Fun Fact of the Day:___!

[cluckcluckluke]

Are we talking about 'Eyjafjallajokull' (with dots above the o)?

I'm not very knowlegeable on volcanoes but I've managed to get this one's name (including how to say it) ingrained in my brain thanks to some very amusing audio my friend and I found, of various foreigners attempting to pronounce the offending word, followed by the correct version from a local.

I am indeed in Australia now. Jobs for us youngsters are indeed a bit scarce right now, but when it comes to the economy in general I think we're still a bit better off than England. (Or maybe that was the case when the mining boom was still viable... everyone says Labor screwed that one up nicely, but we got through the GFC relatively unscathed, mining boom or not, so I suppose we should be thankful for that). We have strong ties with Asia. A lot of growth is happening there right now.

Joyce is the Qantas CEO.

You may have seen him on TV, he's the one with the funny accent and glasses, sometimes. He was voted in over John Borghetti, who has gone and done fantastic things at Virgin instead.
Joyce doesn't get along with the unions. Qantas was grounded for a while back then because they were having a fight.
They are in pretty heavy debt with a junk status credit rating. Tony Abbott refuses to give aid, debt guarantee or sympathy. 5000 jobs schedued for axing.

And hey, don't diss Leeds.

Despite all its shortcomings,it's my hometown and it's kind of... scenic? (In some parts anyhow.)

"We have strong ties with Asia. A lot of growth is happening there right now." Yes and so is a nuclear disaster!!!!
The Japanese government is crazy!

haha, I ain't dissin Leeds. I'm sure it is wonderful.

And I would be happy to teach you some physics! It would help me consolidate my knowlege, and besides, I kind of like talking about physics.

The Higgs boson is the particle responsible for giving other particles mass. Don't worry if you don't know any particle physics - I didn't have a clue before I started, but you pick it up along the way. It's very interesting, I recommend it if you can choose that topic.

Yay!
Is the Higgs Boson what makes up proton and electrons? Sort of like quarks?

So, were do we start?

 

[Fierlin1182]

I agree that the Japanese government is crazy. And some of the Japanese. They always have been, at least in recent history. Did you hear about their denials of what their soldiers did in China and Korea during WWII? I think it's disgusting.

...But okay, I shouldn't go into that. I dislike certain countries and governments but I'm sure the regular citizens everywhere are just normal, nice people like you and me. I did hear that a lot of Japanese oppose actions their government has taken. There are good people everywhere.

I don't think they should be reopening their nuclear plants before they've even sorted out this disaster. :/ If they don't find an effective way to prevent or control/contain a meltdown in the event of an earthquake, who knows how much worse it could be next time. Earthquakes in Japan aren't exactly a rare occurrence.

The growth I was referring to was more with regards to countries like China and South Korea, and the 'tiger economies'. We export immense amounts of iron ore to China. The mining sector kept us afloat during the GFC. (I think. I'm going off things I've heard recently, I was in year 7/8 back then so I didn't know anything ) The stock market takes a big hit whenever China's manufacturing data shows growth is slowing - they need and buy a lot of our resources and keep many people in jobs, I guess.



Well, the Higgs boson is an elementary particle - that means it isn't made up of anything smaller. There are three classes of elementary particles: leptons, quarks and elementary gauge bosons (exchange particles). The Higgs boson is an example of #3. The electron is a lepton (one of six types of lepton). Protons and neutrons are made up of quarks, so they're not elementary particles. Instead, they're known as hadrons (particles made up of quarks). There are two types of hadron: the baryon and the meson. Baryons are made of three quarks (protons and neutrons are examples of baryons) and mesons have two quarks.

That was pretty much what we learned in the first few lessons. There were so many new words. But once you've got a hang of all of that, the rest of particle physics becomes much easier to understand, and you can start on the interesting things!

Well we can start on whatever topic you like. But it seems we've begun on particle physics already. Want to continue?

 

[cluckcluckluke]

I agree that the Japanese government is crazy. And some of the Japanese. They always have been, at least in recent history. Did you hear about their denials of what their soldiers did in China and Korea during WWII? I think it's disgusting.

...But okay, I shouldn't go into that. I dislike certain countries and governments but I'm sure the regular citizens everywhere are just normal, nice people like you and me. I did hear that a lot of Japanese oppose actions their government has taken. There are good people everywhere.

I don't think they should be reopening their nuclear plants before they've even sorted out this disaster.

