6 ms·

Nice! ELI5 what implications does that have?

by akmarinov 5y ago

Y_Y 5y ago
No. Five-year-olds can't do particle physics. It may as well imply nothing at all.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  Then just don't respond homie.
- burundi_coffee 5y ago
  Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1364/ https://xkcd.com/1364/ Some things are indeed too complicated to be explained in simple terms and analogies.
jerf 5y ago
The article really already has that in it, better than you're going to get from anyone else.
- echelon 5y ago
  That simply is not true. HN is filled with subject matter experts that can break down complex topics better than popsci journalists, and provide commentary on how this fits within the framework of current and future research.
  - krapp 5y ago
    HN is filled with people who believe themselves to be subject matter experts, and who refuse to engage with posted articles as they consider leaving the sanctum sanctorum of HN to expose themselves to the plebian knowledge and interests of others to be a waste of time. In other words, with people who wear their ignorance as a badge of elitism. Not unrelated, HN has a few actual subject matter experts who are often aghast at how wrong HN tends to be about any field or subject not directly related to programming, and how often their confidence is in inverse proportion to their knowledge. You can safely assume that while there may be actual, credible particle physicists on HN, their voices are likely to be drowned out by armchair expositors of bullshit ranting about dark matter being a hoax perpetrated by cultural Marxists or somesuch. Do the work yourself. Read the article yourself. Enrich your own mind and satisfy your own intellectual curiosity, don't expect HN to do it for you, or to be better than the mainstream in terms of general expertise, or you'll be misled and disappointed more often than not.
    - echelon 5y ago
      You're projecting here. I only stepped in to defend someone asking for an explanation from the HN community. I'm not putting aside skepticism and intellectual rigour when I read the comments here. I also think you're wrong about the members of this community. There are a tremendously wide assortment of backgrounds represented here. I come to Hacker News mostly for, not in spite of, the comments. I think telling people to not ask questions is dangerous. The person I originally responded to was not doing that exactly, but it felt borderline enough to remind them that the community here is filled with experts and teachers. It's also worth pointing out that we shouldn't silence curiosity. Attacking what you perceive as a lazy mind can only harm the desire to learn.
      - krapp 5y ago
        I'm not objecting to asking questions, I'm objecting to preferring the HN commentariat over at least engaging with the posted content. Asking questions after reading the article is fine - that's part of creating fruitful discussion. But HN does have a problem in that no one believes reading the article is worth the effort, and everyone prefers to just read the comments. The end result of that is a negative feedback loop of insularity and incuriosity, more people only engaging with the subject (or what they believe the subject is based on their reading of the title) on a superficial level rather than real intellectual discussion.
    - jodrellblank 5y ago
      "In Comments: Be kind. [...] Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" HN and Reddit are filled with people sneering at how dumb everyone else on HN and Reddit are. It makes for tedious reading, and a cringeworthy "I'm superior because I see how dumb everyone else is" status grab. If something is wrong, correct it or downvote it or ignore it; don't conjour up some imaginary mind-reading fantasy about how great the author must think they are and then sneerily tear down the strawman.
      - krapp 5y ago
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  That article didn't clear up a whole lot for me personally. Maybe some others are like me. I also read the actual CERN article, which this article copied almost entirely. But after reading twice, what seems to be going on is that a particle has a slightly different mass from its antiparticle. (That is the most unbelievable sentence I have written so far this year! It's just... wow. I didn't think that was even theoretically possible.)
  - dukwon 5y ago
    > a particle has a slightly different mass from its antiparticle This is not the case, and that would violate CPT symmetry. There are two states with different masses (the mass eigenstates) but they are not antiparticles of eachother. They are linear superpositions of the flavour eigenstates: |D1> = p|D⁰> + q|D̅⁰> |D2> = p|D⁰> − q|D̅⁰> where p and q are complex coefficients. The difference in mass between D1 and D2 is directly proportional to the oscillation frequency. If p/q ≠ 1, you have CP violation in this mixing. The amount of CP violation in this measurement was found to be consistent with zero.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      Thanks. That's quite informative. But... having flavor eigenstates not being mass eigenstates is almost as mind-blowing to me. How is that possible? And, by "p/q ≠ 1", I presume you meant their norms?
