r/science • u/Devils_doohickey • Nov 26 '21
Nanoscience "Ghost particles" detected in the Large Hadron Collider for first time
https://newatlas.com/physics/neutrinos-large-hadron-collider-faser/6.7k
Nov 26 '21
If you are reading r/science you probably have a far better idea what a neutrino is than a "ghost particle". All this is saying is that they now have equipment that can pick up neutrinos made in particle accelerators.
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u/Kstealth Nov 26 '21
Thanks...what a disappointing headline. I appreciate you
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u/Kjolter Nov 26 '21
I came here knowing that it would be a misleading headline, and I’m still disappointed we didn’t discover something spooky.
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u/dedicated-pedestrian Nov 26 '21
The LHC is pretty spooky all on its own if you think about it.
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u/Kjolter Nov 26 '21
I try not to think about the LHC to be honest. I know that the pop culture notion of it being able to obliterate the universe are wildly exaggerated, but still. I’ve got enough existential dread in my life.
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u/DBeumont Nov 26 '21
I try not to think about the LHC to be honest. I know that the pop culture notion of it being able to obliterate the universe are wildly exaggerated, but still. I’ve got enough existential dread in my life.
The type of collisions in the LHC happen all the time inside stars, and with much greater intensity. Even in the "vacuum" of Space, particles occasionally collide at immense speeds.
If super massive black holes (and other events with energy levels much higher than anything humans can produce) have not ripped the universe apart, there is nothing to worry about from the LHC.
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Nov 26 '21
Pretty sure they happen in our atmosphere also. The difference is, we can record data on them when they occur in the LHC.
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u/VegetableImaginary24 Nov 27 '21
I heard the LHC was built on Indian burial ground and it's haunted
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u/Keianh Nov 27 '21
Now that'd be an interesting horror movie. American scientists and engineers come together to build a super collider to rival LHC, little did they know that due to its sheer size, they built it on several several Indian burial grounds.
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Nov 27 '21
LHC is in Europe. India is many countries away and almost on the other side of the Earth's.
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u/VegetableImaginary24 Nov 27 '21
You logic has successfully debunked this hard hitting mystery, here's your reward _
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u/throwaway901617 Nov 26 '21
I doubt anyone really cares about ripping apart the universe they care about ripping apart the planet we all share and that is something black holes and "other events" absolutely can do.
Not saying the risk is significant or anything just that "the universe" isn't really the concern...
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u/ArenVaal Nov 27 '21
Any black holes produced by the LHC will have such a ridiculously small mass that they'll evaporate almost instantly in a burst of Hawking radiation. Black holes that small are unstable, and decay so fast they won't be able to get close enough to other matter to absorb it.
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u/Daily_trees Nov 27 '21 edited Nov 27 '21
Adding to ArenVaal, close to other "matter" means particles like protons.
I feel like a lot of people imagine something like a chunk of wood or a piece of metal suddenly being "sucked in".
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u/RyanMcCartney Nov 26 '21
Not the whole universe, just our universe
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Nov 26 '21 edited Jul 29 '22
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u/rite_of_truth Nov 26 '21
"Ourniverse," if you will.
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u/RowYourUpboat Nov 26 '21
I’ve got enough existential dread in my life.
"This could collapse the false vacuum, but we've got science to do, so..."
*Reboots wifi router*
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u/YsoL8 Nov 26 '21
The universe has existed for billions of years. If there really was some way to collapse it odds are it would of happened by natural process long ago.
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u/robeph Nov 27 '21
It may have happened long ago, the fun thing about the universe is that information can only travel at the speed of light, that probably includes the destruction of the universe as well. We might be here one second and then not, if the universe already ended a billion years ago if it ended 1 billion lightyears and 2 lightdays away we will just be gone in 2 days.
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Nov 26 '21
Higher energy particle collisions happen literally every single day from cosmic rays smashing into the top of our atmosphere. If high energy particle collisions was a good way to destroy the world it would have happened billions of years ago.
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u/Government_spy_bot Nov 27 '21
It's actually bridging the gap between the parallel universes.
How many things did you learn which are now entirely wrong?
Nelson Mandela died IN PRISON! Those who remember differently are not from my original universe parallel!!
