🚀 go-pugleaf

matt@physics.berkeley.edu wrote:
> mcirvin@husc8.harvard.edu (Mcirvin) writes about the possibility that we
> are only living in a false vacuum now and that high-energy experiments
> might catalyze a phase transition to the true vacuum:
> I once suggested to Lawrence Hall that it was a truly wonderful
> opportunity for rabble-rousing politics---definitely an argument
> against the SSC that hasn't yet been sufficiently exploited by the
> project's opponents.
> I can just visualize the scene in Waxahachie: thousands of protestors
> chaining themselves to the gates and throwing themselves in front of
> bulldozers, holding up signs that say "Save the universe"!

On the other hand, *this*, about the possibility of breaking the symmetry of
the EM force...

| Someone told me once that a massive photon might not be fatal if the mass
| was low enough.  The range of the electromagnetic interaction would shrink
| from infinity to a length of the order of a metre or so, with no practical
| consequences (?), and there would be a lower frequency limit to the EM spec-
| trum.  Atoms, nervous systems and Usenet would be unharmed; we would simply
| wake up one morning without TV.

...if it can be provoked by human intervention, is about the strongest
argument for continuing fundamental-particle research I have ever seen.  At
last, a decay path for the terrywogon.  Let me know where I can send my $10
to the SSC...

Is it actually the case that the maximum wavelength of real photons must
coincide with the range of interaction of a force mediated by virtual
photons?

-- 
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