Comment by smurpy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smurpy | Hacker News Reader

It looks like one of the authors is on HN with us. Can you offer any insight into the cause of the confusing language in the "Science News" piece? It reads like it was written by a bot not a human.

In the sentence "With the theory physicists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler were able to prove that when two high-energy photons collide, a positron and an electron arise, i.e. matter is formed" shouldn't the word be "predict" not "prove"?

A more flagrant example of a strange word choice for a human science writer to make is "A direct conversion would require a laser that emits gamma-ray photons in a highly concentrated steel." Shouldn't the word "steel" instead be "beam"? This seems like the sort of thing an uncomprehending bot might do, conflate those two words.

Are my the nits I've picked, above, unfounded? Does the author of the original paper have any information which might suggest that an actual human wrote the "Science News" piece?

If not I would suggest that we've got a bot on the loose! Eeek!

Further, I think I'm seeing rather a lot of "content" floating around recently which smacks of machine origins.

Also, to Daniel... Great paper. Amazing stuff!

Author here, thanks! I am not familiar with this website (science-news.co) so I cannot comment on the quality of the writing (or human origin). I agree with you that "prove" should be "predict" - they did not prove anything except that from a theory standpoint, this process can happen in quantum mechanics.

The sentence about lasers is also strange, I have no idea what is meant there. My only guess is that it might be trying to describe some laser experiment that uses lasers to "heat" a hohlraum to produce a field of photons. Then some other high energy photon beam is used to collide with the photons inside the hohlraum.

edit: Original article from DOE press release is here with a bit more info: https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023

Ok, we've changed the URL to that from https://science-news.co/scientists-create-matter-from-pure-l.... Thanks!

Dang, the old URL is the Google translation of a German-language magazine article (not attributed, so it's functionally plagiarism):

https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/physik/mater...

You've previously asked for examples [0] of this type of fraud on HN: so this is one example! Credit to 'smurpy' in this thread, who noticed the 'bot'-like writing style.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27295943

Thank you! I have banned the site.

Automated synonym replacement is the current cutting edge in plagiarism, or more generously, avoiding automated plagiarism detection. There was recently a large scandal in which some large number of scientific papers were traced to a ghostwriting house via their automated synonyms.

So my guess would be that the science news "author" is rewording things to avoid stepping on another author's copyright.

> So my guess would be that the science news "author" is rewording things to avoid stepping on another author's copyright.

And doing it badly...

It's Google's machine translation of a German-language article,

https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/physik/mater...

Good shout! The German article definitely misspells Strahl (beam) as Stahl (steel), which makes no sense in context.

How can two photons collide? Aren't photons force carriers/bosons?

Yes, photons are bosons / force carriers, but they interact with charged particles, and in this case produce e+ e- pairs via this Feynman diagram [1]. By rotating the diagram in spacetime, you get different known interactions: pair production (this topic), pair annihilation (same diagram running the other way in time), and, if memory serves, Compton scattering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_physics#/media/File...

So, can photons interact and produce matter without particles to interact with?

One of the consequences of E=MC^2 is that there is a strong implication that energy can be converted directly into energy and vice versa.

Photons, although mass-less, have energy and can therefore be converted into matter under some circumstances.

I think you mean "directly into matter".

Yes. Thank you!

Apparently my well intentioned ramblings can be directly converted into brain farts.

I’ve always understood photons as being “stuff” in it’s all energy no mass state.

What is “stuff” as all matter no energy?

Probably any matter at absolute 0 would qualify? I think otherwise all mass has some excess of energy in it, I could be wrong.

Alternatively, possibly dark matter would qualify, although I am not sure either as we haven't even proven that it exists.

Wait, no, I was wrong. Matter and Energy are the same thing. Only nothing has no energy or matter.

"Rotate the diagram in spacetime" would make for some top-tier technobabble (not expressing doubt that it is a real thing, just wow, it sounds so cool).

Well, "rotating the diagram in spacetime" is also exactly what you do when you move your hands while holding the printout of a diagram...

(In this case though it's about rotating what's shown in the diagram, that is the interactions pictured, not the diagram itself :-))

This is as deliciously anti-climactic as finding out what "non-Euclidean space" means after hearing it a lot in Cthulu-like horror settings

Ok, so high enough energy photons fluctuating to other particle/antiparticles and then being able to interact with other high enough photons is an explanation I'm willing to settle for, because I thought that multiple bosons can occupy the same space, thus they were not able to interact with each other, by the "boson" definition.

It's still blows my mind that a photon could do that -- turn into a particle-antiparticle pair, the pair then quickly gets annihilated and turns back into the same photon and continues in the exact same direction and form the initial photon was travelling.

But if this process is real, does it mean that high energy photons travel slower than low energy photons?

Because low energy photons could not transform into particles that have mass, while higher energy photons could and thus spend just a liiiiiiitle bit more time as massive particles that can't travel at the speed of light.

Although in propositional logic we can say:

x ⊢ y

which means "x proves y".

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