Large Hadron Collider Creates Matter From Light

SciTechDaily.com ^ | 06 September 2020

[zeestephen]

Last year, the ATLAS experiment at the LHC observed two photons, particles of light, ricocheting off one another and producing two new photons. This year, they've taken that research a step further and discovered photons merging and transforming into something even more interesting: W bosons, particles that carry the weak force, which governs nuclear decay.

[mad_as_he$$]

Really big!

[Reynoldo]

That was (is) my favorite episode.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Me: Maybe I should have said that conversion of stuff into light had already been demonstrated.

You: Are you talking about early 1940's University of Chicago?

What I had in mind was positron-electron annihilation, but any radioactive decay that results in the emission of photons, such as gamma rays in the decay of radium, demonstrates the process. Going the other way is harder. It probably has something to do with the second law of thermodynamics. It's easier to start a fire than to reconstitute the original fuel and oxygen from the residue: ashes, heat and light. Photons are the residue of pair annihilation.

[BwanaNdege]

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

[GOPJ]

Thanks
:)

[higgmeister]

Thanks! I was still a kid when we moved back to the city but I really was amazed that it didn't hurt when my bare feet got mashed into the cow patties in the feedlot if a heifer stepped on them.   Or the memory of our Boxers fighting over the stones from the steers that Dad tossed over the fence.   We kids got to help hold the steers down.