New Physics!

[Gargamel]

Maybe.... probably

I’m looking for to seeing this play out   

(Pasting a link directly won’t work for some reason, sorry) 

[kerbiloid]

The picture was so clear, lol!

Time to reinvent the next iteration of "primary elements" and "green dragons eating red wyverns" system, to make the universe clear again, lol.

[Kerbart]

It's hard for laymen like me to imagine that an anomaly of 2.5 parts per billion in the magnetic strength of the muon means "brand new physics."

As in, "Newton was wrong all that time?"

[Gargamel]

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The picture was so clear, lol!

Maybe this pic will help describe the story a little better for you.

https://apnews.com/article/results-2-experiments-defy-physics-rulebook-ac6949b41669b02cecf1143c8d09edb2

3 hours ago, Kerbart said:

As in, "Newton was wrong all that time?"

Possibly:

Quote

 

If the results do hold, they would upend “every other calculation made” in the world of particle physics, Kaplan said.

“This is not a fudge factor. This is something wrong,” Kaplan said. That something could be explained by a new particle or force.

 

 

[cubinator]

Newton's laws were never wrong, just inaccurate in some physical situations. It seems we may have stumbled upon yet another inaccuracy in our equations so far.

[RealKerbal3x]

7 minutes ago, cubinator said:

Newton's laws were never wrong, just inaccurate in some physical situations. It seems we may have stumbled upon yet another inaccuracy in our equations so far.

Yeah, they were only an approximation of the quantum-mechanical stuff that was really going on. Maybe here we've discovered that at least a part of our understanding of quantum mechanics are actually another approximation of something more complex.

[kerbiloid]

Every further iteration is a past approximation.

_{(Look, a poetry)}

Such funny thing as the "infinite expansion of the Universe" is a perpetuum mobile which obviously demonstrates that any modern theory is just a little wider spot of light, but not the picture in whole..

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Yeah - there are a couple of interesting things going on in the particle acceleration world I've been reading about.  Good stuff! 

[cubinator]

Side note: When we finally build a particle accelerator to create WIMPs, it should be called CHICKEN

[MKI]

When it comes to new quantum physics findings I have a similar feeling of "cool, but I don't really understand what they are talking about".

I wonder if that is the same sort of feeling a person would have to older scientific breakthrough progress like "e=mc^2", or even like the invention of calculus.  

 

 

[Kerbart]

5 hours ago, Gargamel said:

Possibly:

I suspect that “upending every other calculation made” is subject to the same hyperbole as when a graphic designer tells me “it’s hard to imagine two typefaces more different from each other than Helvetica and Arial”

[Kerbart]

8 minutes ago, MKI said:

When it comes to new quantum physics findings I have a similar feeling of "cool, but I don't really understand what they are talking about".

I wonder if that is the same sort of feeling a person would have to older scientific breakthrough progress like "e=mc^2", or even like the invention of calculus.  

Not to mention the invention of superscript, making it possible to typeset E=mc² without java-esque contortions. But I digress.

Over time the number of people understanding the new theory grow, as well as their ability to explain it, leading to more people understanding it and able to explain it, etc. The math (and tools available for it) also become more available.

When I was in high school my physics teacher was not really able to explain the uncertainty principle (to a point where it’s clearly different from “we can’t measure good enough”) or how random events in quantum physics are really chance and not due to some underlying principle we are not aware of.

Nowadays you can find videos on youtube that explain such things in a satisfactory way.

Yes, I do think that Newton’s Principia was as incomprehensible and esoteric for the masses back then (mind you it required a whole new kind of math that was invented along the way for it) as string theory and the standard model is for us today, while it is something explained to high schoolers fifty years from now as “basic knowledge of physics.”

 

[NFUN]

incredibly bold assumption to say that string theory will be any kind of physics in fifty years tbqh

[SOXBLOX]

*intern* "Still a 3 in 100,000 chance its a fluke..."

*some physicist* "Never tell me the odds!"

Looks cool. Can't wait to see what the next batches of data reveal.

[sevenperforce]

Here's what's happening. In my own words.

And, all things being considered........I'm fairly qualified.

On a related note, what do you all think of this adaptation of the Standard Model Diagram?

