Of smashing atoms and viewing the results...

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Justin W

Of smashing atoms and viewing the results...

Post by Justin W »

Hey guys

Those pictures we've all seen...
of the little bits of various particles busted loose and spiraling into non-existence...

Could those spirals be what it looks like to view a wave from the side as it travels away from the viewer...?
...to where?
another dimension?

Perhaps quarks and whateverons simply aren't able to exist in our normal space and rocket away from us in a wave-like fashion...?

Food for thought or just inane blather? :oops:
JohnFP

Of smashing atoms and viewing the results...

Post by JohnFP »

Can you post a couple of "pics" that you are talking about? It may stimulate some discussion here. I am not sure I have seen what you are referring to.
Justin W

Of smashing atoms and viewing the results...

Post by Justin W »

Howdy John!
Justin W

Of smashing atoms and viewing the results...

Post by Justin W »

Here's the one I was thinking of:
Attachments
Smashed Atom.jpg
Smashed Atom.jpg (48.24 KiB) Viewed 3554 times
Justin W

Of smashing atoms and viewing the results...

Post by Justin W »

And I just found this great illustration on the web when Google-Imaging Cornu spirals (which those spirals sure look like to me).

I guess what I'm describing is what it looks like to view from the back of the box in this image, with said wave traveling away from the viewer....
Away to where? Out of our space. I suspect they would appear to be receding into the distance no matter what angle the were viewed from.
Attachments
Cornu spiral.gif
Cornu spiral.gif (83.82 KiB) Viewed 3543 times
JohnFP

Of smashing atoms and viewing the results...

Post by JohnFP »

Hey Justin, I have never seen those representations before, but shall do a little digging into them. It seems interesting and anyone's abstract representation of what the subatomic world looks like it worth persuing to me.
Justin W

Of smashing atoms and viewing the results...

Post by Justin W »

Cool, John :D

I've been told before that some of my ideas about the sub-atomic realm are too "classical" where they should be quantum...
For example, my somewhat bizarre and clearly uneducated notions about viewing an electron as a falling body were laughed at and summarily dismissed. I was taught in physics that an orbiting body is perpetually in free-fall and is forever accelerating toward the center of its orbit. When I apply this visual to an electron, I imagine that wee particle endlessly drilling a tiny hole through weird space, forever executing a geodesic exit from our three dimensions into something else - perhaps sharing our electrons with other worlds in the multiverse for an instant or so....

Anyway - I was told this is crap because our ham-fisted species can only measure one parameter of an an electron's properties at any one time. Jerks! Just because we can't see it with our primitive technology, doesn't mean it's not happening. Electrons exist only as a "cloud" of some kind!? Poppycock! I can say with near certainty that they have distinct orbits because I have an optical resonator/coherent light generator that works on that very principle. Scientists can be so stuffy...

But I digress... As regards the images I posted here - That first one on the blue background must have been an early smashing. I recall briefly possessing a textbook in high school with that very image on the cover. I'm only 31, so I'm not saying it's ancient, but I get the impression that it's been in circulation long enough to be nearly public domain or so... I have no clue what particle accelerator created it, but I'm pretty certain it's representative of what we tend to record when busting atoms apart, and I really do wonder if those tiny spirals may just be what an untethered particle looks like when given no choice but to display its wave-like properties...

That second image was a lucky find. I was planning on sitting down in front of DeltaCad and painstakingly drawing out a spiral plotted in three dimensions, and in searching for tips on drawing spirals, I encountered Cornu spirals. I'll swear I see Cornus when I look at the smashed atoms, and went looking those up specifically, only to find that someone had already done the work of plotting one out 3D! Niiiice.

So yep. While it's likely that my insights are entirely misguided, still I find a sublime harmony in the fact that a spiral is exactly what a sine wave looks like when viewed axially.
Ed Wesly

Of smashing atoms and viewing the results...

Post by Ed Wesly »

I know a little bit about what these tracks are since I had worked as a holographic engineer at FermiLab to record these tracks holographically. Excuse the hazy memory. (We had to figure out the holographic resolution in the depth as the bubbles are on the order of 100 microns or so, see the other thread that I have been posting on.)

The curlicues are bubbles formed by the particles as they collide with liquid hydrogen in the bubble chamber. Because they are losing their energy the spirals have sort of a Geometric Decay (a title of an art piece that will be in the holography show at FermiLab opening 9/26/08, gotta get a plug in!) and their direction is determined by their charge, as the liquid is surrounded by a huge magnet. (Which would try to pick your pocket if you walked too close to the bubble chamber with your keys in your pockets!)

The shape and length would be characteristic of whatever particles, muons, bosons, top quarks, bottom quarks, (sounds like gay porno or good band or alien names!) I didn't pay too much attention to it as these guys were so caught up in their own hubris. These Ph.D types were always making everybody feel stupid, like one time I was talking about the beam ratio, and mentioned 4 to 1 was typical, and they said more object light than reference? like as if I didn't know WTF I was talking about, as they in their measly little world invented their own version of holography, where object beam came first in the Beam Balance Ratio!

It was a hilarious sit com working there, we never really got any good holos, much less anything that showed what they were looking for. They ran the reference beam through the bubble chamber, and the high peak power of the pulsed ruby laser boiled the liquid the same way that the incoming atomic particles did, so there was a nice cone of black in the photos coming out of the dispersing lens in the bottom of the bubble chamber. Some sort of perversion of the Heisenburg uncertainty principle, where you can't observe something without changing it.

So they put a lot of R & D into stretching the pulse from the laser so that the typical q-switch 20 nanoseconds was extended to about 20 milliseconds, 3 orders of magnitude, no mean feat, my hat's off to the electronic engineers who accomplished that. So the peak power went down, exposure time went up, so the Agfa 10E75 we were using was happy, the liquid didn't boil from the laser light, but because the chamber shook from a piston that dropped at its bottom to expand the volume so that it was more sensitive to incoming radiation, the "long" exposures fell victim to the #1 killer of holograms, object movement! Our tax dollars at work!

And Fermi was always in fear of that creepy Phil Gramm congressman, who was threatening to cut off funds for research to balance the budget. (The Gramm-Rudman act of the mid-'80's) But then he later hijacked the concept of particle accelerators to his home state of Texas, a real pork barrel manuever, to build the Super-Conducting Super Collider, from scratch, when it could have been less costly to just add to Fermi! And of course the infamous red ants bit him in the a**, and the project got deep-sixed, but probably not before his constituency profited. So what they are doing at CERN with the anti-matter whatnot could have been happening here if it weren't for our crooks in office!
Martin

Of smashing atoms and viewing the results...

Post by Martin »

Ed Wesly wrote:...whatever particles, muons, bosons, top quarks, bottom quarks, (sounds like gay porno or good band or alien names!)...
...or directly taken from a book like James Joyce's Finnegan's wake (see e.g. http://www.psc.edu/science/2002/milc/st ... uarks.html) :lol:
Justin W

Of smashing atoms and viewing the results...

Post by Justin W »

Ed!
Thanks for your post, brother. A fun read and informative.
Particles spiraling through hydrogen? Neat! Wow I guess it's all about spin characteristics (and charge [so they wouldn't spiral like that if the big@ss magnets weren't there?])... Isn't spin stuff one of the biggies in quantum computing?
Anyway - thanks for sharing your story of good times at Ye Olde Atom Smasher. Musta been a trip moving about the guts of that mammoth machine. Hologramming subatomic activity... Wild!
Mightycool.
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