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This really grinds my gears, we purposefully moved away from "beauty quark" as it was a bit too whimsical (at the expense of descriptiveness), now science commu
by reedf1 6y ago
This really grinds my gears, we purposefully moved away from "beauty quark" as it was a bit too whimsical (at the expense of descriptiveness), now science communicators keep using it as it seems to capture the imagination of non-sci readers. So please, as an informed individual, replace "beauty quark" with "bottom quark" every time you see it in this piece.
- lovemenot 6y agoI'd heard of bottom quark before. Never beauty. Does top quark have its antecedent too?
- reedf1 6y agoYes, "Truth quark". Because they don't exist naturally it lead my physics prof to say "There is no truth in the universe". Also, Some physicists call the fourth, fifth, and sixth derivative of position, "snap, crackle, and pop" respectively. Physicists are a fun lot aren't they?
- lovemenot 6y agoT and B retained. They clearly like symmetry, even through terminological adjustments. Not defending BBC's using non-prescribed terms, but quarks were always named whimsically. The word quark itself having been taken from Ulysses. It's hard to argue with snap following jerk, then acceleration then velocity. The next two follow snap, if not physically then at least historically.
- jcims 6y agoAlso jounce, flounce and pounce lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_derivatives_of_position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv... I thought were all useless terms but apparently snap is quite commonly used in quadrotor motion control.
- rocqua 6y agoSnap is that feeling you get when a train is braking and comes to a halt. The breaking force suddenly falls of, which is noticeable. In general, snap shows how smoothly the acceleration occurs. This allows anything that flexes (like flesh) to slowly take-up the slack. I've also heard this is important for self-driving convoys. You want the cars in the convoy to all accelerate and brake smoothly rather than jostle all the things inside them.
- b3orn 6y ago> In general, snap shows how smoothly the acceleration occurs. That's third derivative of position and called jerk.
- ragebol 6y agoNot just quadrotor motion control, it applies to precision machinery as well. Eg. it's used in those big ASML wafer stepper machines that help power Moores Law for example, but also 3D printers etc. Low values for these derivatives help reduce vibrations in the machines IIRC.
- DrBazza 6y ago> Physicists are a fun lot aren't they? Atomic cross section is measured in barns. As in "you couldn't hit a barn door".
- quchen 6y agoIn particle physics a barn is a huge area though, so the joke kind of makes sense there.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- isaacg 6y agoThe official name of the LHCb experiment is the "Large Hadron Collider beauty" experiment, as named by the scientists themselves. So "beauty quark" is more correct in this context. https://home.cern/science/experiments/lhcb https://home.cern/science/experiments/lhcb Moreover, the paper that describes the result that this article is discussing has "beauty quark" in the name: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.11769 https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.11769
- pmontra 6y agoAnd "b is for beauty" https://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/en/Physics/Beauty-en.html https://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/en/Physics/Beauty-en.html
- reedf1 6y agoAnd I wish they wouldn't have, for the sake of scientific clarity.
- irjustin 6y agoYea scientists are up there in terms of the people with the worst ability to name things. Right there with developers but our terrible naming conventions don't really make it to publications.
- andrewinardeer 6y agoSpaghettification
- twic 6y agoDrosophila geneticists have entered the chat
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y agoExplain?
- d_theorist 6y agoWhy though? What's wrong with being whimsical and capturing people's imagination?
- reedf1 6y agoWell because you can encode intuition in names. e.g. Quarks come in pairs, and each pair has one quark with +2/3e charge and one with -1/3e. The names can give you intuition for their charge, i.e. Up quark is +2/3e Down quark is -1/3e. And if you give names that give you intuition for the charge it is considerably easier to remember (as a former undergrad physicist trust me you need assistance here). The name name "top" allows you to immediately think "up" and +2/3e and "bottom" allows you to immediately think "down" and -1/3e.
