Few things warm the heart of a scientist more readily than a query from a young, curious mind, eager to learn about our universe. Why, just now I received this inquiring email:
R xxxxxx xxxxxx@hotmail.com to me
Sean,
Neutrons have no chemical properties and reflect no light, but they do have mass and occupy space =matter, and clouds of them will never be visible in space!
I find it difficult to believe people who are supposed to be so smart are suck fucking retards!
Cheers Retard ,
Robert
For the curious:
Always happy to help a fellow seeker of knowledge.
I feel your pain. I get these regularly, and it’s demoralizing.
@Moshe “You might want to invest in a spam filter, the space=matter bit should be a trigger all by itself.”
My physics-related emails usually went unanswered, until after sending one from my home email to my work email I found it was picked up by a spam filter on account of the phrase “via gravity”. This was rather mystifying, until I noticed the word “viagra” !
@AJ (#4) That was my first thought, and what the email’s style suggests. But recalling some of the wilfully ignorant denisons of sci.physics, there’s every chance the sender is an adult, even a stubborn old timer.
@ Hephaestus
When you’re right, you’re right; especially when there are so many creative ways to insult someone without using that word even once. Would stupid, ignorant, backwards, uneducated, or addlepated be more acceptable, or is it a whole turn-the-other-cheek type thing?
100 movie insults
**As a word of warning, almost every other obscene word is used.**
I don’t know much about particle physics but as far as I know proton is highly stable but it’s antimatter ani-proton is not, but neutron and antineutrons both are unstable, I mean like for proton if one was stable and it’s anti was unstable or vice versa then antineutron would be stable and the crackpot theory might work….or did I miss something???….i am into biophysics, mostly biology…
FmsRse12 : “an[t]i-proton is not [stable]”
It’s pretty stable… otherwise you might have just solved the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem, and I would steal your idea and win a Nobel Prize. It’s harder to set limits on the antiproton lifetime than the proton lifetime, but Wikipedia directs us to astro-ph/0003485, which uses reasonable-sounding methodology to set limits of > millions of years.
The particle physicists on here could tell us if there are any predicted asymmetries here, but my guess is no. As I said, matter/antimatter asymmetries are super exciting.
Antiprotons are stable.
See, I subscribe to the attitude that these kinds of things are invigorating. You really see that humanity comes in all kinds, including those that are not worth talking to. We know this and yet we need reminding from time to time.
Delete!
NewEnglandBob:
“He probably got his PhD from Liberty University.”
“Liberty” “University” (which of course is neither) is actually *quite tame* by creationist standards. It’s hardly even an insult anymore; they’re just *boring* since the Lynchburg Cracker Barrel’s #1 customer went to the big barrel in the sky. Don’t get me wrong, LU and I have a very personal dislike of each other, but this just isn’t their style. They at least *act* educated, usually.
Higher on my list of really terrible “schools” are Bob Jones, Pensacola, Brigham Young, Patrick Henry, and a really stupid little place called Appalachian Bible College, plus the imaginary place that Kent Hovind got his “degree” from.
This guy, though, is just some crank; I’m not even sure what he is trying to say.
The problem with cranks is that they know more physics than about 99% of the population but know less physics than about 90% of all physicists. So, they sound convincing to those that don’t know better but are easy to spot by those who do.
Imagine this guy putting together some sort of youtube video where he explained the evidence for dark matter, patiently explained its properties, and then declared it to be neutrons without so much as a nod to big bang nucleosynthesis. Suddenly, you’ve got a bunch more people doing weird stuff like this: http://thunderbolts.info/npa/convergence.htm
Now I come from an era of the universe before the standard model was called such, and I took astrophysics and general relativity in undergrad physics as electives. Back then, before inflation came around, we got lectures on nucleosynthesis, the matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the Hubble constant, but none on why there are not enough neutrons to account for dark matter.
I happen to be a bit on the cranky side today since reading those Wikipedia articles did not really address that problem, so I have to leave it to my own wits to speculate about why this albeit rude e-mail is worth answering.
Here goes: If there were so many neutrons out there in the vastness of space to outnumber protons by say five or ten to one, then we’d see a lot more absorptions of neutrons by various neutron absorbing materials such as gadolinium. Also a lot more decays as prompted by those absorptions. That is, nuclear physics would be way different. A possible counterargument is that galactic normal matter has long since swept away the excess ultracold neutrons (by absorbing them and sometimes re-emitting them as hot neutrons that escape into intergalactic space). If so, the composition of extragalactic dust would still be very much weirder (more like an isotope chart than the periodic table). We don’t see that, so nix the neutrons as dark matter speculation. Note that this argument does not appeal to any theory such as the predictions of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis since that would be a theory appealing to another theory about which not everything is clear.
