Degenerate matter

A brief linguistic history of particle physics

I: The Classical Period

atom (ca600BC) from the Greek ἄτομος “that which cannot be cut”

electron (1847) from “electricity”, ultimately from the neo-Latin electricus, “amber-like”

proton (1919) from the Greek πρῶτον “first”

neutron (1939) from the Latin neutral and Greek suffix -ον

positron (1936) portmanteau of “positive” and “electron”

neutrino (1930s) a pun of Enrico Fermi on the Italian for neutron, neutrone

II: Alphabet Soup

muon (1936) originally “mesotron” from the Greek μέσος “middle”, then shortened to “meson”. After whole families of other mesons were discovered, it was renamed the μ-meson or mu meson in 1947. As it turns out, the mu meson was not a meson after all, and so was renamed the muon. Things go downhill pretty quickly from here.

pion (1947) originally pi-meson, after the Greek letter π

kaon (1947) originally K-meson, after the letter K

Followed by J/ψ, Σ, Λ, etc.

III: Mr Gell-Mann Has Time On His Hands

quark (1963) from the sound made by a duck, and only a reference to a phrase in Finnegans Wake by accident

gluon (1964) named after glue

Higgs boson (1964) after Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who hypothesised it, and “boson” is from physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. Many physicists at the time were working on the idea of a scalar field which imparts mass to all other particles, so it could easily have been named the Englert, Brout, Guralnik, Hagen or Kibble boson.

Mollusca of Hyperion

Breakfast on Hyperion

Zurek and Paz calculate (not recently — this is fun, not breaking news) that if Hyperion were isolated from the rest of the universe, it would evolve into a non-localized quantum state over a period of about 20 years. It’s an impressive example of quantum uncertainty on a macroscopic scale. –Cosmic Variance

Pushing my head through a few layers of rubble, I rested against the crumbly wall of my crater to enjoy the dawn. The sun rose in the south, hesitated, coughed and set very quickly again a couple of degrees west. It then smeared itself underneath the sky and sent a lazy ribbon spiralling east-nor-east, behind Big Lump, which is where east-nor-east has been for the last few weeks.

It promised to be a beautiful day, bright and sunny but with only a hint of decoherence. A neatly laid table set with silver cutlery and fresh white bistro linen appeared next to the crater. It held a plate of soft poached eggs, two buttered muffins, a silver pitcher of hollandaise sauce, a pot of freshly made tea and the mummified head of a bull giraffe. I rearranged the dusty debris of the crater wall into a comfortable beanbag shape – I don’t know how people can live on non-porous worlds, it’s really very convenient and cozy as long as you remember not to breathe in when your mouth is covered – unfolded my napkin and politely tossed the giraffe’s head towards the southern horizon. It spun gently for a while, silhouetted against the Rings, and then blossomed into an impressive brown and yellow aurora.

There was a small frog where the yolk of the second egg should have been. It turned out to be slightly overdone, but you can’t expect everything to be perfect.

Difficulties

Slime

This afternoon: my sister came over and we had science day with cornstarch ooblek and psyllium flubber. I’d made the first one but the second was new to me. I’ve never taken Metamucil and don’t think I want to now that I’ve seen what it turns into when mixed with water and microwaved repeatedly: a kind of ropey biological mucus which looks like it’s about to have an argument with Doctor Who.

The girls reacted with delight to both of them: the ooblek got thrown around and the flubber was used to make obscene noises by pushing it into a plastic container.

Tomorrow we’re going up the mountains for the night.

Moods, science and lamb steaks

My mood has been touch-and-go for the past month: a couple of colds and Dad’s visit to hospital were the main reasons. Things are getting back on track this week. Although I just typed and deleted a long rant about that silly Chris Anderson article in Wired (the one about how we don’t need the scientific method anymore because of Google and petabytes and how everything we know is wrong! Again! Still!) so I’m clearly not out of the woods yet.

One way to avoid such useless mental activity: chop a handful of mint leaves with two cloves of garlic, half a teaspoon of sugar and a few grinds of salt, rub it onto lamb steaks, grill, serve to appreciative children.

The Child in Time

Backlog of tiny reviews 2

I got a bit tired of being the only middle-class person in Sydney who hasn’t read any McEwan. The Child In Time is upsetting, almost deliriously so, if you have children, or know any children, or perhaps just if you were once a child yourself; but it is very good. The elements of fantasy reminded me curiously of Brian Aldiss, probably because the latter author wrote a short story which also refers to David Bohm. McEwan gestures at a longed-for synthesis via some quantum hand-waving (and thus, also, hand-particling?) and the neat device of having his central character fail to understand the lectures on physics. In 1982, Janine Gray also uses science as a potential source of hope: it’s more ferocious – McLeish’s utopian fantasies are quick to slump into angry despair – but also more optimistic, because not as dependent on future developments. With Gray, the tools are already in our hands, if only we would put them to use.

Merry Christmas

My old lolswanz got blogged at New Scientist!

Off home soon – I’ll be back on Thursday.

The Voyager Images III

…and third thoughts, which started out as a reply to Tom’s comment to Wednesday’s post but grew:

Calling something “art”, like calling it “engineering”, “religion”, “warfare” or “terrorism”, is in itself a piece of political analysis, since the value we give activities depends on how they’re labelled. Sending a space probe to Saturn as scientific exploration will get more funding than sending it as an art project or an exercise in landscape photography, even though the Cassini images are breathtakingly beautiful. Would the space probe have been launched if the beauty of the images was the only justification? But the formal justification – scientific research – can, in this case, be seen as another form of aesthetic appreciation. Of what Earthly (literally) use is an understanding of, say, the dynamics of Saturn’s rings? Understanding is another form of aesthetic enjoyment- less sensual, more intellectual, but still aesthetic.

That’s a digression from the idea I’m really interested in exploring here, however clumsily. What happens when the ostensible target of a cultural activity is imaginary or hypothetical? Does it become art, by default? And is that just because in the 20th century “art” was expanded to comprehend just about everything that’s not immediately useful, but which is not team sports?

This is, in a sense, an inverse of the modernist gesture of labelling one’s own activities or objects (urinals, glasses of water, etc) as “art”: labelling someone else’s behaviour as “art”. This could be, but is not necessarily, a way of trivialising or satirising it. My unmade bed, which I label as “art”, acquires aura and status – well, if I’m Tracy Emin, anyway. But if I call your space program “art”, the implication will probably be the reverse.

Another thought: religious artefacts tend to become artworks over time, as the faith that built them changes or disappears; veneration is replaced by aesthetic appreciation. The same thing may happen to science.

The Voyager images II

…on second thoughts, there’s no need to play some kind of clever metafictional game to get to the idea of the Voyager images as a kind of weird conceptual artwork.

Of course it’s an artwork. On Mundane SF principles, the chances of the ostensible audience, “aliens”, ever finding it and understanding it, is negligible; even if this were to happen, the chances of us finding out that it did are still more remote.

So: we are the only audience. Sending the golden record into space was a ritual act, a piece of science fiction performance, especially the laborious initial sequence of images which is intended to teach the hypothetical alien recipients a basic grammar of physical and mathematical concepts. Ostensibly, it’s us telling the aliens “we are here”: really, it’s us telling ourselves “we are here, and here is how we want them to see us”.

Is it legit to impute artistic motives to a project like this? It feels like the complement, or the inverse, of “outsider art” – taking an activity which may mean something quite different to its creator and framing it as art.

In what sense was the space program an artwork? What about the pyramids?