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posted by CoolHand on Monday October 26 2015, @03:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the these-glueballs-ain't-for-sniffin dept.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/missing-glueballs-are-sticky-problem-for-particle-physics/

The discovery of the Higgs boson was rightfully heralded as a triumph of particle physics, one that brought completion to the Standard Model, the collection of theories that describes particles and their interactions. Lost in the excitement, however, was the fact that we're still missing a piece from the Standard Model—another type of particle that doesn't resemble any other we've yet seen.

The particle is a glueball, but its goofy name doesn't express how interesting it is. Glueballs are unique in that they don't contain any matter at all: they have no quarks or electrons or neutrinos. Instead, they are made entirely of gluons, which are the particles that bind quarks together inside protons, neutrons, and related objects.

Particle physicists are sure they exist, but everything else about them is complicated, to say the least. Like so many other exotic particles (including the Higgs), glueballs are very unstable, decaying quickly into other, less massive particles. We don't have any ideas about their masses, however, which is obviously kind of important to know if you want to find them. We also don't know exactly how they decay, making it hard to know exactly how we'll identify them in experiments.

If I may be so bold, what do fellow SNs think of modern particle physics, and do any of you have any crazy alternative non-particle-centric physical theories (for example, a model of reality that works using 7-dimensional strings as opposed to 1-dimensional strings from string theory?)


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 26 2015, @04:41PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday October 26 2015, @04:41PM (#254748) Journal

    A century ago there was this idea that "calorie" was fluid heat, was a substance that contained all heat. By moving from one object to another, calorie would eventually equalize. The idea didn't last, as experiments designed to measure the mass of this substance found nothing.

    Now today we talk of particles, as if these subatomic things were similar to grains of sand, just much, much smaller. Maybe strings is a better description. Or waves, or something else. We've accepted the dual nature of these subatomic things as acting like both waves and particles, but we keep talking of them as particles. Why not call these balls "gluewaves"?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @05:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @05:32PM (#254777)

    Perhaps the universe, including past and future, consists of one or a few "strings" (worldlines of what we call particles) tied into an insanely complex knot. The present is then an infinitesimally thin slice of this knot.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Monday October 26 2015, @06:12PM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Monday October 26 2015, @06:12PM (#254802) Journal
    It's only a matter of semantics. Obviously professional physicists don't think of these quantum particles as being remotely similar to grains of sand or some such object that the word 'particle' would evoke in the mind of the layperson, because the equations governing the behaviour of these objects, if they are to match the reality, don't reflect it. Calling them "waves" is the same difference, because these quantum-mechanical entities don't behave exactly like what the layperson would think of as waves either. The confusion is only in the mind of the layperson, and perhaps it might have been better to coin a new term for these objects that reflects the wave-particle duality, but alas the terminology has been entrenched by long use. Blame Planck and Heisenberg et. al. for not coming up with a better term when they had the chance roughly a century ago.
    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Monday October 26 2015, @07:49PM

    by sjames (2882) on Monday October 26 2015, @07:49PM (#254847) Journal

    Ironically, if their balances had been incredibly sensitive, they would actually have measured a tiny increase in mass as an object got hotter. But not for the reason they expected. :-)

  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday October 26 2015, @09:13PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Monday October 26 2015, @09:13PM (#254879)

    Because, just like in the case of magnetism and electricity, "waves" usually end up being differential equations for particles interacting in complex ways we can't make sense of until some genius comes along and sees through it.

    --
    compiling...
  • (Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday October 26 2015, @09:22PM

    by inertnet (4071) on Monday October 26 2015, @09:22PM (#254884) Journal

    As a layman I found this (long) explanation very helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEKSpZPByD0 [youtube.com] Particles, Fields and The Future of Physics - A Lecture by Sean Carroll.