If they don't find an effective way to prevent or control/contain a meltdown in the event of an earthquake, who knows how much worse it could be next time. Earthquakes in Japan aren't exactly a rare occurrence.

The growth I was referring to was more with regards to countries like China and South Korea, and the 'tiger economies'. We export immense amounts of iron ore to China. The mining sector kept us afloat during the GFC. (I think. I'm going off things I've heard recently, I was in year 7/8 back then so I didn't know anything

) The stock market takes a big hit whenever China's manufacturing data shows growth is slowing - they need and buy a lot of our resources and keep many people in jobs, I guess.



Well, the Higgs boson is an elementary particle - that means it isn't made up of anything smaller. There are three classes of elementary particles: leptons, quarks and elementary gauge bosons (exchange particles). The Higgs boson is an example of #3. The electron is a lepton (one of six types of lepton). Protons and neutrons are made up of quarks, so they're not elementary particles. Instead, they're known as hadrons (particles made up of quarks). There are two types of hadron: the baryon and the meson. Baryons are made of three quarks (protons and neutrons are examples of baryons) and mesons have two quarks.

That was pretty much what we learned in the first few lessons. There were so many new words.

But once you've got a hang of all of that, the rest of particle physics becomes much easier to understand, and you can start on the interesting things!

Well we can start on whatever topic you like. But it seems we've begun on particle physics already.

Want to continue?

I have not. Yeah the government said that no one will return until there was only 1 ( what ever they measure radiation in ) but now they are saying, Oh, 20 is close enough, that's fine.
Also all the skilled workers at the plant who are cleaning up the problem have reached their maximum radiation exposure and now the government is having to send in unskilled workers....***!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, totally agree. It isn't the majority that are bad, it's just those who seem to be in power!!!
What a totally ridiculous place to put a nuclear plant. Japan is right near a fault line. Also I saw on the 7:00pm project that there are massive pole like structures in the plants and if they happen to touch each other it could cause an explosion that will disperse radiation all the way down the Australia.

So the Higgs boson just is. Nothing else makes it up.
So like the elementary gauge Bosons that have many elementary particles, do Leptons and quarks have many as well?

I am defiantly going to learn all of these cool new words

.
Do you have all this knowledge from memory or are you just searching it up to refresh?

haha, yeah I am up for continuing on with this subject. I mean as long as you are sure you don't mind? Because a warning, I will ask many questions and may drive you a little nuts

!!!

Wasn't the Higgs Boson named after the scientist who discovered it?

 

[cluckcluckluke]

So what actually IS a quark??? Energy?

 

[Fierlin1182]

Greed in the upper echelons was always a bane of society.
Having the plants back would be great for the economy and save the country heaven knows how much on energy costs. Money comes before people, of course.

Although nuclear is brilliant in the aspect of producing zero carbon emissions (heheh, at least at the power generation stage), even I admit that problems associated with disposal of waste, (spent/)fuel falling into the wrong hands and the consequences of possible accidents reduce its viability as a large-scale solution.

The nuclear fuel in power plants can't explode. The fuel used in most plants (some use plutonium) is enriched to 3% uranium-235. This is enough to sustain a chain reaction and get very hot, but it won't explode. Military-grade uranium is at least 80% (now it's more like 90%) uranium-235. The other isotope present, U-238, absorbs neutrons before the chain reaction can get out of control. As the majority of atoms in nuclear fuel are U-238, the fuel physically cannot explode.

But if it overheats and melts down the reactor, it can cause other things like hydrogen to do so instead. That's what happened when something(s) got blown up at Fukushima.

Fire away with your questions, I'll do my best to answer them. Well I'm glad that you're finding it interesting.

I know all these "basics" of particle physics off the top of my head (it starts to get fun later on, lol) because once you get into the harder problems you pretty much have to use this information in every second sentence/equation. But when we get to pair production and the energies involved, or particle accelerators or calculating the range of virtual exchange particles, I'll probably have to consult my book.

The Higgs boson was indeed named after Peter Higgs, the guy who proposed its existence (and probably played a role in discovering it too, lol. Scientific discoveries are no longer solitary ventures, there would've been a colossal team working on the problem at CERN.)

Yep, I guess you could say a quark is just a little packet of energy. That's the same with all the other elementary particles. My physics teacher used to describe them as "mathematical points" - they have no internal structure, which sounds confusing because that would mean there was actually nothing there. Then how would they have mass? That's a property (resistance to acceleration - inertia) that they apparently acquire through interaction with the Higgs field.

