Whew, I seem to have really shot my mouth off on that one!
Thanks guys -- I knew I could count on you... :)
I was talking off the top of my head, and couldn't remember
details about some of the aspects of particle physics. I have no
defense against allegations of making up information.
To respond to specific comments:
To R. W. Moore ([email removed]):
I did not state that the fundamental force carriers were charged
electrically. I stated that they were charged with the force that
they were carrying -- i.e. photons carry electromagnetic force and
so on.
I had remembered that the 'pion' was identified as having been a
carrier of the strong force; I did not know that it was indeed a
meson and not a particle in and of itself.
I had believed that all virtual particles (those introduced for
bookkeeping and thus are not observed) were massless. I was
mistaken.
I stated that particles with zero mass have infinite
relativistic speed. What I meant by that is that the quantity
one over tau reaches infinity at velocity c. Thus the amount of
energy required to accelerate a mass to velocity c is infinite, thus
the velocity is infinite in terms of energy expenditure. That
statement was used to justify my mentioning that since an infinite
amount of energy has been expended to accelerate a zero-mass
particle, the amount of mass the particle has now is finite. By
'you can pick whatever value you like' I meant that you can do so
when the particle is created. Photons can have any mass you want,
depending on their frequency/wavelength/energy/mass. I apologize
for making such vague statements. They were clear to me while I was
writing them, but after looking back I realize that they were
unclear out of context. I did not mean to imply that photons have
a completely variable mass, nor that they travel instantaneously.
The statement that gravity detectors need to have a substance
that is not affected by gravity included was simply stupid. I had
been thinking in engineering terms of 'well, you need to insulate
blah-blah from what you're measuring, or it'll cancel everything
out'. Baloney. I would like to point out that the gluons and
bosons that Roger mentions being detected by ordinary matter do so
after going through an accelerator and observing the energy from the
collisions -- we know of no such way to treat gravitons right now.
But, then again, that may be fixed by the next theory to come down
the pike.
To Richard Fernholz ([email removed]):
Thanks for the review. I had heard about the electroweak
unification theories, but had not seen anything specific about the
particles recently. Also, thanks for the QCD review. I had, I
guess conveniently, forgotten about the fact that the pion was a
meson -- I had assumed that it, like the muon, was a fundamental
particle. I'd learned about them from an Asimov article, and the
conclusion he'd made at the time was that the pion carried the
strong force.
To Robert Flammang ([email removed])
I had assumed that there was some more complex bookkeeping
method to reduce the effects of the strong and weak forces than
having massy exchange particles. I stand corrected.
To Leonard Erickson ([email removed])
Again, I had assumed that there was some more complex
bookkeeping method involved (than exchange particle mass). Does
this involve the uncertainty princple and thus the range that a
particle can travel before being detected is dependent on the chance
that it will be 'seen'? Hmmm.
At any rate, thank you for setting me (and the list) straight.
Jack Dietz
// [email removed]