Guest Snibly Posted September 18, 2004 Share Posted September 18, 2004 The smallest size of something is quarks, according to my understanding. Will what composes those things? Is it just pure energy? Or do we not know.... Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thales Posted September 18, 2004 Share Posted September 18, 2004 Answer that and you'll be staring down the barrel of more than just the Nobel Prize. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Snibly Posted September 18, 2004 Share Posted September 18, 2004 Bah, everything should be known. Not knowing how/why/what is just a stupid concept. Anyways, what does the theory of relativity suggest or any theory for that matter. By that I mean, is there a fundamental/indefinite/underlying "creating essence" of everything? ... Thanks for any info Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thales Posted September 18, 2004 Share Posted September 18, 2004 Some sort of objective reality underlyes everything in nature and the universe. The laws that govern our world are unchanging and understanding them is what drives people like myself. The search for a theory of everything has been underway in earnest since the dawn of scientific enquiry(by my namesake in Ionia two millenia previously) yet despite our advances we have only scratched the surface of what there is to know. What your talking about in regards to the how/where fundamental particles obtain there mass is a hot topic in particle physics and cosmology as we speak. The leading proponent at the moment is the hypothetical Higgs boson. This particle, which exists only at pre-symmetry breaking energies, if thought to 'assign' all other baryonic matter its mass. There is odds of 6 to 1 we will discover it by 2010, if it infact exists. To find out more I suggest you google for some basic explanations of symmetry breaking(supersymmetry) and Higgs Boson research. We may yet discover a theory of everything but most experts agree it will probably not be for another few generations at least. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crash Posted September 18, 2004 Share Posted September 18, 2004 If 'theory of everything' cannot be testified, no one should believe it................. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thales Posted September 18, 2004 Share Posted September 18, 2004 I don't understand what you mean by testified? Do you mean tested? If its a theory of everything then of course it can be tested. We just don't have one to test as yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Severian Posted September 18, 2004 Share Posted September 18, 2004 Well, a string theorist would say they are made of strings... For my purposes I think of them as being a representation of a symmetry group (SU(3)). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crash Posted September 18, 2004 Share Posted September 18, 2004 Theory of everything/string theory cannot provide a testifiable prediction in order to see if it is accurate or not, well not so far, the closets we can get is to speculate about the new particle accelerators that are being made may help.............. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
revprez Posted September 22, 2004 Share Posted September 22, 2004 The smallest size of something is quarks' date=' according to my understanding. Will what composes those things? Is it just pure energy? Or do we not know.... Thanks[/quote'] Either quarks condense out of something more fundamental or they are fundamental particles. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thrand Posted September 22, 2004 Share Posted September 22, 2004 It is believed that neutrinos contain practically zero mass, the heaviest of the 3 probably being about 0.05 electron volts, or about one billionth the mass of a proton. This mass, while the smallest yet observed might account for much of the mass in the universe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Severian Posted September 23, 2004 Share Posted September 23, 2004 It is believed that neutrinos contain practically zero mass, the heaviest of the 3 probably being about 0.05 electron volts, or about one billionth the mass of a proton. This mass, while the smallest yet observed might account for much of the mass in the universe. What has that got to do with whether or not quarks are fundamental? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ZOG Posted September 24, 2004 Share Posted September 24, 2004 It is believed that an electron doesen't have a dimension. An electron acts as a particle only when it is observed. Therefore matter at its heart is an illusion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Severian Posted September 24, 2004 Share Posted September 24, 2004 I'm sorry, but none of these sentences make any sense. 1. What do you mean by 'an electron doesen't have a dimension'? Are you trying to say that it is a point particle? If so, I agree, but I fail to see the relevence. 2. An electron is a particle so it always acts like one. 3. I have no idea what your last sentence is trying to say! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ydoaPs Posted October 6, 2004 Share Posted October 6, 2004 Well' date=' a string theorist would say they are made of strings... For my purposes I think of them as being a representation of a symmetry group (SU(3)).[/quote'] grrrrrr....not MADE OF strings. they ARE strings(according to string theory) quarks are not composed of anything. if they were, they wouldn't be elmentary particles, now would they? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ydoaPs Posted October 6, 2004 Share Posted October 6, 2004 I'm sorry' date=' but none of these sentences make any sense. 1. What do you mean by 'an electron doesen't have a dimension'? Are you trying to say that it is a point particle? If so, I agree, but I fail to see the relevence. 2. An electron [b']is[/b] a particle so it always acts like one. 3. I have no idea what your last sentence is trying to say! 1.)yes, he is saying it is a point particle. no, it has no relavence. 2.)no, it also acts like a wave 3.)it says he is a psuedoscientist or he has no clue what he is talking about. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Severian Posted October 6, 2004 Share Posted October 6, 2004 1.)yes' date=' he is saying it is a point particle. no, it has no relavence.2.)no, it also acts like a wave 3.)it says he is a psuedoscientist or he has no clue what he is talking about.