short distance, but I still don't understand what why the weak interaction allows things to combine in the first place and it normally it doesn't then if they overlap. If weak force carrying particles are emitted from a proton, and the electron comes into contact with that proton, why would weak bosons hit the electron? I could see how there's a small distance, but if it's actually touching the proton... Well not completely classical waves, but particles have many properties of waves even mathematically and I don't think they create the double slit experiment result by being more like a point particle, but I suppose they can be localized to packets and have vector states.

So in other words, your saying because the fabric of space is distorted, the probability will tend to follow that curvature? What if half of the particle is in the black hole and the other half is outside of it? I guess maybe the half that's inside would like like a cone being stretched towards the event horizon, and the outer half would still look relatively like a sphere?

Wait, why "don't" we actually have theories for gravity? If we can't normalize gravity, obviously doesn't follow the same mechanics that can allow you to just add up probable energy levels and etc, it follows something different but still similar to the realm of other forces, so why wouldn't someone look into that? Why would they try to force it to coincide with current theories instead of developing a way to bring it into QTF? Maybe gravity isn't comprised of virtual particles at all, but it can still exist as a field mathematically...

I think he's asking what causes the whole "charge" thing and electro-magnetism, and the current answer to that I think is that both electrons and protons emit virtual particles which are particles emitted from a parent particle like an electron or set of "entangled" (for lack of a better term) quarks and carry the forces of nature, like electromagnetism. No one really knows "why" virtual particles are emitted though or what's causing it, so that will just have to be the extent of hte answer.

I know ionization energy isn't the right term, but like I said I don't know what the right term is, so I don't know what else to call it really. There's some kind of minimum energy required to excite an electron to the state where it's boundaries overlap a proton's enough to combine, but I just don't get why exactly it isn't enough on it's own.

I know ionization energy isn't the right term, but like I said I don't know what the right term is, so I don't know what else to call it really.

It can be, because mass and energy are the same thing. I can mathematically convert a rock to energy to see how much energy is trapped in it.

It seems there needs to be some kind of minimum energy action in order to trigger the combining of a proton and electron, because it doesn't appear to happen on it's own, but I don't know why it doesn't happen on it's own if electrons and protons do overlap. Perhaps maybe they just don't overlap "enough", like technically their existence does extend infinitely, but that doesn't mean everything is entangled when your not looking at it, and a particle collider provides the minimum energy necessary to force an electron into a proton enough for them to combine, but what's the actual minimum distance for that?

So say I have a bag of 10 marbles, 1 red, blue, green, yellow, purple, orange, magenta, cyan, brown and gray, and there's a 1/i change of me picking a green one at any given second. What is the likelihood I will pick a green number as a percentage of 10? How much time could pass before I would actually be able to pick a green one? Actually, let's just say I have a bag of 10 marbles, they're all green and the probability of picking one is 1/i. What is the percentage I'd pick a green one using that probability?

So I guess that only leaves this weird ionization energy thing, where some specific energy in some specific way is required to make the interaction happen, but why does that actually need to happen then?

So atom bombs and nuclear reactors release a lot of energy, but it seems like it would be more convenient if something could store that energy. Is there some way that energy could be mechanically used to compress matter and create degenerate matter? Or would you have to constantly use massive amounts of energy to keep matter stored like that? Because if the surface of a neutron star moves even 1 milimeter, it releases a gamma ray burst, which within our vicinity would be powerful enough to sterilize Earth, not that we could generate anything on Earth that powerful, but it seems like degenerate matter can store massive amounts of energy in a small space. Now that I think about it, a degenerate matter bomb might be the solution to the meteor problem in the other thread, if you can in fact store that much energy, but there would need to be some way to release all that energy at once.

I know, but theoretically there should be a size of the meteor where they to release thermal energy, but they are not small enough to release too much thermal energy but not large enough to cause major damage to the ground. Right, but, how realistic is it to throw a 2 ton piece of metal and deflect 2.5*10^16 kilograms of matter? Ion beams? Mass drivers? I guess, seems kind of complex, though it does say in that very link that there is a potential to let pieces burn up in the atmosphere, even if there potentially exists the same problem. Thought I suppose, Earth won't stay at 920 Kelvin, and it wouldn't happen all at once. Maybe if it could be spread out enough for Earth to return to equilibrium before the next swarm, but doing that might be too complex. Actually, the calculations on this thread might even be the citation needed for that paragraph. The only one where there doesn't seem to be any direct setbacks is I guess trying to blow it up completely, based on that link, but perhaps studies should be done on the far side of the moon where nuclear devices are detonated and there are orbiting satellites to scan how the radiation spreads out.

Two people are away from the finish line in a race and are both facing forward in the same direction. One person is 1 foot away, and the other is 2 to feet away. The finish line is a horizontal line that is perpendicular to both people's line of sight, and both people are running at the same speed and both never stop running until they reach the finish line, but the person two feet away wins first place. How did they finish first?

I didn't directly say the specific parameters, but I did say the robot had already picked up deer and small dinosaurs, and based on that you can infer the parameters are within the 150-200 range. I suppose it might be better though to be more specific. And if it was an ark you could also have assumed it stopped because it already had something of the weight the man had at the end, but not something of the weight the man had at the beginning.

I'm not saying the companies wouldn't like it, but there's no law saying they have to use money to build things except for safety requirements and getting rid of structural violations within buildings, so there is a good chance it will go into their pocket. If your a small business it's probably more likely you'd use it to grow, but for big businesses it probably wouldn't do much.

Well that makes sense, but...can you still be more specific as to how virtual particle interactions within a field are instantaneous when virtual particles can only travel at the speed of light?

What do you mean it requires a "weak interaction"? What are particle colliders doing that a normal atoms doesn't? If anything, colliders add more energy, unless you mean the "weak force", in which case, what does the weak force have to do with particles combining? Wouldn't the strong force have more to do with that? It would make sense if there was some kind of ionization energy for electron-proton, but so far I haven't found anything like that, and I also don't know specifically why that stops the particles from combining. Perhaps the quarks are held so tightly together that it takes massive amounts of kinetic energy to break them and then for an electron to combine with them? What about in the sun? To electrons fuse into protons in the sun? I was thinking because electrons are waves, they physically exist, and according to the math that describes it, they have physical oscillation.

All mammals had some kind of common ancestry millions of years ago.