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from the or-they-are-being-eaten-by-a-grue dept.
At the April 13th and 14th meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver, Co. Physicists debated new ways to determine how long neutrons actually live. While neutrons are typically bound up with protons in the nucleus of atoms, and are perfectly stable there, they don't last long on their own.
Depending on the approach taken to measure it, the average lifetime of a neutron returns different values.
Using the bottle method (put a bunch of Neutrons in a 'bottle' and count how many are left after a period of time), the average lifetime is 14 minutes, 39 seconds.
Using the 'beam' method (count the protons given off in a detector as neutrons decay), the average lifetime is 14 minutes, 47 seconds.
These two methods are so precise that they do not overlap even taking the worst possible margins of error of both. It is a puzzler.
"The discrepancy has bedevilled researchers for nearly 15 years."
One possibility is that one of the two methods is doing something wrong. In that case, researchers might want to combine beam and bottle in a single device. At the meeting, physicist Zhaowen Tang of the Los Alamos lab described how researchers could put a particle detector inside a bottle neutron trap and count neutrons using both methods. His team has acquired funding to start building the device.
Another possibility is that the beam and bottle approaches have been measuring the neutron lifetime correctly, but that some unseen factor accounts for the discrepancy between the two. A leading idea is that neutrons might occasionally decay into not just protons but also dark matter, the mysterious unseen material that makes up much of the Universe's matter.
Interesting that plain old neutrons might be the key to opening the door on dark matter.
Pinpointing the lifetime of a neutron is important for understanding how much hydrogen, helium and other light elements formed in the first few minutes after the Universe was born in the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. Scientists also think they can hunt for new types of physics if they can better pin down the neutron's lifetime, because that would help to constrain measurements of other subatomic particles.
A few seconds goes a long way in physics.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday April 17 2019, @10:12AM (5 children)
"I have not yet seen a sufficient reason for the invention of dark matter. "
To save General Relativity: without dark matter, GR fails, and we can't have THAT!, Harumph harumph!
Yeah, dark matter is pretty scammy.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @09:36PM (4 children)
Scientists are looking into other ideas as well, including adjusting GR, the problem is that no solution works in all cases.
An idea that does work in all cases is imagining unseeable matter existing in different proportions in different locations.
Most will agree it is a poor answer, but better than all the other answers they have tried.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday April 17 2019, @10:03PM (3 children)
"but better than all the other answers they have tried."
Beg to differ: THIS is better...
http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 18 2019, @05:00PM (2 children)
I'm sure EVERYONE doing research in GR is trying to suppress this guy and prevent him revealing the DIRTY truth and take away their GRANT MONEY ($65k/year salary). Physicists just love hiding the truth, including (fake) climate science which they are exploiting for all that lovely free grant money.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday April 18 2019, @11:16PM
Did you READ the web-site (you CAN read, can't you?)?
He's been given a grant from DARPA to further his research ($1.3 million)
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x3ed9/darpa-is-researching-quantized-inertia-a-theory-of-physics-many-think-is-pseudoscience [vice.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantized_inertia [wikipedia.org]
So SOMEONE is taking him QUITE seriously.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday April 18 2019, @11:35PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantized_inertia [wikipedia.org]
As of 2018, two kinds of observations have been shown to be incompatible with dark matter but can be explained by quantized inertia:
Globular clusters: in 2006, ESO researchers confirmed Mordehai Milgrom's main point, i.e. that the dynamics of stars becomes non-Newtonian when their gravitational acceleration drops below a critical threshold of about {\textstyle 2\times 10^{-10}{\text{m}}/{\text{s}}^{2}} {\textstyle 2\times 10^{-10}{\text{m}}/{\text{s}}^{2}}, however they also showed that such peculiar behavior does not only occur at the periphery of large galaxies but also in much smaller structures such as globular clusters, a phenomenon impossible to explain by dark matter (which has a large and smooth distribution over the whole galaxy).[20]
Wide binaries: in 2012 and 2014, UNAM researchers published results of the study of a particular type of wide binary star system. When such a pair of stars is separated by more than 7000 AU, so that their gravitational acceleration drops below the threshold of {\textstyle 2\times 10^{-10}{\text{m}}/{\text{s}}^{2}} {\textstyle 2\times 10^{-10}{\text{m}}/{\text{s}}^{2}}, their behavior also becomes non-Newtonian, i.e. their observed orbital speed becomes so large that the centripetal acceleration should produce centrifugal forces overcoming their gravitational attraction, so that they should separate, but they do not do so. The behavior of such a small system remains unexplainable by dark matter.[21][22]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---