![]() ![]() However, for particles, this set is surprisingly small. Such carving must be heavily dependent on descriptive dimensions: quantifiable ways that an entity may differ from one another.įor perceptual intake, the number of irreducible dimensions may be very large. ![]() The first phase of my lens-dependent theorybuilding triad I call conceptiation: the art of carving concepts out of a rich dataset. This is the only reason why we don’t find atomic nuclei orbited by tau particles. Why? Because the higher-energy particles that comprise the second and third generations tend to be unstable: give them time (fractions of a second, usually), and they will spontaneously decay – via the weak force – back into first generation forms. Will there be a fourth generation, will we discover some upper bound on fermion generations?Įven though we know of three generations, in practice only the first generation “matters much”. The fermion with the highest mass – the Top quark – was only discovered in 1995. Physicists had to close the translation distance gap, by building bigger and bigger particle accelerators. The latter generation took lots of time to “fill in” because you only see them in high-energy situations. To date, physicists have discovered three generations of fermions: And we can pull this magic trick once more, and find fermions even heavier than these fermions. It turns out that you can: there exist particles identical to these four fermions with one exception: they are more massive. What would happen if we were to pump a very large amount of energy into the system, say by striking an up quark with a high-energy photon? Must the output energy be expressed as hundreds of up quarks? Or does nature have a way to “more efficiently” spend its energy budget? Just as particles spontaneously “jump” energy levels, sometimes particles morph into different types of particles, in a way akin to chemical reactions. Notice that all fermions have spin ½ we’ll return to this fact later.Ĭonservation of energy is a thing, but conservation of particles is not. Here we see a typical detector, with scientists inspecting their instruments in the center, for contrast: Because of their weak interactivity, our neutrino detectors must be large, and buried deep inside the earth (to shield from “noise” – more common particle interactions). ![]() Such weak interactivity explains the measurement technology lag.Īre you sufficiently creeped out by how many particles pass through you undetected? □ If not, consider neutrino detectors. In fact, in the time it takes you to read this sentence, hundreds of billions of neutrinos have passed through every cubic centimeter of your body without incident. Due to these factors, neutrinos such as those generated by the Sun pass through the Earth undetected. As such, they only interact with other particles via the weak force (which has a very short range) and the atomic force (which is 10^36 times less powerful than electromagnetic force). Why did it take relatively longer to discover this fourth particle? Well, these hypothesized neutrinos do not carry an electric charge or a color charge. And they found it 26 years later, in 1956. The scientific community began to speculated that a fourth type of fermion existed, even with an absence of physical evidence. And so, scientists were confronted with the following dilemma: either reject conservation of energy, or posit the existence of an unknown particle to “balances the books”. However, when you actually calculate the energetic content of decay process given above, you find a mismatch. Ĭonservation of energy dictates that such decay reactions must preserve energy. But these forms are expressions of a single underlying phenomena.Ĭonsider the analogy between. There are many forms of energy: kinetic, electric, chemical, gravitational, magnetic, radiant. Today, we’re going to go spelunking into the fabric of the cosmos! But first, some tools to make this a safe journey.Įnergy is the hypothesis of a hidden commonality behind every single physical process. ![]() Prerequisite Post: An Introduction To EnergyĬontent Summary: 2100 words, 21 min reading time. ![]()
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