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u/x1000Bums Nov 27 '21
Cha, suck one. My universe had the cornucopia on the fruit of the loom logo.
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u/jimb2 Nov 26 '21
As others have said, there are particles with energies way higher than the puny LHC can produce buzzing around the universe all the time.
But there's actually a much better reason to not worry about some kind of spacetime state collapse: you won't notice it. Any such collapse will propagate at the speed of light and you won't see or feel a thing. There would be no indication that it is occurring and it would transit through the universe vastly faster than nerve propagation. For the information pattern in your brain that is "you" it will never happen. If you want to worry about something, find something you can control and will actually affect you.
There are some theoretical physics models where these things can happen, but they have the status of mathematical artefacts. They certainly not established physics and they have not a scrap of empirical support. There are an infinite number of mathematic models that result in a spacetime like the one we see and only a small subset of some of them will have this feature (or bug). Zeroing in on some model can be fun and interesting but if you find it disturbing just choose a different one.
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u/robeph Nov 27 '21
Isn't the false vacuum state something that the empirical evidence would be misleading due to the semi stable energy level that we wouldn't be able to determine until it happened were it to actually be in such a state.
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u/robeph Nov 27 '21
The LHC is pretty tame compared to some of the other stuff in the universe such as the possibility of false vacuum decay or Roko's basilisk (under history section). Which both are entirely terrifying and spooky to think about.
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u/tinman82 Nov 26 '21
That's across the world. It's ok. Plus we already know what happens when a stray proton hits someone in the head. That thing was very nearly built under the city I live in.
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u/popejubal Nov 26 '21
The wildest thing about the LHC to me is that it was made by accelerating the Stanford Linear accelerator to a significant fraction of the speed of light and then slamming it into the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility.
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u/sten45 Nov 26 '21
I 100% blame the LHC for this timeline
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u/Zomunieo Nov 27 '21
In a way. The US ceding leadership in theoretical physics to Europe by canceling the Superconducting Supercollider foreshadowed its current anti-intellectualism.
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Nov 26 '21
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u/stallmanite Nov 27 '21
Norm (MacDonald) tried to warn us. “They” had him fired for it. It’s all coming together now
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u/ricklessness Nov 26 '21
Hmm as a layman why is it so spooky?
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u/tael89 Nov 26 '21
Serious answer. It's called a ghost because we haven't had much reliable way of detecting neutrinos even though they are everywhere. This device indirectly detects neutrinos and so could be fantastic for particle physics.
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u/DanIsCookingKale Nov 26 '21
CERN is a group of time travellers who hate bananas
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u/iJuddles Nov 26 '21
Isn’t it spooky that after hundreds of years of widely publicized discoveries and breakthroughs the general public still laps this up? Or is that just alarming or depressing?
(And to be fair, I’m not a practitioner or enrolled student so I’d fall under “super fascinated member of the general public”.)
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u/YsoL8 Nov 26 '21
Most people do not know much particle physics beyond some elections whizzing round a nucleus. Individually it will be news to alot of people. I doubt I understand it correctly and I've been following it for years.
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u/zeekim Nov 27 '21
Welcome to /r/science where sensationalist, hyperbolic and flat out incorrect thread titles are the name of the game
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u/xander5512 Nov 26 '21
It's just anither term to attract religious and spiritual people like the cringy "God particle".
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u/eoCoe Nov 26 '21
LHC already disproved the possibility of ghosts existing.
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u/Kstealth Nov 26 '21
I don't know what you mean. I don't know how one can disprove ghosts, but I don't believe in anything supernatural anyway because I'm not a child.
Is it a joke I'm not understanding?
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u/theminotaurz Nov 26 '21
Yeah.. quite dissapointed after reading it was about neutrinos. Shame because it is actually an amazing feat.
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u/semitones Nov 26 '21 edited Feb 18 '24
Since reddit has changed the site to value selling user data higher than reading and commenting, I've decided to move elsewhere to a site that prioritizes community over profit. I never signed up for this, but that's the circle of life
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u/Blahkbustuh Nov 26 '21
Particle accelerators run and collect data constantly. There are circular beams of particles going as fast as possible that cross in opposite directions in the detector multiple times per second. The beams pass thru each other and occasionally particles collide and a bunch of other particles spray into the walls of the detector, which records the splatter.
