🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Yousuf Khan wrote:

> On Sun, 23 Mar 1997 05:00:12 -0500, Chris Wagner
> <wagnerc@ucunix.san.uc.edu> wrote:
> 
> >> Now, we may be accustomed to think of an electron as just a little ball
> >> whirling around a nucleus like a planet orbits a star. But, that's just a
> >> convenient portrayal. Can you imagine it, these things have mass, but no
> >> volume?!? Boggles the mind, doesn't it? But that's just something we have
> >> to get used to in Quantum physics.
> 
> >It seems perfectly logical to me...  Consider this analogy:  What is 
> >the volume of a black hole?  It is a quantum singularity, it has
> >*zero* volume.  But its *effective* volume is the radius of its
> >event horizon.  This very intuitivly transfers to all subatomic
> >particles.  They can all be thought of as quantum singularities of
> >*fixed* mass.  Therefore they don't blow up in mass and size like
> >a black hole.  
> 
> Ah, but there's more to it than that, which I didn't mention previously.
> It's now also thought that the very concept of mass itself has a very
> smallest particle associated with it. For example, an electron and a proton
> have the exact same amount of electric charge (but in opposite directions),
> however, an electron is about 2000 times less massive than a proton. Same
> magnitude of electric charge, but a very different amount of mass. Now,
> there's no explanation for this yet. How can such a tiny particle be the
> equal of a much larger particle when it comes to electric charge? We just
> know it to be true, but we have no idea why. 
> 
> It is postulated that the entire universe is bathed in an as yet undetected
> field called the Higgs field. And the particles that make up this field are
> known as the Higgs boson; the Higgs boson is thought to be the very
> smallest particle of mass in the universe. 

I don't know very much about Higgs potentials, all I know is that it is
using to explain matter generation from vacuum. The Higgs potentials just
after the big bang were supposed to be constant in space and time (because
they need to be inextinguishible from vacuum) and at one point in time
suddenly drop to a minimum. The energy released is supposed to be matter
now. I also now that the Higgs boson is thought to be incredibly massive
itself so it's gonna be a hell of a job to see one in an accelerator. As I
heard. The new ring at CERN is not going to be enough, but maybe Potts
knows this better.


> So it looks like mass is not so
> much a basic inextricable property of matter as just yet another type of
> particle that matter particles attract. So the matter particle known as an
> electron attracts much fewer Higgs bosons than a proton would; and
> particles like photons attract no Higgs bosons at all therefore they are
> massless.  Once we discover our first Higgs boson experimentally, then we
> will start work on a theory that explains how many Higgs boson can be
> expected to be attracted by individual particles, and therefore we will
> know the nature of mass. It should be noted that mass is mass, it doesn't
> matter if a particle is matter or if it is antimatter, it still attracts
> the same amount of mass (i.e. the same amount of Higgs bosons). 
> 
> The reason I brought this up is because you were starting to picture quarks
> and leptons as some sort of mini-blackholes, because they were
> dimensionless. However, in order to have blackholes, you need a
> concentration of the Higgs field, which attracts more Higgs bosons, which
> makes the Higgs field even stronger, etc. That's not the case here, each
> particle attracts whatever number of Higgs bosons it was predestined to
> attract, and no more than that.
> 
> Oh, and BTW, I believe that the Higgs field is somehow attached to the time
> dimension. The field moves with the time dimension, but it doesn't care
> about the space dimensions. Because our matter particles attracted to this
> Higgs field, and this Higgs field is attracted to time, we get washed along
> with the tide of the Higgs field and therefore we get washed along by time.
> If we were massless, we'd all be travelling at the speed of light all of
> the time, and we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between time or
> space, because it would all be the same. But because we have mass, we have
> an awareness of a certain dimension (time) as something different from the
> other dimensions.
> 
> 					Yousuf Khan
> --
> Yousuf J. Khan
> ykhan@achilles.net
> Ottawa, Ont, Canada
> Nation's capital
> 
> 
> 


Dries van Oosten

Eat any good books lately?