9 ms·
Why do matter particles come in threes?
- hateful 7y agoCould it be that just like having extra neutrons in an atom make it more massive, but still have nearly the same reactive properties - that the particles themselves are made up of something else that can have extra "higgs" that make them more massive?
- JohnBerea 7y agoIn related news, the existence of biscuits and triscuits hints at a third food known as monosquits.
- philsnow 7y agoI read somewhere that the origin of the name 'triscuit' is because they were originally baked "with electricity" from turbines in/near Niagara Falls. They had a picture of some period promotional material with the "baked with electricity" line, but who knows, in this era of deepfakes it easily could have been just a photoshop job done for fun amidst pandemic boredom. Snopes [0], which is for the most part what passes for fact these days, says it's legit. [0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/triscuits-electric-biscuits/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/triscuits-electric-biscuit...
- cestith 7y agohttps://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968530250870786 https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968530250870786 is a Twitter timeline thread of an investigation into this. https://twitter.com/TheRealTriscuit/status/1243177402492162049?s=20 https://twitter.com/TheRealTriscuit/status/12431774024921620... is Nabisco's response through the brand account. https://twitter.com/TheRealTriscuit https://twitter.com/TheRealTriscuit currently says "elecTRIcity biSCUIT…but you can just call us Triscuit #ifykyk High voltage sign" in the bio field. Other theories have been that the original recipe has only three ingredients, but Nabisco quashed that, and that it's named for triticum since it's a wheat snack.
- kstrauser 7y agoAmazon is currently out of quadsquits.
- csours 7y agoPerhaps they would be known as unisquits?
- tobias2014 7y agoMonoscuits, right? Or is it uniscuits or unoscuits?
- toddh 7y agoThe rule of three is also a decorating rule. You should always clump picture, vases, etc. in clumps of three. The reason always given is balance. Three esthetically produces the best visual balance. Maybe the universe has an esthetic sense?
- waterheater 7y agoHacker News is not the correct venue to discuss mysticism, occultism, and esotericism more generally. What I'll say on the matter is that both religious and esoteric texts place high importance on groupings like this. Certain texts may provide explanation for the generations of particles. They are worth investigating with an independent mind, while assuming that what you're reading is incorrect.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoWhat is an "independent mind"?
- waterheater 7y agoSome people view those texts as infallible sources of information. Other people view those texts not as sources of information at all but as lunacy. The reality is somewhere in the middle, but it's also a spectrum. Science verifies information. The issue with these texts is that it's very, very hard to verify anything being said. It's much easier to provide counterexamples to disprove it. By using the phrase "independent mind," I mean: it's worthwhile investigating these texts, but go in with a truth-seeking mentality, not a disproving mentality.
- atombender 7y agoI question the universality of this rule. What makes two vases on a table less "balanced" than three? What about a single vase? Four? Five? Symmetry in physics isn't really about aesthetics.
- krapp 7y ago
- MR4D 7y agoIt's because of the 3 Fates. j/k More seriously, this is an interesting coincidence.
- stallmanite 7y agoPerhaps we are on track to implementing the three seashells.
- outworlder 7y agoAnd the 3 dimensions.
- MR4D 7y agoSomebody voted down a joke? Seriously? Wow. Some people must not be enjoying their quarantine as much as I am. LOL!!
- earthboundkid 7y agoAs though a) we actually know that particle flavors come in threes and b) any human being's opinion on this is worth more than that of the schizophrenic on the corner who at least believes he is talking to God.
- dang 7y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- earthboundkid 7y agoYes, I think I was in a particularly bad mood when I wrote this. But I also stand by the sentiment that a schizophrenic is in a better position than Weinberg because the schizophrenic hears God directly and so has reason for believing what he hears. Weinberg doesn't believe in God but somehow has convinced himself that his aesthetic preferences have something to do with the intrinsic nature of the universe. Weinberg has been out of the physics game in and in the world of letters for my entire lifetime. He won a Nobel Prize (which is generally a tombstone for careers) before I was born. I don't want to say that his insights are completely worthless, but they're already conventional wisdom (so they don't add much to what we already commonly think) and he's just gotten so used to talking about the nature of the universe that he isn't trouble by the fact that he has nothing more than a hunch to back him up. In this case, I have to be ad hominem because there's nothing but the man to discuss. He has a hunch. His hunch is worth printing because he's a Great Physicist (or whatever the original title was). To point out that the hunch is just a hunch, I have to point out that the Great Physicist is just a person and the hunch has no grounding whatsoever.
