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lorenzohess 1 days ago [-]
> After almost two decades of searching, a team of physicists in China says it has observed strong evidence of a mysterious particle called a glueball, which is made entirely of force-carrying particles.
> ... The discovery of glueballs would provide direct evidence that gluons can interact with themselves, researchers say. This is a key prediction of quantum chromodynamics
strictnein 1 days ago [-]
> "quantum chromodynamics"
I had to google it: "the study of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons"
_kulang 21 hours ago [-]
It’s the theory of colour charge essentially, counterpart to electrodynamics. Quarks have colour, rather than electrical charge. Mediating particle is the gluon, analogous to (but entirely different from) the photon
throwawayffffas 12 hours ago [-]
Its called chromodynamics because the interactions are described by the special unitary group of degree 3, which is the same group that describes how we perceive color interactions.
cynicalkane 4 hours ago [-]
It's just the three dimensional nature of it plus the usual physics practice of giving things cheeky names. The vector space of (visible) colors is not acted symmetrically upon by SU(3); it doesn't transform symmetrically under charge-preserving unitary matrices. A blue strawberry with red leaves would not seem the same to us as a red strawberry with green leaves.
mr_toad 10 hours ago [-]
Now explain how quarks have flavour!
amelius 15 hours ago [-]
Why do they call it a "mysterious glueball" if the theory predicted it?
Synaesthesia 14 hours ago [-]
Because it's never been observed.
not-kinsale-joe 14 hours ago [-]
mysterious: strange, not known, or not understood.
They don't really know what it is or understand it.
This led me on a 1.5 hours long, entertaining chat session with Gemini learning about stuff in Physics - hopefully without much hallucinations. But definitely with a lot of typical - "You have arrived at a great insight.." like egging on by the AI :D
But learned a bunch about bosons, fermions, QCD, gluons, Kugelblitz, composite bosons and finally Noether’s Theorem on symmetry. Was a wild ride
16 hours ago [-]
apparent 18 hours ago [-]
How do you plan to make this newfound knowledge 'stick'? Do you have enough relevant/related knowledge that you'll remember it? Or is there a way to have Gemini make a bunch of cards for use with spaced repetition software?
amelius 15 hours ago [-]
Best way is to build a particle collider in your back yard. If you don't have the budget, write a simulator.
apparent 5 hours ago [-]
I was waiting for someone to make a glueball joke, TBH.
Bluestein 5 hours ago [-]
"You are absolutely right! ..."
ilteris 18 hours ago [-]
You can use Gemini notebook notebooklm for this
samuell 15 hours ago [-]
Yea, I like the quiz feature a lot. It feel more efficient than both the podcast one (which mostly creates a very superficial high level talk on a level I typically already grasp), and the flashcard one in my experience.
apparent 17 hours ago [-]
Oh cool, will look into this. Have only used it to make podcasts in the past. I'm a little hesitant to build in a walled garden though. I'd rather store things in an open format that can be used with many platforms, not just the one.
nobrains 11 hours ago [-]
share the thread ?
hdivider 23 hours ago [-]
Isn't it significant in some sense that this was discovered in China first, and not the US?
In the sense of: we didn't know splitting the atom would change warfare forever, back when Einstein and others published on it. We don't know if there are discoveries of similar impact lying in wait somewhere. If China gets to such a discovery first, we are in Sputnik territory, to say the least.
SoftTalker 19 hours ago [-]
We knew. That's why Roosevelt started the Manhattan project after scientists wrote to him warning about it, to be sure that the Germans or the Soviets didn't develop it first.
peterashford 21 hours ago [-]
Einstein? Rutherford, I think
ddddddrop 15 hours ago [-]
Why not let the man himself tell you (as a surrogate for Roosevelt) the story
But nuclear fission was discovered by scientists working in Nazi Germany (except Meitner who had fled to Sweden by then).
jhoechtl 20 hours ago [-]
It's foundational science. The US scuence system calls for utility and time to merket. In such a system there is little space for gluons.
IAmBroom 4 hours ago [-]
That is untrue. US science is also funded by NSF grants - or were, before the Orange Idiot and his crew of apes began defunding science they didn't understand.
Much science is done by international (i.e., borderless) cooperation between teams of scientists, as well. Science is becoming, and ultimately should be, nationless.
21 hours ago [-]
20 hours ago [-]
colechristensen 22 hours ago [-]
Plenty of things get discovered all over the world and this isn't a particularly earth shattering result. Discovering evidence of a particle predicted for 50 years is interesting but still pretty mundane.
The LHC which is doing much of the particle physics discovery is in Switzerland and France, if you need to be reminded, not the US.
The first strong force theory was published by Hideki Yukawa in Japan in 1935 (which won him the nobel prize) ... so uh, not exactly a sputnik problem.
Sputnik problems (and the nuclear race) are engineering and industrial races, not fundamental physics ones.
lukeify 18 hours ago [-]
> The LHC which is doing much of the particle physics discovery is in Switzerland and France, if you need to be reminded, not the US.
Which is ironically an example of particle collider science happening overseas primarily because the US relinquished its lead on scientific discovery, despite having a similar-scale particle collider practically finished and ready to go [0].