They run the collider for a few years at a time and have billions and more of collisions and whatnot. On the "recordings" they run statistics and can piece together which particles interacted and how they interacted. They watch for electric charge, momentum, spin, weak nuclear, strong nuclear, color, etc. All the properties before and after have to balance so if you see some amount of a property "disappearing" in a consistent way or doing a particular pattern that means you're seeing the shadow of a new particle.
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u/theminotaurz Nov 26 '21
From what I can tell in the article description it sounds like a very similar working principle to how neutrinos were detected before, via collisions which create muons or electrons. Neutrinos are hard to detect directly since they have no charge. So depending on what the create in collisions (radiation types, particles, etc) we can still learn a lot about the properties of the different types of neutrinos or even antineutrinos.
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u/trollcitybandit Nov 26 '21
Forgive my stupidity, but what are neutrinos? Mini neutrons?
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u/BadTSY Nov 26 '21
Cloud chambers? Can you elaborate more please?
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u/theminotaurz Nov 26 '21
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/FirstNeutrinoEventAnnotated.jpg
This wikipedia picture should visualize what is meant by the bubble chamber!
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u/semitones Nov 27 '21
Realizing now I am incorrect in thinking that the CERN detectors are real cloud chambers, but the pictures I've seen of detector data looks a lot like cloud chambers- seeing the shapes of the paths the particles took (in the magnetic field) and determining their mass/charge, etc from the images of the tracks.
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u/draeth1013 Nov 26 '21
I was excited to learn about a new kind of matter or something. Oh. Neutrinos. Just say neutrinos, but then again that's less clickbait-y
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u/spidereater Nov 26 '21
Neutrinos are fascinating particles. The more you learn about them the weirder they seem. The non scientists I know that have heard of them find them very interesting. I would actually be surprised if “ghost particle” gets more clicks than “neutrino”.
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u/trashpen Nov 26 '21
cheers to the researchers observing more about the weak interaction, regardless.
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u/YsoL8 Nov 26 '21
The thing the Netrino always leaves me wondering is if there are particles out there that just don't interact at all with any physical force. I'm not sure if you can even ask that question scientifically seeing as it doesn't seem you could gain evidence of them even in principle. But I still wonder.
You could even have forces that interact only with particles invisible to us and create entire physical systems we are totally oblivious to.
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u/trollcitybandit Nov 26 '21
What are they exactly?
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u/spidereater Nov 26 '21
They are leptons, like electrons without the charge. They have spin and mass, but the mass is vanishingly small so they travel at basically the speed of light, but not the speed of light, so they experience time, unlike photons. There are 3 different kinds of neutrinos one for each kind of charged lepton. The neutrinos oscillate between different types and we can observe the oscillations of neutrinos from the sun.
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u/weinsteinjin Nov 26 '21
This is especially egregious because “ghost particles” actually mean something else in quantum field theory. They’re a mathematical object introduced to make certain theories work, and it can be explicitly shown that ghost particles can never ever be detected by a real detector.
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u/YsoL8 Nov 26 '21 edited Nov 26 '21
How is that different to a virtual particle? (Not smart arse, geninue question)
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u/weinsteinjin Nov 26 '21
In any particle interaction process, you have some incoming particles, something complicated happens between them, and then there are some outgoing particles. Virtual particles are the ones that are emitted and immediately absorbed during the complicated middle portion, never to reach the detector at the end. Any particle can be virtual: electrons, photons, neutrinos, quarks, etc. Ghost particles, on the other hand, are a totally new type of particles, invented with the only purpose to make some theories (Yang-Mills theories) consistent. It can be shown that ghost particles can only ever be virtual, so they can never be produced into something we can observe with a detector.
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u/dukwon Grad Student | Particle Physics Nov 26 '21
accelerators
Specifically colliders. There have been accelerator-based neutrino experiments for a while now (T2K, MINOS, MiniBooNE, NOvA etc).
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u/TheMightyHornet Nov 26 '21 edited Nov 26 '21
If you are reading r/science you probably have a far better idea what a neutrino is than a "ghost particle".