- dang 7y agoThis includes much more information and so is less shallow, and therefore much a much better post than upthread. There's an interesting phenomenon where people often reply to moderation comments with a post that says what they meant in the first place. The personal aspect is arguably still a problem. But it's also true that critiquing celebrities isn't the same thing as garden-variety personal attack, since they represent more than just themselves individually, and you make it clear that the intention isn't personal. There's at least one revision a comment like this could go through to get better: a little more information about what the specific ideas are. For example, which insights are already conventional wisdom? Readers who are not steeped in the field could learn something from that.
- bmn__ 7y agoAn entertaining introduction into the zoo of subatomic particles: http://enwp.org/Atom_%28Asimov_book%29 http://enwp.org/Atom_%28Asimov_book%29
- GuB-42 7y agoUnlike what the title lead me to believe, it is not the number 3 that is special. It could have been 2 or 42, the question would have remained the same. The real question is "why are there N copies of each fundamental matter particles?", where N is a seemingly arbitrary number that happens to be 3.
- enchiridion 7y agoThis comment is just saying that some numbers can be other numbers in physics experiments. There is something special about 3 because that's what is observed. This recent discussion comes to mind here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706459
- RangerScience 7y agoHmm. I dunno, I think there's something to three specifically. One is singular; AFAIK two (and any even number) has a symmetry; so three is the smallest number of things you can have in a set and have it be a set, instead of a unity or symmetry.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago> so three is the smallest number of things you can have in a set and have it be a set, instead of a unity or symmetry. Three is the smallest number of things you can have in a [non-empty] set and have it not be a set of one or a set of two? You don't say. :)
- RangerScience 7y agoOkay, I'll try again. AFAIK, the number 1 shows up in nature, it actually represents either an everything (this entire atom) or a 0-1 continuum. When the number 2 shows up in nature, it's always balanced opposing somethings. Newton's third law, matter / antimatter, negative/positive electric charge, n/s on a magnet. When the number 3 shows up in nature, you actually get a set of things. Proton, neutrons, electrons; and perhaps this theory now runs into a problem because I'm not thinking of another trinity. So, if you have two things, and they're not opposites, they imply more things in the category. If you have one thing in a category, and it's not an everything or a spectrum (of the everything), it implies more things in the category. If you have three things in a category, they only imply more things if two of them have a symmetrical relationship (resistors, inductors, capacitors). The category may still have more things. but it's not otherwise implied.
- jordanpg 7y agoIt's unfathomable to me that anything about the universe would be pinned at some integer value. My intuition is that particles come in infinite numbers of "generations" and we just so happen to be only able to measure three of them right now.
- lisper 7y agoEverything in the universe is pinned at integer values. That's the reason quantum mechanics is called what it is.
- dhimes 7y agoOur model for everything in the universe is pinned at integer values. I think that's gp's point.
- lisper 7y agoNo, the physical evidence shows that everything in the universe is pinned at integer values in point of actual physical fact. It's not just our models. It goes all the way back to blackbody radiation and the ultraviolet catastrophe of the late 19th century. The evidence for QM is overwhelming. It's not just an artifact of our modeling.
- bananabreakfast 7y agoThe ultraviolet catastrophe is for sure a good example of this phenomenon.
- dhimes 7y agoWhat's the spin of an electron?
- bananabreakfast 7y agoYeah, so that's a core part of the unintuitiveness of Quantum Mechanics. Nature itself, it turns out, is fundamentally quantized. And also random too. It objectively cannot be broken down into a continuum.
- amai 7y agothree-dimensional space => three particle families ;-)
- dchyrdvh 7y agoThere is common trick in designing reliable systems out of unreliable components: replicating the unreliable component 3 times. When one of the three behaves differently from the other two, it's declared faulty and replaced. This wouldn't work with 2 copies as it wouldn't be possible to say which copy is faulty. So roughly speaking, for an outsider, the HN website appears as a single entity, but under the hood it's 3 replicas. This is an analogy to a proton that consist of 3 quarks.
- drlobster 7y agoBut not a good analogy.