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The Scientists Who Look for Nothing to Understand Everything
The Z’ would be a sort of spiritual medium that communicates both with regular matter and dark matter, that mysterious stuff that accounts for all that extra mass scientists think they observe but can’t explain other than through observations with telescopes.The Scientists Who Look for Nothing to Understand Everything Physicist Usama Hussain laughed uncomfortably every time the conversation even got close to the question, “Do you look for nothing?” His professors would kill him if they heard him agree with that. After all, he’s technically looking for a brand new particle that may or may not exist, with the hopes that it might help explain some of the Universe’s weirdness.
But hunting for a new particle (even the famous Higgs Boson) is a search for something by finding all of the nothing. It requires confirming all of the places it can’t be, and understanding all the properties it doesn’t have, so what’s left is the discovery. It’s like carving a sculpture from marble. You spend all your effort removing the nothing, and maybe you’ll end up with something. Or maybe not.
“Anything that happens, even if we find nothing at all, will be a revolution.”
And finding nothing where well-accepted theories predicted something is equally important. That could send theorists back to the drawing board, and require physicists to rethink their understanding of the Universe. In this new Wild West era of particle hunting, “Anything that happens, even if we find nothing at all, will be a revolution,” physicist James Beacham from the Ohio State University told me over a beer in the CERN cafeteria in Geneva, Switzerland.
But hunting for a new particle (even the famous Higgs Boson) is a search for something by finding all of the nothing. It requires confirming all of the places it can’t be, and understanding all the properties it doesn’t have, so what’s left is the discovery. It’s like carving a sculpture from marble. You spend all your effort removing the nothing, and maybe you’ll end up with something. Or maybe not.
“Anything that happens, even if we find nothing at all, will be a revolution.”
And finding nothing where well-accepted theories predicted something is equally important. That could send theorists back to the drawing board, and require physicists to rethink their understanding of the Universe. In this new Wild West era of particle hunting, “Anything that happens, even if we find nothing at all, will be a revolution,” physicist James Beacham from the Ohio State University told me over a beer in the CERN cafeteria in Geneva, Switzerland.
“We’re really in uncharted territory as far as physics is concerned,” said Hussain. “The small hope is always there” that his team discovers a new particle—he specifically is looking for something called the Z’ (“Z-prime”) particle. The Z’ would be a sort of spiritual medium that communicates both with regular matter and dark matter, that mysterious stuff that accounts for all that extra mass scientists think they observe but can’t explain other than through observations with telescopes.(There’s also dark energy, which makes up most of the Universe’s mass-energy, but we don’t need to talk about that right now.) The Z’ particle’s shards consist of what looks like a skinny jet of subatomic particles with some missing energy....
https://gizmodo.com/the-scientists-who-look-for-nothing-to-understand-every-1796309514
https://gizmodo.com/the-scientists-who-look-for-nothing-to-understand-every-1796309514
53 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Here it is, from Mr. Heisenberg:
The counter is also true from the given inequality. The uncertainty of energy of empty space, given any arbitrary small time frame, approaches infinity as the time frame of the measurement approaches zero.
Therefore, as Richard Feynman said when asked Why is there something rather than nothing?: "Nothing is unstable."
Nothing is inconsistent with the characteristics of reality. It's just that simple.
http://www.quantumdiaries.org/tag/z-prime/
Existing theories predict the Higgs boson, Z', and graviton can all decay into a b quark and an anti-b quark
It's my understanding that those products would not be directly observable, so (in some sense) it's a discussion about book-keeping rules and their consequences for observable decay products
It's an interesting topic. But as far as I can tell, the only reason the article is posted in this forum is that the scientist hasn't learneds to talk to lay-listeners about his research and spouts gibberish about "a sort of spiritual medium that communicates both with regular matter and dark matter"