[/quote'] On point 2. It may act like a wave in certain circumstances, but that doesn't stop it being a particle. If you measure its position you will get a definite answer, limited only by the accuracy of your experiment. Incidentally, even the position eigenstate is a wave in momentum space: wave-particle duality is not saying that an electron (or whatever) is sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle; it is saying that it is both. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gilded Posted October 6, 2004 Share Posted October 6, 2004 "quarks are not composed of anything. if they were, they wouldn't be elmentary particles, now would they?" A good smack with a hammer or a KGB interrogation will make the quark eagerly split into even smaller pieces! My point is, they are CURRENTLY elementary particles. As atoms were some time ago. :> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ydoaPs Posted October 6, 2004 Share Posted October 6, 2004 they didn't have those wonderful atom smashers when atoms were thought to be elementary particles. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MadScientist Posted October 10, 2004 Share Posted October 10, 2004 grrrrrr....not MADE OF strings. they ARE strings(according to string theory) quarks are not composed of anything. if they were' date=' they wouldn't be elmentary particles, now would they?[/quote'] Sorry about this yourdad, I'm not trying to be clever here, I'm just trying to find out the facts the best I can but are you saying these guys are wrong?? http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/scale.html In that Sense Of Scale applet it shows the scale from an apple right down to a quark but then it goes down to show a string. Implying that a string is something far smaller than a quark and that quarks are made from lots of strings. Like I said, I'd just like to see evidence to the opposite so I know the facts. On a side note... If quarks are strings, not really important to this AFAIK anyway but the smallest particle everything can be made from. Where do they come from?? I was thinking about the life cycle of a solar system, the particles that make the subsequent solar system don't start with the formation of a star do they?? Can they be traced right back to the star factory (the gasseous nebulas IIRC) where these "fundamental particles" are just reassembled into something that will create a star and go on to create a solar system. Doesn't that imply that these fundamental particles have been used in a previous solar system whose sun died leaving just the fundamentals lying around to form part of a new star factory and solar system. That would mean the strings (or whatever) that make each of us up are as old as the universe and some of them could have been used to create previous life forms or even basic elements in a rock or anything else. I should warn you here that I'm interested in how quantum mechanics could be used to explain esoteric things such as telepathy, telekenisis, remote viewing, ghosts and even human thought. Which will probably be considered by most as crazy nonsense but they are just theories like string theory until it's proven or disproven. So to take things to the crazy level.. If you believe in the quantum consciousness, that the thoughts you think are just these "strings" working in unison to affect the thoughts and decisions you make. At some level these strings would have to be able to work in unison to store memory too. Would it be possible for a string, which can expand into other higher dimensions where it might expand in size?? If it was that large couldn't they store their previous states in another dimension as memories.. That would mean even something inanimate like a chair made from the same strings ourselves are made from have memories and the ability to become a part of a person to influence thoughts.. But a chair being a chair whose strings aren't connected in the correct way to actually think and thus relay their memories. And say one single string could store the memories of all strings or somehow in another lower dimension they were all interconnected. If you trace them down through a 2D universe to a 1D universe and to a 0D universe which would act as an anchor point for them where they all converged. Now what if they could work in unison as a collection of strings in our dimension and project a memory in a way we can't as human beings?? They might transmit a memory to a person as a ghost. And if you're still reading this, here's something else for you to think about. I think it's almost certainly stepping into the realms of nonsense though. Assuming the aliens we're supposedly seeing in the skies are physical and not ghosts why don't people report seeing ghosts of aliens here on Earth?? Two reasons: #1 The universe is supposedly only around 12.5 to 15 bllion years old, so there won't be many previous memories for a string to store yet. #2 In a star factory the funadmentals from a previous solar system will be diluted with fundamentals from other solar systems or other elements of a galaxy. Because maybe it takes several strings from a previous object to project the memories of one string in the new object, like they can only project their memories working in unison as we do, our strings simply project their memories of our lives to us inside our minds. The huge flaw in all this of course is, why don't they show ghosts of other inanimate objects instead of just people?? And why don't our strings project ghosts too?? Which is why it's probably nonsense and I apologise for that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPL.Luke Posted October 24, 2004 Share Posted October 24, 2004 out of curiosity how do they make antiproton's in particle accelerators? I know how they make positrons and electron's but how do they make antiprotons or for that matter how do they prevent subsequent annihalation of positron's? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Severian Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 they didn't have those wonderful atom smashers when atoms were thought to be elementary particles. We don't have colliders which can probe string theory yet either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Severian Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 out of curiosity how do they make antiproton's in particle accelerators? The Antiproton Source is made up of three parts. The first is the Target: Fermilab creates antiprotons by striking a nickel target with protons. Second is the Debuncher Ring: This triangular shaped ring captures the antiprotons coming off of the target. The third is the Accumulator: This is the storage ring for the antiprotons. http://www.fnal.gov Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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