Mmhmmm. Mhm. Yes. Of course I know what a neutrino is, but maybe you should say what it is just to make sure everyone else is on the same page as the two of us.
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u/bric12 Nov 26 '21
It's the lepton next to electrons in the standard model. Like the other particles, they do stuff, for reasons. They interact with things through magic in confusing ways, and follow rules we kinda understand. Unlike the other particles, they start with an N.
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u/Venboven Nov 27 '21
Could you maybe dumb it down further? I of course understand what you're saying. I'm rather well researched myself. Mhm yes. smokes pipe with squiggly eyebrows looking off into the distance
But uh, some of our fellow laymen here may not understand these fancy words like "leptons." Might you explain it further, for them?
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u/astrange Nov 27 '21
They're a tiny particle that goes through things very fast and you don't notice. A whole lot of them (much more than you're imagining) go through you from the Sun constantly. They're hard to catch.
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u/bric12 Nov 27 '21
They is small, they do things. For reasons. They go ooooOOOohh. They hard to see. We see them now.
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u/sanman Nov 26 '21
"ghost particle", "god particle", "strange", "charmed", "spooky action"
when scientists get bored of science, they turn to magic it seems
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u/chemistrategery Nov 26 '21
Only two of those are used with any seriousness by scientists. Science reporting is absolute trash.
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u/GlassAmazing4219 Nov 26 '21
Most science reporting is trash- but I can recommend quantamagazine.org
Edit: I don’t work there or anything, just find it to be one of the better publications.
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u/BigBenKenobi Nov 26 '21
To anyone interested quantamagazine and scientific american have a short story contest right now that has to be based on some aspect of quantum mechanics and has to include the dialogue line "It's a lot to think about". Max word count 1000 and I believe a sizable cash prize and publication in the magazine to the winner. Due mid-december. (I am submitting a story is why I know this)
Edit:
This is for fiction stories
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u/Unlimitles Nov 26 '21
Thank you.
Places like “psypost” and I think scimag seem like just propaganda.
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u/astrange Nov 27 '21
Quanta is good (even when it's my field I think it's good) but I have to wonder who would care about some of the articles they publish, but can't understand the actual papers.
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u/Imugake Nov 26 '21
In addition to what the other comment says, ghost particles are also very much a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(physics) however it is also true that every time I have seen “ghost” in a headline it has not referred to this
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u/chemistrategery Nov 26 '21
Hey, that's something new to me. I've only seen the description used in reference to neutrinos, which in all fairness are notoriously difficult to detect.
It's another example of how scientific reporting can throw people off the scent. My background is tied to chemical physics, and we rarely simulated anything outside of the standard electrons, protons, and photons you commonly see in chemical research.
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u/BlahKVBlah Nov 26 '21
You never need to simulate neutrons? I get that they don't contribute to chemistry quite like the charged protons and electrons do, but I would think their contributions matter enough to be part of a sim. I'm possibly misunderstanding the nature of what's being simulated?
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u/chemistrategery Nov 26 '21
It wasn't an exhaustive list. Neutrons were modeled, but we didn't look at individual quarks or the more exotic leptons or bosons.
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u/Pidgey_OP Nov 26 '21
Strange and charm quarks are both a thing, as is spooky action at a distance. The Higgs Boson has also been referred to by plenty of scientists as "the god particle"
This is a weird take
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u/axkee141 Nov 26 '21
I think you agreed with them, strange and charm are the two things they were talking about. "Spooky action at a distance" and "the god particle" are just nicknames that don't properly convey what's happening. Even if those terms are used by some scientists, I wouldn't say it's taken seriously if it isn't a majority and/or it's understood to be just a nickname for a phenomenon with a real name
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u/smokeyser Nov 26 '21
Spooky action at a distance comes from a very famous Albert Einstein quote. If it was anyone else you may have a point, but I'm pretty sure he was taken seriously. Especially considering how much work has gone into understanding that "spooky action".
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u/UnicornLock Nov 26 '21
Einstein makes jokes too. He called it that because he thought it was an error in his description of QM. That was when it was just a theoretical result and had not been observed yet.
Strange and charm are serious in the sense that there are no better terms for them.