      - dukwon 5y ago
        If you think of the Hamiltonian as a 2x2 matrix operating on the flavour eigenstate, there are off-diagonal terms arising from the amplitude of spontaneously changing from particle to antiparticle. The leading-order diagrams look like this: https://ppd.fnal.gov/experiments/e871/public/images/Kaon_mixing.gif https://ppd.fnal.gov/experiments/e871/public/images/Kaon_mix... You get CP violation even if |p/q|=1 but Arg(p/q)≠0.
treeman79 5y ago
Spin two toy tops in opposite directions. When they bump into each other they both stop. All fun stops. This experiment says when they bump into each other ones spinning a certain direction always have a little spin to it left over. A tiny bit of fun still exists. That little bit of fun is all physical matter in the universe.
adrian_b 5y ago
The title is confusing, because the whole particle does not switch between matter and antimatter, only its internal components switch. The hadrons, i.e. the particles made of components bound together by the so-called strong nuclear forces are partitioned into 3 groups: particles made of 3 quarks, particles made of 3 anti-quarks and particles made of 1 quark together with 1 anti-quark. Particles made from more quarks than in these 3 groups are possible in principle, but they would disintegrate extremely quickly, i.e. in times many orders of magnitude less than 1 nanosecond. The reasons why only those 3 kinds of hadrons are normally encountered is that exactly like the electric forces attempt to neutralize the electric charge and prevent the negative charges to separate from the positive charges, the strong nuclear forces also try to neutralize a similar quantity, with the difference that this quantity is 2-dimensional, unlike the electric charge, which is 1-dimensional. The condition of neutralizing that 2-dimensional quantity can be satisfied by the 3 kinds of quark combinations listed above. The lightest hadron made of 3 quarks is the proton and the lightest hadron made of 3 anti-quarks is the anti-proton. The proton and the similar hadrons can be considered as matter and the anti-proton and similar hadrons can be considered as anti-matter. None of these hadrons made of either 3 quarks or 3 anti-quarks can switch between matter and anti-matter and this remains true for their compounds, like nuclei or anti-nuclei. On the other hand, the 3rd kind of hadrons, which are usually named mesons, and which are made from 1 quark and 1 anti-quark, are in fact neither matter nor anti-matter. The article linked here refers to a particle of this kind, where the total number of quarks is +1 -1 = 0. So in mesons it is possible that the pair of 1 quark + 1 anti-quark will transform in another pair of 1 quark + 1 anti-quark, but where the quarks are different types of quarks than before the transformation. This transformation is possible because the total number of quarks is 0, both before and after the transformation, so any such transformation is possible as long as the new types of quarks are such so that the electrical charge remains the same. The compositions of mesons can oscillate between different pairs quark + anti-quark, but the heavier mesons decay extremely fast so it is exceedingly difficult to observe such oscillations. The linked article reports the experimental observation of such an oscillation, which was known as possible since decades ago, but it was not seen in experiments due to technical difficulties. So in these transformations some quarks and anti-quarks appear and disappear, but the total quantity of matter and anti-matter is the same before and after, which is why the title is misleading.
steve76 5y ago
Water drips out of a faucet, and makes a sink wet. If you are nature, and have no internal mind, and can interact on extreme limits such as exists/non-exist, you can drip dryness from the sink, up through the faucet, through the pipes and into the water tower. Nature always takes the easiest route. If that route includes changing "drip wet down" or "drip dry up" it will take it. Electricity works with positive and negative. At very high temperatures in very precise regions, a third pole leads to better calculations. Better calculations led to better applications, such as plasma, measuring and manipulating the Sun, quantum biology where the molecules of genes are abandoned for a much higher resolution in the subatomic particle interactions, or giving your nervous system a therapeutic sunburn with a positron emitter.