- stan_rogers 6y agoAnd the pair, in this case, is truth and beauty. Are you saying that strange and charm give you an intuitive feel for the charge number?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- goldenkey 6y agoWhat you are describing is association, not intuition. It is not the responsibility of scientific laborers to name and structure things in order to create convenient associations for cramming physics undergrads. Intuition involves a deep understanding of the objects and processes, a lot more harrowing than memorizing charges..
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- shawnz 6y agoWhat is intuitive about the up quark and down quark charges? The fact that "up" is associated with positivity is totally arbitrary, and even the fact that positive charges are called positive is totally arbitrary.
- Kaibeezy 6y agoHow do you/scientists feel about strange and charm? I’ve seen “sideways” sub for strange, which actually seems to fit the mnemonic better anyway. Why not “curly” or something instead of charm?
- chriswarbo 6y ago'Strange' predates the quark/parton model, and was a placeholder name for a particular unexplained phenomenon; similar to how the prefix 'dark' gets used. In particular, collider experiments were giving rise to a 'particle zoo' of pions, kaons, lambdas, etc. all of which were assumed to be fundamental. Some of these lasted much longer than expected, and were called "strange". It turned out that these could be modelled by giving fundamental particles a new property, which got the name "strangeness". Similar to how particles can have "charge", which is zero for neutral particles; non-strange particles have zero strangeness. Their long lifetime was explained due to the strong force conserving strangeness: collisions between non-strange particles can make pairs of particles with positive/negative strangeness (as long as it sums to zero); but once those individual particles have separated they can no longer decay via the strong force; they have to wait for the weak force, which gives them a longer half-life. It was only later, once the quark model became more accepted, that these particles were no longer considered fundamental, and "strangeness" could be explained as "containing strange quarks". On the other hand charm, beauty/bottom and truth/top seem to all be built on the quark model from the start; which makes the whimsy in their names more deliberate. --- FYI the BBC's Horizon did an episode in the 60s called "Strangeness Minus Three" ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01z4p1j https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01z4p1j ) which is interesting to watch in hindsight, now that we have quarks and the standard model; and makes a nice comparison to the more recent search for the Higgs boson. --- Tangentially this idea, of a new property whose conservation prevents massive particles from decaying, also arises in supersymmetric models of dark matter. There, supersymmetric particles have a different "R parity" to normal particles, which prevents them decaying even if they're very massive; such particles are a candidate for dark matter.
- ars 6y agoIsospin is another property that has been explained better in a new way. They still teach it for some reason though.
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- amadsen 6y agoI'm a physicist who spent seven years working at the LHC and I've never heard of a "purposeful" move away from the term beauty quark. It just fell out of favor but some, including myself, still like to use that name on occasion, personally I like it much better. The particle does not have a name in the official (PDG) listing, only a symbol "b". The "bottom" quantum number is universally called as such so one talks of "bottom hadrons" and so on. On the other hand the general area of research is called "b-physics" or "beauty physics", LHCb is the LHC-beauty experiment and so on. It makes perfect sense that this article uses "beauty" throughout for consistency. At the end of the day its just a name and this particle happens to have more than one (as does the J/psi and others) and neither is more whimsical than the other. Physicists tend to be quite whimsical anyway, particle physicists perhaps especially so.
- goldenkey 6y agoIn any case, which authority told /u/reedf1 that studying the universe should be barred from being whimsical? Alan Watts would be laughing. So would the Joker. The universe is not meant to be taken so seriously. It is whimsical. And that is part of its beauty ;-)
- reedf1 6y agoI have absolutely no problem with it being whimsical. Actually I would like it to be as whimsical as possible, while still being easy and consistent to learn that is.
- reedf1 6y agoI was given the impression by my professors that it was a purposeful move, maybe it was just in teaching and not research. I'll defer to you, the actual particle physicist.
- goldenkey 6y agoHow can something you wear so light on your sleeve cause you such angst that it "grinds your gears." Though you may have resigned in this tumult, I believe you still need to resolve something far deeper in your perspective on knowledge with regard to yourself and others.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]