"practically finished and ready to go" is a bit of an overstatement. They made some holes in the ground, and did preliminary research and manufacturing, but it was heavily mismanaged and fantastically over budget, so congress killed it
kakacik 15 hours ago [-]
That would be classical 80:20 or more like 90:10 rule, few kms of tunnels ain't close to delivery in any feasible way, just the first baby steps.
The amount of continuous effort (and budget) that goes into just keeping CERN up and delivering is non-trivial. I live nearby and sometimes chat with folks working there (its >15,000 folks although not all do science).
amelius 14 hours ago [-]
Well they have plenty of spare time to do things like, for example, invent the web browser.
defrost 14 hours ago [-]
That was a time saving part and parcel of the job of exchanging text and images between researchers.
you are trying to see something that's not quite there in this case. there is shit ton of very good research that happens all over the world. but i also sympathize with what you are trying insinuate and that's also probably happening.
EA-3167 22 hours ago [-]
HEP is undeniably an international effort, and it's silly to try and spin this into something akin to the space race. While this is a useful and frankly brilliant potential confirmation of existing theory, that's what it is: confirmation (sort of). Without CERN, without universities across the world including all across Asia none of this would be possible.
Very few endeavors are as truly international as this because the problems are so hard to even explore, and the machines required to do so are the most complex and highly engineered on Earth. Lets not lose that international spirit in science because the blowhard narcissists who run our countries would find that temporarily useful to them.
aaron695 22 hours ago [-]
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cat-whisperer 24 hours ago [-]
are we going to have force-fields now?
throwawayffffas 12 hours ago [-]
We have them now. You are not floating into space because of one right now. Also magnets.
krapp 24 hours ago [-]
No.
yndoendo 23 hours ago [-]
I thought a Plasma Window is a form of force-field.
CoastalCoder 19 hours ago [-]
> I thought a Plasma Window is a form of force-field.
Kind of. It weakly repels Gnome users.
GroksBarnacles 23 hours ago [-]
Plasma is matter, not a force
foobarian 23 hours ago [-]
Yet what is matter but a (strong) force
ndsipa_pomu 15 hours ago [-]
Matter is usually made of fermions (half-integer spin) whereas force is mediated by bosons (integer spin).
krapp 22 hours ago [-]
Matter is not a force. Matter and forces are two different things in physics.
And the "strong force" is another thing altogether.
aeonik 22 hours ago [-]
I think their point might be that matter is what defines the location of the force field. I.e. it's the EM field doing the actual work.
qsera 17 hours ago [-]
Yea, that is it, and I agree with them. When we say that a particle is at some x,y,z, we just mean that the space at that location behaves in a certain manner, for some reason.
And since we don't like mysteries, we say that there is a "particle" there with so and so properties..
TheOtherHobbes 14 hours ago [-]
It's more like "behaved", because particle measurement events are always historic. Quantum fields are statistical distributions of possible future particle measurement events within spacetime.
CGMthrowaway 19 hours ago [-]
That is, until we find a way to unify the fields
ziiinq 22 hours ago [-]
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jfkffkfktk 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
abc123abc123 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ArtemKhymenko 13 hours ago [-]
Interesting how should someone uses it IRL at the end of the day
germandiago 20 hours ago [-]
AI-made?
bronlund 17 hours ago [-]
Oh no. A new particle. Who would have guessed %]
Hobadee 1 days ago [-]
And here I am, thinking I discovered "glueballs" in elementary school when we were given rubber cement to use.
I had to google it: "the study of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons"
They don't really know what it is or understand it.
But learned a bunch about bosons, fermions, QCD, gluons, Kugelblitz, composite bosons and finally Noether’s Theorem on symmetry. Was a wild ride
In the sense of: we didn't know splitting the atom would change warfare forever, back when Einstein and others published on it. We don't know if there are discoveries of similar impact lying in wait somewhere. If China gets to such a discovery first, we are in Sputnik territory, to say the least.
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/beginnings...
Much science is done by international (i.e., borderless) cooperation between teams of scientists, as well. Science is becoming, and ultimately should be, nationless.
The LHC which is doing much of the particle physics discovery is in Switzerland and France, if you need to be reminded, not the US.
The first strong force theory was published by Hideki Yukawa in Japan in 1935 (which won him the nobel prize) ... so uh, not exactly a sputnik problem.
Sputnik problems (and the nuclear race) are engineering and industrial races, not fundamental physics ones.
Which is ironically an example of particle collider science happening overseas primarily because the US relinquished its lead on scientific discovery, despite having a similar-scale particle collider practically finished and ready to go [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
The amount of continuous effort (and budget) that goes into just keeping CERN up and delivering is non-trivial. I live nearby and sometimes chat with folks working there (its >15,000 folks although not all do science).
If you're reaching for examples of spare time activities, this was squeezed into 20 minutes of downtime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e1eLe1ihT0
Very few endeavors are as truly international as this because the problems are so hard to even explore, and the machines required to do so are the most complex and highly engineered on Earth. Lets not lose that international spirit in science because the blowhard narcissists who run our countries would find that temporarily useful to them.
Kind of. It weakly repels Gnome users.
And the "strong force" is another thing altogether.
And since we don't like mysteries, we say that there is a "particle" there with so and so properties..