[LibWhacker]

Okay, don't worry about the Large Hadron Collider creating a black hole that will swallow the Earth. No, no, worry about it creating a Q-Ball, a region of space where the laws of physics are repealed, yippee!

[altair]

I think you're blowing things out of proportion. The LHC isn't big enough to create something really dangerous and much the same thing was said before nuclear bombs were first set off.

I found a neat video a couple weeks ago that illustrates this. Do you know how many nuclear and thermonuclear bombs have been detonated since 1945?

Check out this video which shows all the blasts between 1945 and 1998. The three flags across the bottom, from left to right, are Pakistan, India and China.

The summary at the end is the shocker. In terms of being blasted by nukes, what part of the world has been pounded the hardest by nuclear bombs? (The western United States)

[ClearCase_guy]

“Some of what we see, seems to defy the laws of physics. And, since we refuse to contemplate anything above the physical world, we will now postulate a Q-ball which, by definition, is in the physical world but which does not adhere to the laws of the physical world. This is science. It’s not at all like that flimsy, unprovable “supernatural” stuff which Christians use to explain the universe.” [/s]

[allmendream]

"Isn't this subject a little intimate?"

[UCANSEE2]

[samtheman]

Things must be tough in the physics world. Imamobamanomics is making it tough all over, I guess.

I guess they’ve got to come up with SOMETHING to get funding...

[Thunder90]

PING

[Chode]

[November 2010]

Some people can control cue balls.

[SunkenCiv]

Brian Cox

Google

That's showbiz. Thanks LibWhacker!

---

· String Theory Ping List ·

---

---

· Join · Bookmark · Topics · Google ·
· View or Post in 'blog · post a topic · subscribe ·

---

[Mr. Jeeves]

Not one reference yet to Corporal Cueball, himself? :)

[E8crossE8]

The author of the quoted article, "Mysterious Q Balls -Created in the Heat of the Newborn Universe: Are They SciFi or SciFact?", a person called Casey Kazan, wrote in his piece:

“Inside a Q-ball, the familiar forces that hold our world together don't exist…”

As is the case with far too many popular articles that purportedly deal with physics topics, this quote is inaccurate, and very misleading. It is so misleading that some posters here, in attempting to discuss the article, in turn wrote passages such as

[ A q-ball ] “is a region of space where the laws of physics are repealed…”

and

[ a q-ball ] “is in the physical world but ... does not adhere to the laws of the physical world…”

None of this is remotely accurate, although the fault lies with the author of the misleading “popular” article and not with the freepers who merely took him at his word. Q-balls do not "depart" in any way from established facts of physics, and q-balls are not some “new” attempt to “get funding,” and, in fact, they aren’t new in any sense at all. They are explicit mathematical solutions to the differential equations of motion of certain quantum field theories describing the interaction dynamics of specific bosonic fields, first worked out more than 40 years ago. The name “q ball” is due to the fact that these particular mathematical solutions exhibit spherical symmetry (hence “ball”) and possess a non-vanishing type of “charge,” which is often designated in physics by the letter “q.” (The charge in this case is not the same as electrical charge.)

The first q ball-type soution to a quantum field theory was derived in 1968, but the first physicist to work out all the mathematical details required to prove that such states are stable against the phenomenon of quantum mechanical tunneling was Sidney Coleman at Harvard in 1986 (he used a clever technique known as the “thin shell approximation” with which he derived the analytical expressions that comprise his solution, which he named "q ball"). Sidney died a few years ago, but his calculations, clearly presented in published articles, have been independently reproduced by hundreds of physicists around the world since then (including different derivations than the original). There is absolutely nothing controversial about any of this. It is completely inaccurate to imply, as the author of the “popular” article does, that ordinary forces “don’t exist” in a q-ball. On the contrary, the particle field configuration called a q-ball behaves the way it does precisely because of the laws of physics. Due to the peculiar (but theoretically and experimentally well-established) quantum mechanical properties of bosons (physical states that possess integral values of intrinsic angular momentum, also known as spin), it turns out, as Sidney showed years ago, that certain solutions to the field equations can arise that describe bound configurations of bosons which are characterized by a potential function that has a value smaller than would be the case for the corresponding free (i.e., non-binding) potential. Thus, the bound state is the lowest energy state - unusual, but fully consistent with established properties of the forces that determine the dynamics of elementary particles. It will be interesting to see if these theoretical solutions can be experimentally confirmed.

In the meantime, it is very unfortunate that the author of the popular article so completely mangled this point, misleading some posters here as a result. Many scientists have had the experience of popular journalists messing up descriptions of their work with absurd linguistic flights of fancy - this is yet another example.

[allmost]

Maybe they're the good guys. :)