And here's a simpler, less-information-dense version:

Honestly I think this is MUCH more descriptive than what is currently used on Wikipedia. The particles are all shown to scale (constant density representation, etc.). Spin and charge are shown visually. Lifetimes are to scale. The four particles we most commonly interact with are helpfully highlighted. The parenthetical exponent signifies antimatter variations in a pretty intuitive way.

Thoughts? Is this fairly descriptive? How can I adjust?

[SOXBLOX]

Heyyy, that's cool! I love it! I don't recall seeing one showing the interactions. My only feedback would be on the colors; maybe a lighter background and more visible lines?

[Kerbart]

15 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:Thoughts? Is this fairly descriptive? How can I adjust?

I’m spectacularly unqualified and not a physicist, so I’ll take “this is just how we do it” for an answer, but why is the timescale expressed in 10^-n with n ranging from -30 to 0? Wouldn’t it be simpler and less confusing to display it as 10ⁿ with n ranging from 0 to 30, and getting rid of  the double negation?

How do you determine that a top quark lives for 10²⁵ seconds? That’s like 317 million billion years, if I got the math right?

[sevenperforce]

5 minutes ago, SOXBLOX said:

Heyyy, that's cool! I love it! I don't recall seeing one showing the interactions. My only feedback would be on the colors; maybe a lighter background and more visible lines?

Which lines are difficult to see? I'm not asking to be snarky; I'm asking because I don't know. I've been making it myself so it's hard to figure out what the "right" version would look like.

2 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

I’m spectacularly unqualified and not a physicist, so I’ll take “this is just how we do it” for an answer, but why is the timescale expressed in 10^-n with n ranging from -30 to 0? Wouldn’t it be simpler and less confusing to display it as 10ⁿ with n ranging from 0 to 30, and getting rid of  the double negation?

How do you determine that a top quark lives for 10²⁵ seconds? That’s like 317 million billion years, if I got the math right?

Whoops, no, you caught an error. It should be either 10ⁿ with a negative scale, or 10^-n with a positive scale. My double negative is entirely wrong. A top quark lives for 10^-25 seconds, not 10²⁵ seconds. It is the shortest-lived of all fundamental particles and is the only color-interacting fermion which can be directly observed, since it decays faster than the timescale of strong nuclear interactions that would otherwise fold it into a hadron.

Thanks for catching the mistake.

To that point, what's more intuitive? 10ⁿ sec with a negative scale or 10^-n sec with a positive scale? I need feedback from people who aren't steeped in physics.

Also, is it clear from the diagram that the masses of all the particles are to scale (with a volumetric constant-density representation)? Should I add a legend element to explain that?

Here's the video I tried to link in the last post which somehow didn't make it.

 

[Kerbart]

For me 10ⁿ with a negative scale makes more sense. “-25” reads intuitively as less than “-20” without mental acrobatics required to translate it to a negative exponent.

[sevenperforce]

Edited:

Any thoughts on the color scheme?

I made the weak nuclear interaction blue because it is technically part of the electroweak interaction which is a component of the electromagnetic force, and spin is a magnetic moment. But if this is confusing or distracting I can make it green (which is typically the preferred color scheme for depicting electroweak interactions) and tint the spin signifier as well.

Decay paths and flavor oscillations are shown in a dark red, but would it make sense for them to match the color of the weak interaction since particle decay is mediated by the weak force?

Another way to depict weak, QED, and color force interactions more cleanly would be to wrap each fermion group in an interaction overlay. E.g., a band of grey for the Higgs field, a rainbow band for the strong force, and a blue (or whatever other color) band for the weak interaction. Quarks would have all three, charged leptons would only have QED and weak, and neutrinos would just have the weak interaction. Would that be more illustrative?

And is it clear from the diagram that the neutral leptons (the electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino) have ¹/₂ spin? I painted them that way but I don't know if it's readily visible.

[Kerbart]

Is it clear that the depictions are to scale? I’d say no, but at the same time it’s a very intuitive depiction of size, and the size that matters is mass, not radius, so in that sense I think it’s achieving it’s goal.

I like the cleaner version more, especially if it’s aimed at non-physicists like me. I know that an electronvolt is a measure for energy in particle fysics, and dividing it by c² turns it into a mass (I think. Wait, isn’t energy already equivalent to mass?) but I have no perception of what those numbers are. Is a million of them a banana? A billion of them? Does it matter? If the diagram is scaled than the relative masses are already depicted, so no need for showing  numbers there.