Nice! ELI5 what implications does that have?

Y_Y 5y ago

No. Five-year-olds can't do particle physics. It may as well imply nothing at all.

BobbyJo 5y ago
Then just don't respond homie.
burundi_coffee 5y ago
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1364/ https://xkcd.com/1364/ Some things are indeed too complicated to be explained in simple terms and analogies.

jerf 5y ago

The article really already has that in it, better than you're going to get from anyone else.

echelon 5y ago
That simply is not true. HN is filled with subject matter experts that can break down complex topics better than popsci journalists, and provide commentary on how this fits within the framework of current and future research.
- krapp 5y ago
  HN is filled with people who believe themselves to be subject matter experts, and who refuse to engage with posted articles as they consider leaving the sanctum sanctorum of HN to expose themselves to the plebian knowledge and interests of others to be a waste of time. In other words, with people who wear their ignorance as a badge of elitism. Not unrelated, HN has a few actual subject matter experts who are often aghast at how wrong HN tends to be about any field or subject not directly related to programming, and how often their confidence is in inverse proportion to their knowledge. You can safely assume that while there may be actual, credible particle physicists on HN, their voices are likely to be drowned out by armchair expositors of bullshit ranting about dark matter being a hoax perpetrated by cultural Marxists or somesuch. Do the work yourself. Read the article yourself. Enrich your own mind and satisfy your own intellectual curiosity, don't expect HN to do it for you, or to be better than the mainstream in terms of general expertise, or you'll be misled and disappointed more often than not.
  - echelon 5y ago
    You're projecting here. I only stepped in to defend someone asking for an explanation from the HN community. I'm not putting aside skepticism and intellectual rigour when I read the comments here. I also think you're wrong about the members of this community. There are a tremendously wide assortment of backgrounds represented here. I come to Hacker News mostly for, not in spite of, the comments. I think telling people to not ask questions is dangerous. The person I originally responded to was not doing that exactly, but it felt borderline enough to remind them that the community here is filled with experts and teachers. It's also worth pointing out that we shouldn't silence curiosity. Attacking what you perceive as a lazy mind can only harm the desire to learn.
    - krapp 5y ago
      I'm not objecting to asking questions, I'm objecting to preferring the HN commentariat over at least engaging with the posted content. Asking questions after reading the article is fine - that's part of creating fruitful discussion. But HN does have a problem in that no one believes reading the article is worth the effort, and everyone prefers to just read the comments. The end result of that is a negative feedback loop of insularity and incuriosity, more people only engaging with the subject (or what they believe the subject is based on their reading of the title) on a superficial level rather than real intellectual discussion.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    "In Comments: Be kind. [...] Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" HN and Reddit are filled with people sneering at how dumb everyone else on HN and Reddit are. It makes for tedious reading, and a cringeworthy "I'm superior because I see how dumb everyone else is" status grab. If something is wrong, correct it or downvote it or ignore it; don't conjour up some imaginary mind-reading fantasy about how great the author must think they are and then sneerily tear down the strawman.
    - krapp 5y ago
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
That article didn't clear up a whole lot for me personally. Maybe some others are like me. I also read the actual CERN article, which this article copied almost entirely. But after reading twice, what seems to be going on is that a particle has a slightly different mass from its antiparticle. (That is the most unbelievable sentence I have written so far this year! It's just... wow. I didn't think that was even theoretically possible.)
- dukwon 5y ago
  > a particle has a slightly different mass from its antiparticle This is not the case, and that would violate CPT symmetry. There are two states with different masses (the mass eigenstates) but they are not antiparticles of eachother. They are linear superpositions of the flavour eigenstates: |D1> = p|D⁰> + q|D̅⁰> |D2> = p|D⁰> − q|D̅⁰> where p and q are complex coefficients. The difference in mass between D1 and D2 is directly proportional to the oscillation frequency. If p/q ≠ 1, you have CP violation in this mixing. The amount of CP violation in this measurement was found to be consistent with zero.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Thanks. That's quite informative. But... having flavor eigenstates not being mass eigenstates is almost as mind-blowing to me. How is that possible? And, by "p/q ≠ 1", I presume you meant their norms?
    - dukwon 5y ago
      If you think of the Hamiltonian as a 2x2 matrix operating on the flavour eigenstate, there are off-diagonal terms arising from the amplitude of spontaneously changing from particle to antiparticle. The leading-order diagrams look like this: https://ppd.fnal.gov/experiments/e871/public/images/Kaon_mixing.gif https://ppd.fnal.gov/experiments/e871/public/images/Kaon_mix... You get CP violation even if |p/q|=1 but Arg(p/q)≠0.