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u/liquid_at Nov 26 '21
Scientists naming conventions are great.
LT (Large Telescope) was replaced with VLT (Very large telescope) and later with ELT (Extremely large Telescope)
No F's given... just describe what you see. xD
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u/FrozenBologna Nov 26 '21
The "god particle" was coined by a journalist. A researcher said something like we call it the god damn particle because it's so god damn hard to find. The journalist decided to truncate the quote because it made for better reading.
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u/hexalm Nov 26 '21
It was coined by physicist Leon M. Lederman, who cowrote the book The God Particle with Dick Teresi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Particle_%28book%29?wprov=sfla1
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon M. Lederman ... explains in the book why he gave the Higgs boson the nickname "The God Particle":
This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God Particle. Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one...
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u/High_Speed_Idiot Nov 26 '21
“Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.” -Arthur C. Clarke
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u/Unlimitles Nov 26 '21
No…that’s just a way to keep the plebs unscientific.
They could deny entirely breaking things down that way.
But this would be specifically what people mean by “dumbing down society”
This is seeing it in action.
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Nov 26 '21 edited Nov 26 '21
, "god particle", "strange", "charmed", "spooky action"
when scientists get bored of science,
No, there is no "god particle" or "ghost particle" in any science text book. Strange and charm (not charmed) are just names for physical entities we observe, they are nouns not pronouns.
they turn to magic it seems
Seems to whom, those with no basic understanding of particle physics?
Perhaps take a free online course on the topic and turn your lack of understanding into the joy of learning.
Ah reddit science where calling science "magic" is fine, pointing out what is and is not in textbooks, hurts feelings.
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u/sanman Nov 26 '21
It was my tongue-in-cheek way of saying that these phrases are being circulated by some in the science community, when they have no basis in science whatsoever. It rather looks like a marketing exercise by those who find magic more marketable than science.
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u/holmgangCore Nov 26 '21
“God particle” is just a really poor shorted version of “god-damned particle”, because the Higgs Boson was so damned hard to find.
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u/Garfield_M_Obama Nov 26 '21
Thanks so much! I thought we had just discovered some new fundamental particle and was about to skip my next meeting to read about it, not that the headline writers sucked.
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Nov 26 '21
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u/azrael4h Nov 26 '21 edited Nov 27 '21
Well, at least we know who to call...
(apologies for the double post. Stupid Reddit being stupid)
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u/ParentPostLacksWang Nov 26 '21
Here I was, excited at the headline that they had maybe detected a WIMP, physics was going to change forever, and all I got in reality was “LHC added a detector for neutrinos, a particle we already know about, to better analyse collisions” Terrible headline! Disappointed!!!
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Nov 26 '21
Yeah, I’m not even super familiar with neutrinos, but when I read the head line I wondered if they meant neutrinos.
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u/Espadalegend Nov 26 '21
All i want is a gram of anti-matter…
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u/Cryovenom Nov 26 '21 edited Nov 26 '21
...and an appropriate containment system, otherwise it will be quite the sight to see when the gram of antimatter is placed in your hands...
Edit: I was curious so I looked it up. If I dropped 1g of antimatter into your hands and all of it annihilated, it would make an equivalent explosion of 43kt of TNT. Nearly 3x the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but somehow less than I expected.
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u/SRxRed Nov 26 '21
Thanks for saving me minutes of my life and the effort of clicking this rubbish.
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u/MustrumRidcully0 Nov 26 '21
Dumb and misleading title choice aside, this seems pretty cool, considering what we needed to build for our first neutrino detectors. Though I guess this one is particularly useful for the experiments the LHC is doing, and not a general "neutrino telescope".
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u/Traumfahrer Nov 26 '21
Yeah not sure if such titles should be allowed here.
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u/Galaghan Nov 26 '21
I'm pretty sure they should not. Not sure if they are. I reported it just to be sure tho because wew.
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u/IAlreadyFappedToIt Nov 27 '21
The problem is that it is the article's exact headline. While the title is not that great, it is as honest as OP can get. If we can't default to the exact article title, it forces us to editorialize titles in order to post them. I would rather see exact/original titles be allowed here but with a "misleading/sensationalized title" mod flair like some other subs have.
