Mesons Flip Between Matter and Antimatter 150
steve writes "A team of over 700 physicists at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator have observed the B-sub-s meson oscillating between matter and antimatter states at 3 trillion times a second. From the Fermilab press release: 'Immediately after the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago, equal amounts of matter and antimatter formed. Much of it quickly acted to annihilate the other, but for little-understood reasons, a bit more matter than antimatter survived, providing the universe with the planets, stars and galaxies visible today.' The Standard Model predicted the oscillation, and Fermilab has been working for 19 years to confirm it. The announcement is good press for Fermilab, which is pushing Congress to build a new 18-mile-long International Linear Collider."
Re:Only a bit (Score:4, Interesting)
P.S.: In Hawking radiation the effect of more matter than antimatter is also observed.
Re:Enough with the big colliders already! (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh! Shiny! (Score:5, Interesting)
I certainly expect many
The US is the world leader in physics research, one of the few fields we still can claim that in. We have 8 of the world's Fusion power research facilities (and 4 more have been decomissioned for a total over time of 12,) more than the other nation in the world combined (if you exclude the ITER which we have rejoined.) But by letting the ILC go to Europe or Japan, we'd be deflating our physics potential. The ILC will be unparralleled in its power; attracting the brightest minds in physics today with real opportunity. If the ILC is in America, we'd be very attractive to those bright minds and with them opportunities to put their minds to work for our country. The LHC (slated to be the largest particle accelerator completed in 2007) would be the only comparable facility.
I think we lost out on a real opportunity by not building the superconducting supercollider. Whether or not you believe it was just being funded to show up the Soviets or not, I can't help but place it's closing as the begining of a distinct lack of focus on science in the US that is only getting worse today. Funding the ILC would at least be a demonstration that America still has interest in its scientific future, and at best would help us get the facility here and mark a hopeful turn in trends.
But showboating our physics prowess and bringing in a few eggheads isn't the only real benefit. The projects like the ILC and other big time projects like the ISS can invigorate the mind of our young children, prompting them to take an early interest in science and physics; the key factor in our nation's future. How many children do you know who want to be an astronaught because they hear about NASA and it's contributions to the ISS? It doesn't matter if it's international, as long as we participate in a meaningful way it gets talked about and can influence our kids.
So I think we should fund the ILC. Lets do it for the children.
Cool discovery, but not unexpected (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a really cool measurement. But the summary is a little sensationalist. First, the B-sub-s is not the only particle that oscillates between matter and anti-matter. Kaons have been known to do this for decades and regular B mesons have been observed to do this for 20 years or so. In fact we've known for a long time that B-sub-s mesons oscillated. What we didn't know is how fast. We knew "really fast" but not a number.
In fact, the cool thing is that a B-sub-s, statistically, will oscillate many times between particle and anti-particle before it ultimately decays. Nothing else in this class of particles will do that. For instance, most B mesons will not change flavor before decaying.
But, this is a very interesting result.
Re:Oh! Shiny! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not some trivial "bragging rights" move. Brain drain is REAL, and very important for the economies of nations.
WWII pushing so many scientists to move out of Europe, is one of the main reasons the US became the top superpower in the world.
Re:Oh! Shiny! (Score:3, Interesting)
Repeated enough times, this trickles down into education and your country's economy. You are now less capable than your neighbors. Your country's quality of life goes down. It is in your best interests to compete in this respect if you want to retain your smart people.
If we instead pretend that all of the countries of the world have signed treaties preventing their people from moving to other countries, this problem goes away. But without a competitive drive, spending on pure research is going to be based on the numbers, and based conservatively. Money spent on research will drop sharply and our rate of scientific advance will slow to a crawl.
You say that you "don't care where these things get built so long as they get built," but without this "dick measuring competition", they never would.