Anyway, the topic of "what are particles" is kind of vague and I'm not sure I can provide a fully comprehensive answer. Particle physics as a field is still changing, as you can see by the recent discovery of Higgs boson, and what people were trying to do with string theory earlier. There are still a lot of problems with the "Standard Model" (everything being composed of leptons, quarks and exchange bosons) which haven't been resolved, such as unifying gravity with the other three forces (interesting topic coming up, lol). Maybe at some point in the future, the Standard Model will be overturned or expanded upon. The things that we "know" now are based upon experimental and theoretical evidence. Nothing is 100% concrete when you get down to elementary particle scale.

So anyway, elementary particles.

Here's a list of the elementary particles.

Leptons:
Electron
Electron neutrino (electron and electron neutrinos are the only stable ones)
Muon
Muon neutrino
Tau
Tau neutrino

Quarks: (each of these is known as a "flavour" of quark)
Up
Down (up and down are stable and make up matter that we see around us - the other four only last for fractions of a second)
Charm
Strange
Top
Bottom

Elementary exchange bosons:
Photon (exchange particle in the electromagnetic interaction)
Gluon (exchange particle in the Strong force)
W+, W- and Z0 (exchange particles in the Weak force)
Graviton (exchange particle in gravitational force)

These are the four fundamental forces of nature. Every other force you can think of is pretty much a manifestation of one of these.

and of course,
Higgs boson (responsible for mass).

Every particle - including composite ones - has specific properties (such as charge, spin - angular momentum, we weren't taught about that until later in the course though, it's important for some things that are coming up but don't worry about it too much for now - baryon number, lepton number, strangeness, etc.) and they can be expressed using a set of "quantum numbers", which are different for different particles.

For example, the electron has quantum numbers
-1 for charge
+/- 1/2 for spin (plus or minus a half)
1 for electron lepton number (because it's a lepton and it's in the electron class, which it shares with the electron neutrino)
0 for baryon number (because it's not a baryon)

etc. etc.

Up quark has quantum numbers
+2/3 for charge (plus two-thirds)
+/- 1/2 spin
0 lepton number
1/3 baryon number (because it's a third of a baryon, lol)
etc.

The down quark is the same, except it has charge -1/3.

Two up quarks and a down quark make a proton (add up the charge and it comes to one.)

The proton has numbers:
+1 for charge
+/- 1/2 for spin (it's only a proton if the spins of the three quarks add up to either +1/2 or -1/2. Therefore they must have different spins. If they all have the same spin and the spin of the resulting particle is +3/2 or -3/2, the particle has more mass, because it has more energy as angular momentum is pretty much energy - you know e=mc^2, mass is energy etc.etc. and it's no longer a proton because it's heavier. In this case it becomes a... Delta particle, I think it is.)
0 lepton number
1 baryon number (because it is a baryon - it has three quarks)


...Man, that post is so long. o.o Have fun trying to learn some of those facts! I hope it makes sense, our booklet taught all this to us in a pretty good order, but I can't remember what it was so I'm just saying things randomly.

 

[miss heny]

x.x You just fried my brain more Delta XD

 

[Blooie]

Flies! They make me crazy! Imagine you're sitting at the kitchen table enjoying a cup of coffee and there's a pesky little fly buzzing around. You wave your hand at him, and he zips away. There he is, flying close to the ceiling when suddenly WHAM!! He's walking on the ceiling. Did you see that little booger flip over? Nope! One second he's flying around with his legs hanging down and the next he's upside down walking up there! Oh, the hours I have whittled away trying to see a fly flip over.

 

[Fierlin1182]

x.x You just fried my brain more Delta XD

*bows regally*

Yeah, particle physics is such a hoot... Don't want to get started on astrophysics though, there are more derivations there.

 

[miss heny]

*bows regally*

Yeah, particle physics is such a hoot... Don't want to get started on astrophysics though, there are more derivations there.

I can barely get by on math, and regular physics... This? *is brain fried*

Haven't talk to you in a while XD

 

[Fierlin1182]

*bows regally*


Yeah, particle physics is such a hoot... Don't want to get started on astrophysics though, there are more derivations there.

I can barely get by on math, and regular physics... This? *is brain fried*

Haven't talk to you in a while XD

Years of experience. I was groaning to myself when I first saw all this too. Partly because I actually had to learn it and it was worth about 3.5% of my future in exams.

But it got more interesting as time went on.

Yeah, I know. Hi, how are you?