SEVEN QUESTIONABLE
LIMERICKS
1)
A mass-less neutrino
named Bill
Went so fast his
friends seemed to stand still.
He sped past each boson
And zipped past a photon
With “I’ll go faster
than light, yes I will!”
A cosmic observer
called Mark*
Found 1a’s were a
standardized spark,
So we know space expands
Quicker than math demands
And we call its
strange energy “dark”.
3)
Since the time of the
Tories and Whigs,
Since Adam was clad
just in figs,
Laws of church and of state
Have had no science debate,
For you can’t have a
Mass without Higgs.
4)
The math that
describes quantum strings
Also seems to explain
cosmic things,
But it needs ten dimensions,
Which causes some tensions
About “Theory of
Everything” flings.
5)
A hip physicist,
Brian Greene,
Has us contemplate
worlds yet unseen.
Be it blessing or curse,
This weird multi-verse
Would multiply both
kind and mean.
6)
Does our spacetime
grow rounder or flatter?
Do WIMPs make far
light bend and scatter?
Spirals don’t fall apart,
So we think, as a start,
Seven tenths of our
“stuff” is dark matter.
7)
The Standard Model is
viewed as an article
Proved by the mass
and the charge of each particle.
Yet it would be better
And shown to the letter
If supersymmetry
found us a sparticle.
*Phillips
Dec. 26, 2011
Dec. 26, 2011
In this week’s Lorel Lu blog, at http://lorellu.blogspot.com/ , Mom takes on a science lesson in limericks. She pushes far outside my envelope of knowledge with these rhymes. But here are a few tidbits I dug up for annotation, stanza by stanza:
ReplyDeleteFirst Stanza
Neutrinos:
Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles which make up the universe. They are also one of the least understood. Neutrinos are similar to the more familiar electron, with one crucial difference: neutrinos do not carry electric charge. Because neutrinos are electrically neutral, they are not affected by the electromagnetic forces which act on electrons. Neutrinos are affected only by a "weak" sub-atomic force of much shorter range than electromagnetism, and are therefore able to pass through great distances in matter without being affected by it. If neutrinos have mass, they also interact gravitationally with other massive particles, but gravity is by far the weakest of the four known forces.
See http://www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/neutrino.html
Faster than light? See, eg. http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/06/once-again-physicists-debunk.html
And for jokes about neutrinos, see http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/09/28/collected-neutrino-jokes My favorite is “A neutrino walks into a bar for a smoke, and the bartender says, “need a light?” The neutrino replies, “I’m already one step ahead of you.”
bo•son (b s n)
n. Any of a class of particles, such as the photon, pion, or alpha particle, that have zero or integral spin and obey statistical rules permitting any number of identical particles to occupy the same quantum state.
See http://www.thefreedictionary.com/boson
Photon: Under the photon theory of light, a photon is a discrete bundle (or quantum) of electromagnetic (or light) energy. Photons are always in motion and, in a vacuum, have a constant speed of light to all observers, at the vacuum speed of light (more commonly just called the speed of light) of c = 2.998 x 108 m/s.
See http://physics.about.com/od/lightoptics/f/photon.htm
ReplyDeleteFifth Stanza
Here, Brian Greene explains string theory in a TED talk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtdE662eY_M
Second Stanza
ReplyDeleteMark Phillips is presumably this Univ of California Santa Cruz alum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_M._Phillips
See http://news.ucsc.edu/2009/08/3137.html for some background, for example…”The stellar explosions known as type 1a supernovae have long been used as ‘standard candles’, their uniform brightness giving astronomers a way to measure cosmic distances and the expansion of the universe…. The discovery of dark energy, a mysterious force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, was based on observations of type 1a supernovae.”