I would cap the edges in the graph with arrowheads. Nothing says “interaction” like that. And do add a legend for what each interaction in the clean graph is because that is not obvious otherwise.

[NFUN]

8 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

To that point, what's more intuitive? 10ⁿ sec with a negative scale or 10^-n sec with a positive scale? I need feedback from people who aren't steeped in physics

 

I'm steeped in physics, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that you want a negative scale if those are the options, so that things that are more less than zero are smaller. Far, far more intuitive than having big bars mean numbers closer to zero.

Or, if you care more about visual impact than easy quantitative readability, you could use a negative scale, normalized so that the scale is 10^n+t+1, where t is the exponent of the particle with the shortest lifetime. That way the chart starts at 0 and the bars go to the right, with the most shortly-lived particle having the smallest bar, and the most stable having the largest. Annoying to actually get concrete information from though.

Or cut the knot and just put 10^ on each x-axis value so you don't need to worry about weird backwards negative considerations.

Just now, Kerbart said:

(I think. Wait, isn’t energy already equivalent to mass?)

It's like saying a euro is equal to 2 dollars if the conversion is fixed, or that 2 gallons is equivalent to 60 miles if you know you're talking about a 30 mpg car. Since c is by definition constant, the same energy will always give the same equivalent mass, so they're simply two sides of the same coin.

In natural unit systems, people just say c=1 (no units) and gets rid of the distinction entirely; E=m, and you express masses and energies with the same units. Natural unit systems are fun. In GR, you can set the gravitational constant G to be equal to 1 as well, which has the fun result that masses can be expressed in terms of length. In this system, the Sun has a mass of about 1.47 kilometers, which is incidentally (note: this isn't coincidental at all) half of its Schwarzchild radius (the radius of a black hole with its mass)

[sevenperforce]

10 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

If the diagram is scaled than the relative masses are already depicted, so no need for showing  numbers there.

That's the entire basis of my favorite tattoo.

10 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

I would cap the edges in the graph with arrowheads. Nothing says “interaction” like that. And do add a legend for what each interaction in the clean graph is because that is not obvious otherwise.

What are your thoughts on wrapping each group of fermions in an interaction overlay?

10 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

I know that an electronvolt is a measure for energy in particle fysics, and dividing it by c² turns it into a mass (I think. Wait, isn’t energy already equivalent to mass?)

Exactly. eV is the measured total energy of the particle, and so dividing by c² turns it into a measure of mass because e = mc².

Does it make more sense on the more complex version to dispense with the whole "eV/c²" term and add that to a legend as well?

10 minutes ago, NFUN said:

you could use a negative scale, normalized so that the scale is 10^n+t+1, where t is the exponent of the particle with the shortest lifetime. That way the chart starts at 0 and the bars go to the right, with the most shortly-lived particle having the smallest bar, and the most stable having the largest. Annoying to actually get concrete information from though.

I have to deal with the electron/positron and the +/- up quark, both of which have lifetimes far longer than the age of the universe.

Speaking of +/-, is it readily ascertainable from the graphic that the parenthetical exponents after each particle signify the antiparticle numbers? Or do I need to add a legend for that as well? The photon, Higgs, and Z boson are all their own antiparticle so they get the (0) exponent, while the charge-carrying fermions and W boson all have electric charge and get the (+/-) exponent, and the stinking gluon has 8 freaking flavors and gets the (8) exponent. We don't really know whether there is such a thing as an antineutrino or if all the neutrinos just remain in a three-way (0) superposition so I used (?) for them.

Edited April 9, 2021 by sevenperforce

[NFUN]

1 minute ago, sevenperforce said:

 I have to deal with the electron/positron and the +/- up quark, both of which have lifetimes far longer than the age of the universe.

in which case, it'd be just as easy to get useful information from this normalized chart as from a normal one! 10⁵⁰=10⁶⁵ is good enough for anybody who'd be looking at this chart. I'm just telling you to shift over the axis

[sevenperforce]

20 minutes ago, NFUN said:

in which case, it'd be just as easy to get useful information from this normalized chart as from a normal one! 10⁵⁰=10⁶⁵ is good enough for anybody who'd be looking at this chart. I'm just telling you to shift over the axis

Having zero near one end but not quite at one end allows me to conveniently fudge the edge of the graph to add an infinity term, so that I can readily incorporate the electron and the up quark. Otherwise they would be off the chart by a factor of three.