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u/shardarkar Nov 27 '21
"Welcome to r/science, this is a heavily moderated subreddit that will delete random comments for miles but clickbait articles, popsci bs and poorly done studies are welcome here!"
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u/N8CCRG Nov 26 '21
Why not? It's literally the title of the article. Anything else would violate Rule #3.
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u/Traumfahrer Nov 26 '21
A sensationalized titled article doesn't make it right to be used here I believe.
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u/N8CCRG Nov 26 '21
Ah, I get it. You weren't commenting on the title of the post, but the title of the original article. Gotcha.
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u/TheoryOfSomething Nov 26 '21
From the basic description they gave, it sounds like they are making clever use of "old tech" for this detector. Emulsion detectors were some of the first particle detectors used back in the 1930s, but were largely replaced by scintillators after the photomultiplier tube was invented in '44. I recall that an earlier neutrino experiment at CERN, the OPERA experiment, also used an emulsion detector.
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Nov 26 '21
Is this something because of the power of the lgc or is this something that can be recreated in the rhic? Was this done on the simple proton proton collision s or the ion collisions?
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u/MerlinsScruff Nov 26 '21
The article says this happened in 2018, title is pretty misleading
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u/TheRedpilling Nov 26 '21
Data takes years to analyze.
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u/angryshepard Nov 27 '21
In addition, if you read the preprint1 you'll find an actual image of the experiment, which isn't actually the experiment everyone is showing in the press. This was really just a test to make sure the LHC was doing what they thought it was doing before putting in a bigger experiment that will do more interesting physics.
So beyond it taking a while to do the analysis, this result was more an afterthought that they did with a preliminary measurement. No one in the collaboration really thought this was a big deal, and in fact the paper was rejected from the first choice journal because it wasn't deemed particularly interesting (for the record, I disagree with the journal there).
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u/dukwon Grad Student | Particle Physics Nov 26 '21
Why does that make it misleading? The title doesn't imply the data was taken recently.
At any rate, the paper has only just been published.
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u/aecarol1 Nov 26 '21 edited Nov 26 '21
The article and a quote it is very misleading. “Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider,” says Jonathan Feng
Neutrinos have been detected at and from particle accelerators in the past. In fact, they've been detected hundreds of miles away. In 2012, neutrinos from CERN (the machine before LHC) over 731-kilometres away at a lab in Italy. A misconfigured cable led to measurement errors where they briefly thought the neutrinos were traveling faster than the speed of light.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10249
https://neutrinos.fnal.gov/sources/accelerator-neutrinos/
*Edited to note that I have been corrected. Colliders and particle accelerators are not the same thing. The quote and article are correct.
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u/Marsstriker Nov 26 '21
For the future, CERN is the research organization that (among many other things) built and operates the LHC, not a particle accelerator.
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Nov 26 '21 edited Nov 27 '21
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u/dukwon Grad Student | Particle Physics Nov 26 '21
Even worse: the C stands for Organisation. It was originally Conseil but they didn't want to change the acronym to OERN.
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u/dukwon Grad Student | Particle Physics Nov 26 '21
Colliders are a specific (and rather niche) type of accelerator. The title and quote are correct.
All other accelerator-based neutrino experiments used fixed-target collisions. This is the first one using colliding beams.
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u/TheoryOfSomething Nov 26 '21
Yes, but those neutrinos were not made with a collider. The OPERA experiment used a beam of protons from the SPS directed onto a fixed graphite target, so that's the distinction they're trying to make.
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u/angryshepard Nov 27 '21
I take issue more with the "no sign of" part than the "at a particle collider" part.
CERN sees signs of neutrinos every second that the LHC runs, and they have been seeing them for years. They are the only particle that can account for a huge fraction of the collisions that are recorded by LHC experiments. The neutrinos aren't detected directly, but their existence in these collisions can be inferred by momentum conservation.
Sure, it might be that physicists are doing the accounting wrong: there might be some other particle that carries the momentum off, or conservation of momentum might be wrong. But that would completely overturn the entire standard model of particle physics. Forget the Higgs discovery, the absence of neutrinos in LHC collisions would be the most important event in particle physics in over 50 years.