ReplyDeleteThird Stanza
The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is an elementary particle initially theorised in 1964, and tentatively confirmed to exist on 14 March 2013. The discovery has been called "monumental"[9][10] because it appears to confirm the existence of the Higgs field, which is pivotal to the Standard Model and other theories within particle physics. In this discipline, it explains why some fundamental particles have mass when the symmetries controlling their interactions should require them to be massless, and—linked to this—why the weak force has a much shorter range than the electromagnetic force.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
Fourth Stanza
ReplyDeleteAbout string theory, see: http://superstringtheory.com/basics/basic4.html musical notes could be said to be excitation modes of that guitar string under tension. In a similar manner, in string theory, the elementary particles we observe in particle accelerators could be thought of as the "musical notes" or excitation modes of elementary strings. In string theory, as in guitar playing, the string must be stretched under tension in order to become excited.
And from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstring_theory
Superstring theory is an attempt to explain all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in one theory by modelling them as vibrations of tiny supersymmetric strings. Superstring theory is a shorthand for supersymmetric string theory because unlike bosonic string theory, it is the version of string theory that incorporates fermions and supersymmetry. Since the second superstring revolution the five superstring theories are regarded as different limits of a single theory tentatively called M-theory, or simply string theory.
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_10_dimensions#Number_of_dimensions :
An intriguing feature of string theory is that it predicts extra dimensions. In classical string theory the number of dimensions is not fixed by any consistency criterion. However, to make a consistent quantum theory, string theory is required to live in a spacetime of the so-called "critical dimension": we must have 26 spacetime dimensions for the bosonic string and 10 for the superstring. This is necessary to ensure the vanishing of the conformal anomaly of the worldsheet conformal field theory. Modern understanding indicates that there exist less-trivial ways of satisfying this criterion. Cosmological solutions exist in a wider variety of dimensionalities, and these different dimensions are related by dynamical transitions. The dimensions are more precisely different values of the "effective central charge", a count of degrees of freedom that reduces to dimensionality in weakly curved regimes.
Sixth Stanza
ReplyDeleteIn astrophysics, weakly interacting massive particles or WIMPs, are hypothetical particles serving as one possible solution to the dark matter problem. These particles interact through the weak force and gravity, and possibly through other interactions no stronger than the weak force. Because they do not interact through electromagnetism they cannot be seen directly, and because they do not interact through the strong nuclear force they do not interact strongly with atomic nuclei. This combination of properties gives WIMPs many of the properties of neutrinos, except for being far more massive and therefore slower. WIMPs are considered one of the main candidates for cold dark matter, the others being massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) and axions. (These names were deliberately chosen for contrast, with MACHOs named later than WIMPs) Also, in contrast to MACHOs, there are no known stable particles within the standard model of particle physics that have all the properties of WIMPs. The particles that have little interaction with normal matter, such as neutrinos, are all very light, and hence would be fast moving or hot.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_particles and http://www.astro.umd.edu/~ssm/darkmatter/WIMPexperiments.html
Seventh Stanza
ReplyDeleteThe Standard Model of particle physics is a theory concerning the electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear interactions, which mediate the dynamics of the known subatomic particles. It was developed throughout the latter half of the 20th century, as a collaborative effort of scientists around the world. The current formulation was finalized in the mid-1970s upon experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks. Since then, discoveries of the bottom quark (1977), the top quark (1995), and the tau neutrino (2000) have given further credence to the Standard Model. More recently (2011–2012), the possible detection of the Higgs boson would complete the set of predicted particles upon its verification. Because of its success in explaining a wide variety of experimental results, the Standard Model is sometimes regarded as a "theory of almost everything".
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model
Supersymmetry theory says that every particle must have a Supersymmetric partner particle yet so far ATLAS hasn’t found a single one of these ‘sparticles’.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2011-03-sparticles.html#jCp
http://phys.org/news/2011-03-sparticles.html
Supersymmetry theory says that every particle must have a Supersymmetric partner particle yet so far ATLAS hasn’t found a single one of these ‘sparticles’.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2011-03-sparticles.html#jCp