Subatomic particle seen changing to antiparticle and back for the first time | Hacker News Reader

Subatomic particle seen changing to antiparticle and back for the first time

ox.ac.uk

147 pointsjdmark27 comments

The big programmer in the sky, responsible for the entire simulation is having fun introducing new variables, whenever our science gets close to the edge of having figured out all of the existing variables.

It’s like moving the cheese :-)

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out".

It has also happened 42 times already.

Perhaps probabilistic quantum effects offer a way to disguise deliberate runtime manipulations from internal observers.

You can also sneak in free will via those effects. The narrative of a purely mechanical deterministic world has fallen apart probably more than is recognized.

Free will does not imply, nor require, determinism. Non-determinism (randomness) does not imply free will. The concepts are orthogonal.

Parent said you could sneak in free will. I don't know that you can really combine determinism and free (autonomous) will.

It's easy: you are the process making your decisions. All determinism means is that your existence was predetermined (i.e. computable in advance, if you had the true omniscience and nigh-omnipotence-levels of compute power to do so); “your actions are predetermined” from there just means that your actions are a result of you, rather than randomness.

If you are within the universe, then determinism doesn't prevent free will in the slightest. It only screens off free will if you believe that free will can only come from an external-to-the-universe supernatural spirit (and ignore that you haven't explained how that has free will).

Non-determinism only gives you free will if you further believe that that random noise somehow gives rise to this supernatural spirit, or allows it to affect the world. For a physicalist, non-determinism actually weakens free will (though not by much).

Remember: all non-determinism can be modelled as determinism plus random input. You can factor out all non-deterministic effects as an extra input bitstream (or… probably real-stream if the universe is continuous) fed into a deterministic process.

From that point of view, non-determinism doesn't really harm free will all that much. All it means is that you're affected by another thing you don't know about, but that's already the case in every conversation you have with another human, deterministic or no.

Under determinism you don't have autonomous free will, and nothing you wrote in those 5 paragraphs actually explained otherwise.

PS I neither believe in free will nor determinism.

The bigger headline is it has some kind of mass difference between the two that could explain the antimatter/matter imbalance in the universe, a major unsolved physics problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p... (baryon asymmetry)

If it’s toggling back and forth and the mass changes, does this mean its momentum should also be changing since mass-energy are conserved?

Seems to me that if a particle is flapping back and forth on mass and it’s energy were not changing this would be extremely weird and maybe even more significant.

They should try to measure this if they haven’t already.

Is it not possible there is a (potentially massive) hole in our understanding of physics or perhaps even a whole different set of rules which we have yet to perceive and explore?

I ask because along with the recent onset of quantum mechanics, proposed unified field theories, and the revived discussion of UFO phenomena in the US (specifically regarding US armed forces’ interactions with “them”), many state that the operation of these UFOs is simply not possible under our defined laws of physics.

Thus, is it wise for us to assume a rule which has held true in our relatively simple world would not change at a different scales of physics?

I’d think it best to be open minded as we explore these new frontiers, but do know that we are often driven to further understanding by our previous understanding.

Disclaimer: I am NOT a professional working within physics or any directly related field.

Yes absolutely possible and also precisely the reason we are looking at these particles. The way science works is that we call these "assumptions" laws because we have never seen them broken and if we do it's likely some other assumption is wrong or our measurements are incorrect. But physics is always based on experiments, and if an experiment would show a violation of the law of conservation, and that experiment is repeatable and no one can find a flaw in it, then the law is changed.

And this is not some idle theory based in idealism, it actually happened in a super real way multiple times the most famous one being when we dropped the Newtonian "laws" for special relativity and quantum physics. No one liked it, no one was happy with it, but physics is about what happens in reality, and reality is what dictates what the laws are.

You probably get some downvotes for the UFO thing, but it doesn't really matter. Scientists don't need UFO's to question their assumptions, but they can be fine inspiration regardless.

The momentum doesn't need to change. If the mass decreases it can just go faster.

If the mass changes from m0 to m1, the velocity has to change by a factor of m0/m1 to conserve momentum. But to conserve kinetic energy speed has to change by a factor of sqrt(m0/m1).

Something else has to be involved to reconcile these conflicting velocity constraints.

Does the energy need to be conserved in the same form?

No. But it needs to be explained what other form it takes.

Mass?

How does that work out in the at-rest frame of reference, when the particle is not moving?

In our current physics everything is always vibrating or moving.

Duplicate with more discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27483949

Does anyone know what writing style this article is using, if indeed it is a defined one?

Specifically I'm referring to how quotations are done with colons and single quotes:

So and so, said: 'The thing they said.'

It’s a press release.

I mean style as in style guide, like APA or MLA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_style_guides

Sounds like neutrino mixing to me; which my naive view (physics graduate along time ago) is related to particles existing in higher dimensional spaces - my theory being they are projections in our 4D.

I guess particle-antiparticle mixing could instead be a temporal phenomenon too?

Translation: "Subatomic particle changing to antiparticle and back confirmed after hundreds of incremental tests and subsequent analysis showed a high enough degree of sigma of certainty"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com