{"id":6939,"date":"2011-06-20T09:09:15","date_gmt":"2011-06-20T16:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=6939"},"modified":"2011-06-20T09:09:15","modified_gmt":"2011-06-20T16:09:15","slug":"chirality-and-the-positrons-mustache","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/20\/chirality-and-the-positrons-mustache\/","title":{"rendered":"Chirality and the Positron&#8217;s Mustache"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2011\/06\/the-winners-of-the-3-quarks-daily-2011-science-prize.html\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/2011\/06\/6a00d8341c562c53ef0154330d829c970c-800wi.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"160\" height=\"350\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-6940\" \/><\/a>  Woke up this morning to the happy news that my post &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2010\/10\/18\/the-fine-structure-constant-is-probably-constant\/\">The Fine Structure Constant is Probably Constant<\/a>&#8221; walked away with the Charm Quark (i.e., tied for third place) in this year&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2011\/06\/the-winners-of-the-3-quarks-daily-2011-science-prize.html\">3QuarksDaily science blogging prizes<\/a>.  Many thanks to Lisa Randall for judging and Abbas Raza and the 3QD crew for hosting.  And of course congrats to the other winners:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Top Quark: SciCurious, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/blog\/post.cfm?id=serotonin-and-sexual-preference-is-2011-03-28\">Serotonin and Sexual Preference: Is It Really That Simple?<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Strange Quark: Anne Jefferson, <a href=\"http:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/2011\/05\/levees-and-the-illusion-of-flood-control\/\">Levees and the Illusion of Flood Control<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Charm Quark: Ethan Siegel, <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/startswithabang\/2011\/05\/where_is_everybody.php\">Where Is Everybody?<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I already have a great nominee for next year&#8217;s contest.  One of the most confusing things in particle physics is the notion of &#8220;chirality.&#8221;  The related notion of a particle&#8217;s &#8220;helicity&#8221; is relatively easy to explain &#8212; is the particle spinning in a left-handed or right-handed sense when compared to its direction of motion?  But a massive particle need not have a direction of motion, it can just be sitting there, so the helicity is not defined.  Chirality is the same as helicity &#8212; left-handed or right-handed &#8212; for massless particles moving at the speed of light, but it&#8217;s always defined no matter how the particle is moving.  It had better be, since the weak interactions couple to particles with left-handed chirality but not ones with right-handed chirality! (And the opposite for antiparticles.)<\/p>\n<p>It all gets a bit heady, and you can&#8217;t give a real explanation without going beyond simple pictures and actually talking about the quantum wave function.  But <a href=\"http:\/\/www.quantumdiaries.org\/2011\/06\/19\/helicity-chirality-mass-and-the-higgs\/\">Flip Tanedo at Quantum Diaries has given it an heroic effort<\/a>, which I insist you go read right now.  I don&#8217;t want to reproduce the whole thing &#8212; Flip was more careful and thorough than I ever would have been, anyway &#8212; but I will tease you with this one picture.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.quantumdiaries.org\/2011\/06\/19\/helicity-chirality-mass-and-the-higgs\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/2011\/06\/impositron.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"404\" height=\"177\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-6943\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Isn&#8217;t that the cutest pair of elementary particles you&#8217;ve ever seen?  I smell a Quark in this lepton&#8217;s future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Woke up this morning to the happy news that my post &#8220;The Fine Structure Constant is Probably Constant&#8221; walked away with the Charm Quark (i.e., tied for third place) in this year&#8217;s 3QuarksDaily science blogging prizes. Many thanks to Lisa Randall for judging and Abbas Raza and the 3QD crew for hosting. And of course [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,47,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-internet","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6939\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}