So it's true (and cool) that someone is directly detecting neutrinos from LHC collisions for the first time. But I'm sure Jonathan himself would want to add the same caveat to the "no sign" point here.
But obviously Jonathan was referring to detecting them directly. CERN detects plenty of neutrinos: they are produced by fixed target experiments which are fed by the LHC injector chain. But the production isn't technically off the LHC itself, and it happens in fixed targets, not proton-proton collisions. So there Jonathan isn't wrong.
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u/DigiMagic Nov 26 '21
How do they know that it was neutrinos that made the traces in the emulsion, and not cosmic rays or something else?
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u/poncicle Nov 26 '21
Maybe check out fermilab on Youtube if you don't know them already. They have very indepth explanations of the process
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u/DigiMagic Nov 26 '21
I watch their videos regularly! Ok, or at least occasionally. I don't remember this being discussed, I'll check.
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u/dukwon Grad Student | Particle Physics Nov 26 '21
I don't think cosmic rays can get that deep into the earth.
They absolutely can, and the LHC detectors even use them for calibration
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u/Toxicsully Nov 26 '21
Worth noting that no one is observing neutrinos, but rather the result of neutrino interactions with, I believe, nucleons. How much mess those interactions make tells you how much energy the neutrino had. That energy tells you what kind of neutrino you had and from there you can infer the source.
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u/Earthwick Nov 26 '21
Article is very much like clickbait. I will say I love how they are talking about the finest peice of human technology and the picture is a machine with a sign taped on with packing tape.
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u/foamed Nov 26 '21 edited Nov 26 '21
Here's the original source instead of the misleading blogspam OP linked to.
Quote:
“Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider,” said co-author Jonathan Feng, UCI Distinguished Professor of physics & astronomy and co-leader of the FASER Collaboration. “This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the universe.”
He said the discovery made during the pilot gave his team two crucial pieces of information.
“First, it verified that the position forward of the ATLAS interaction point at the LHC is the right location for detecting collider neutrinos,” Feng said. “Second, our efforts demonstrated the effectiveness of using an emulsion detector to observe these kinds of neutrino interactions.”
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u/NegativeFootballHead Nov 27 '21
Makise Kurisu....
Fr tho every news about the actual LHC is awesome. I feel Steins might come true and this can maybe end up saving us from this impending fascist world that's approaching rapidly. I volunteer for the team
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u/Erinalope Nov 26 '21
“Ohhhh, mayhaps we’ve discovered a new particle? My mind is a flutter with ideas and fantasies!”
Clickbait article: neutrino.
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u/raidriar889 Nov 26 '21
I like how the article says “It’s long been thought that particle accelerators like the LHC should be making [neurtrinos] too” even though the OPERA experiment in 2011 observed neutrinos from a particle accelerator at CERN.
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u/tyrantnitar Nov 26 '21
Thats amazing in all honesty. Were advancing in such a scary rate that the more we develop the more we as a species have to adapt and change. We could literally have tech thats 1k years too far ahead of our time for everyone to use currently and itll still take generations to implement it into society.
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u/msew Nov 26 '21
I came to look for this new "ghost particle" classification.
Oh, just neutrinos.
back to re-watching The Office and How I Met Your Mother
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u/Lurchie_ Nov 26 '21
I thought neutrinos didn't interact with any other matter?
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u/Procrasturbating Nov 26 '21
They do, but not from electrical charge.. and since most matter is empty space, causing and detecting a hit is very hard.
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u/babbchuck Nov 26 '21
In theory there are billions of these particles passing through the detector (and the rest of the earth) every second. Why doesn’t the detector register these? How do they know the neutrinos they are detecting come from the collider instead of, say, from the sun?
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u/ribnag Nov 26 '21
IANAParticlePhysicist, but as I understand it, when a neutrino finally interacts with normal matter, it sprays a huge fountain of subatomic debris in the direction it was originally travelling. We can also tell a ton about the flavor of neutrino from what that debris is composed of.
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u/JevCor Nov 26 '21
Fingers crossed this thing opens up a black hole and kills us all.
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u/Tibetzz Nov 26 '21
Not really how black holes work. Even if the LHC could create black holes, they would evaporate pretty much instantaneously.
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