Creating Fermions Matter creation is the inverse process of particle annihilation. Bosons are massless. It is possible to create massive particles from massless photons for example through the conversion of massless particles into one or more massive particles. An example of this is two photons can create and electron-positron pair. This mass creation takes advantage of the momentum conservation laws when two photons collide. The law of conservation of energy sets a minimum photon energy required for creation of a pair of fermions: this threshold energy must be greater than the total rest energy of the fermions created. To create an electron-positron pair the total energy of the photons must be a minimum of just over a mega-electron volt (MeV). The energy is turned into mass through the famous e = mc^2 equation and is an energy value that corresponds to soft gamma ray photons. The creation of a much more massive pair, like a proton and antiproton, requires photons with energy of more
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Causal Relationships
This article is four years old but has some very interesting discussions on the topic of causal relationships and the quantum. "In classical physics – and everyday life – there is a strict causal relationship between consecutive events. If a second event (B) happens after a first event (A), for example, then B cannot affect the outcome of A. This relationship, however, breaks down in quantum mechanics because the temporal spread of a particles’s wave function can be greater than the separation in time between A and B. This means that the causal order of A and B cannot be always be distinguished by a quantum particle such as a photon." https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-mechanics-defies-causal-order-experiment-confirms/
the Big Bang
The Big Bang From: National Geographic (A general overview) How old is the universe, and how did it begin? Throughout history, countless myths and scientific theories have tried to explain the universe's origins. The most widely accepted explanation is the big bang theory. Learn about the explosion that started it all and how the universe grew from the size of an atom to encompass everything in existence today. The Big Bang Theory, no not the television series, but the theory of how the universe as we know it developed. It is a result of observations, modeled using Einstein’s gravitational model and an understanding of quantum physics. So far, even though there are some difficulties, the Big Bang Theory remains consistent (as of September 2022) with the observations and is widely accepted through the cosmological community. Skepticism There is opposition and plenty of skepticism though. It is said that it violates the first law of thermodynamics (you can't create or destroy ma
Imagine
Imagine - a very wonderful topic Imagine, if you will, when we reach out for the planets in our own system and perhaps the stars, how will we go about it? One cannot resist but to think about the space station and spaceship, the United States Spacecraft Discovery One, depicted by Stanley Kubrick from the story by Arthur C. Clark, 2001 – A Space Odyssey. The question is, how would we justify its cost? Where would the resources come from to build such a thing? What’s its return on investment? I would be willing to bet that these questions came up when building ocean going sailing ships and planning trips to prove the world is a sphere. Perhaps similar questions came about when Shackleton was planning to go to the Antarctic pole. It’s time to dream again. Do you remember the spinning wheel space station from that movie? Justification and Return on Investment What is the cost of loosing humans on Earth? You know it can happen many ways. We could eliminate ourselves through war or our ow
Consciousness
What is consciousness A question that seems to be circulating the scientific community more so now with internet social networking than perhaps before the onslaught of the internet. I’ve recently seen a few articles that claim to be scientific in nature may seem to lend little in the way of scientific reasoning and evidence. So here are my thoughts. Consciousness, being an experience of pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience, et cetera requires a system that can experience the above. Let’s take each of these words individually. Pleasure is a complex experience involving emotional responses. The emotional responses need a complex system of pattern matching and temporal sequencing which trigger a range of neurotransmitters (chemical messengers) in many parts of the brain. Visual and auditory experience require a large number of neurons working in conjunction processing signals that directly relate to each other spatially and temporally. This data is segmented by the processing a
Black Holes
Black Holes - a very deep topic Looking into black holes may give us a clue to the speed of causality. They are definitely an extreme object and change everything including time. Let’s start with how black holes are made. Making a Black Hole In order to make a black hole a given amount of mass would have to be compressed so that its mass would fit into the Schwarzschild radius. In order to do this the force applied to the matter at the core would have to exceed the force exerted by the combination of the force generated by thermal energy (random motion of the matter), and the electromagnetic repulsive force and then the nuclear repulsive force. The core of a nuclear fusion reactor, a normal star, is held apart by the vibration of its particles, the electromagnetic and the strong nuclear force, depending on the depth of the measurement and the size of the star. The heat is generated by a combination of the energy of the force from gravity and the energy released by nuclear fusion rea
Darwin and Beyond
Introduction Why is Darwin mentioned in a document about causality? He was a biologist or botanist, and causality is more about physics than biology. Biology is chemistry which is really quantum physics and Darwin’s evolution could not be a better example of causation at the end-result level. The wonders of nature. Life is everywhere we look on this planet that we call Earth. It is there in tropical regions growing wild if we let it. It is there in the temperate areas doing its thing. The oceans are literally full of life everywhere. Even in the hottest and the coldest places on this planet we find life, and nothing seems to stop it, well except us. Of each of life’s varied forms DNA holds not only the code to build itself but memories of the past selves. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, while rats have 21 and mice have 20. Analysis found chromosomes from all three organisms to be related to each other by about 280 large regions of sequence similarity. Yes, we are related to rats