This hereby ends speculation by me…except on the dineutrons, tetraneutrons, etc., that some French researchers have claimed to see.
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Whoops. I just fell prey to the free-neutron lifetime trick again. Oh well, something stupid in my brain has this fixation on the lifetime of the neutron being on the order of a billion years. Even then, there’d be more protons than neutrons. But there’s still tetra neutrons as a possible explanation!
Wait. I thought everyone knew that the “missing matter” was packing peanuts:
“Scientists spent a huge amount of time and money looking for the missing matter, before realizing it was the white pellets that all their equipment used to search for missing matter was packed in.”
@Cranks-R-Us! #34: Exactly.
What also bugs me is their absolute certitude, which not a single scientist or authentically knowledgable person pretends to.
RIGHTEOUSNESS: a cultural disease cultivated by religion.
@abadidea#33: “This guy, though, is just some crank; Iām not even sure what he is trying to say.”
He’s saying that he’s absolutely right, and he’s sticking his tongue out at Sean to prove it.
#1 Moshe — Why should “space=matter” be discounted (even though it’s not what the ignoramus was saying)? Matter is simply space that is rotating.
Robert’s short email is so rich with irony I can’t stop chuckling. I’ve filed this one away as a model for a future book character. The “Cheer Retard” line is just brilliant.
This is the best email I’ve ever read. It starts as an honest naive thought of a child (a pretty smart one too!) and then, like in “the Exorcist” turns to a nightmare of dumbness š
Cheers ya’all!
Dogg
Depressingly familiar e-mail.
I hate to say this, actually I like saying it š , but the reaction to Sean’s post is more illuminating than the post. I think the post and the way Sean framed it is hilarious. Sean struck exactly the right tone. But by far the majority of comments to it were stating the obvious – that the emailer was wrong. Duh!!!
There sure seems to be a cranky need in people to pile on when something is obviously wrong. Does it ever occur to anyone commenting here that it is equally depressing to see how many people following this blog need to find absolute safety before daring to venture an opinion. I find it amusing that the emailer was so sure of himself. But I also find it amusing that so many scientific types, both professional and amateur, are equally sure about the latest theories (last thirty years) that have a rabid following but no physical proof. What this man is saying is very similar to the evidence string theory has. But unfortunately the emailer does not have the blessings of the gurus of physics so it is very SAFE to criticize.
Why x out the e-mail? I wanna help him with his problem. With SCIENCE!
Are normal protons stable?
Lab Lemming:
Some theories predict they won’t be stable, but the half life is 10^31 years or more. Thus, trying to observe proton decay has been tricky, and so far we haven’t done it. I don’t recall what the most recent reasonable lower limit is, based on the experiments we’ve done.
“Does it ever occur to anyone commenting here that it is equally depressing to see how many people following this blog need to find absolute safety before daring to venture an opinion.”
Does it ever occur to anyone like Eric Habegger that a person’s first encounter of a posting can happen over an appreciable span of time AND may perchance never in the slightest be influenced by previous respondants when “daring to venture” a perfectly legitimate and original opinion utterly unmotivated by any daft notion of “absolute safety” in numbers?
Does it ever occur to anyone like Eric Habegger how “depressing” it is to encounter yet another control-freak policeman on a blog thread, on which almost everyone else presumes a liberty [shudder] of venturing an opinion?
“What this man is saying is very similar to the evidence string theory has. But unfortunately the emailer does not have the blessings of the gurus of physics so it is very SAFE to criticize.”
Ah. Yes. Beware those boogyman “gurus of physics”. (Notice the clear implication that ALL such ‘guru physicists’ are necessarily String Theorists). It’s just not “SAFE” to disagree with them, is it? Even when you’re armed with an authentic understanding of the subject. (HAH). Just as long as folks like you and Robert can declare your outrage and your ‘Constitutional Right’ to harbor the Truth with God-like Certitude, that’s all that counts.
Pathetic.
Lab Lemming #46 asks: “Are normal protons stable?”
Estimated mean lifetime of protons : >2.1Ć10^29 yr (long enough to be confidently considered ‘stable’)
Even the abnormal ones.
In case that got muddled in some browsers, the figure is ‘more than’ 210,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
Or over 700 billion times as long as the current 13.7 billion-year age of the universe.
Curious, isn’t it, that but for a single quark switch, a free neutron’s mean lifespan before decaying into a proton is a digestible span of only about 15 minutes.