treeman79 5y ago

Spin two toy tops in opposite directions. When they bump into each other they both stop. All fun stops. This experiment says when they bump into each other ones spinning a certain direction always have a little spin to it left over. A tiny bit of fun still exists. That little bit of fun is all physical matter in the universe.

adrian_b 5y ago

The title is confusing, because the whole particle does not switch between matter and antimatter, only its internal components switch. The hadrons, i.e. the particles made of components bound together by the so-called strong nuclear forces are partitioned into 3 groups: particles made of 3 quarks, particles made of 3 anti-quarks and particles made of 1 quark together with 1 anti-quark. Particles made from more quarks than in these 3 groups are possible in principle, but they would disintegrate extremely quickly, i.e. in times many orders of magnitude less than 1 nanosecond. The reasons why only those 3 kinds of hadrons are normally encountered is that exactly like the electric forces attempt to neutralize the electric charge and prevent the negative charges to separate from the positive charges, the strong nuclear forces also try to neutralize a similar quantity, with the difference that this quantity is 2-dimensional, unlike the electric charge, which is 1-dimensional. The condition of neutralizing that 2-dimensional quantity can be satisfied by the 3 kinds of quark combinations listed above. The lightest hadron made of 3 quarks is the proton and the lightest hadron made of 3 anti-quarks is the anti-proton. The proton and the similar hadrons can be considered as matter and the anti-proton and similar hadrons can be considered as anti-matter. None of these hadrons made of either 3 quarks or 3 anti-quarks can switch between matter and anti-matter and this remains true for their compounds, like nuclei or anti-nuclei. On the other hand, the 3rd kind of hadrons, which are usually named mesons, and which are made from 1 quark and 1 anti-quark, are in fact neither matter nor anti-matter. The article linked here refers to a particle of this kind, where the total number of quarks is +1 -1 = 0. So in mesons it is possible that the pair of 1 quark + 1 anti-quark will transform in another pair of 1 quark + 1 anti-quark, but where the quarks are different types of quarks than before the transformation. This transformation is possible because the total number of quarks is 0, both before and after the transformation, so any such transformation is possible as long as the new types of quarks are such so that the electrical charge remains the same. The compositions of mesons can oscillate between different pairs quark + anti-quark, but the heavier mesons decay extremely fast so it is exceedingly difficult to observe such oscillations. The linked article reports the experimental observation of such an oscillation, which was known as possible since decades ago, but it was not seen in experiments due to technical difficulties. So in these transformations some quarks and anti-quarks appear and disappear, but the total quantity of matter and anti-matter is the same before and after, which is why the title is misleading.

steve76 5y ago

Water drips out of a faucet, and makes a sink wet. If you are nature, and have no internal mind, and can interact on extreme limits such as exists/non-exist, you can drip dryness from the sink, up through the faucet, through the pipes and into the water tower. Nature always takes the easiest route. If that route includes changing "drip wet down" or "drip dry up" it will take it. Electricity works with positive and negative. At very high temperatures in very precise regions, a third pole leads to better calculations. Better calculations led to better applications, such as plasma, measuring and manipulating the Sun, quantum biology where the molecules of genes are abandoned for a much higher resolution in the subatomic particle interactions, or giving your nervous system a therapeutic sunburn with a positron emitter.