Roger's Equations

Hi Roger, WOW, interesting summary!

I can't help but think that the virtual W^- particle is a 'bridge-concept', like Yuval mentioned (in another thread on the Piranhas of space). If we can't measure it, there is now way to test its characteristics, as you said.

Maybe, one day, there will be an explanation...

Jorrie

Jorrie,

Thanks for your feedback. I'm trying my best to get a handle on these subjects and present them in such a way to have them make sense. It's difficult but I enjoy it because I feel I'm learning the subject much better than I otherwise ordinarily would.

As to your comments:

The existence of these virtual particles can be verified by the lifetimes of the processes that involve these virtual particles. So we don't need to measure them to feel confident they exist. The lifetimes of the processes they are involved in can be calculated using the rest mass of the real force carrier particle involved along with the energy-time uncertainty relation.

When it comes to measurement, the problem is since there is an energy-time uncertainty relation, the quicker things happen, the fuzzier (not a scientific term ;) they are (We are less sure of their exact energy). Virtual particles, because of their short lifetimes are just too uncertain to measure precisely. But what makes this science rather than science fiction is that these particles, though uncertain, are uncertain in a very specific way, which then produces very specific results (measurable lifetimes).

I'm going to post a part II to this post that gets into what has been verified experimentally and how and what has yet to be predicted but why they are expected to exist. I'll include some math that hopefully makes a strong case for the existence of these particles.

It's funny, nature has all these strict rules regarding conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, etc. However nature constantly finds a sneaky way around them with the uncertainty relations and its a good thing because if it didn't, the universe would look much different.

Not really sure that the nature has any codified or set rules. Rather it was early physicist who set the rules based on the limited scale of their own observations about nature. As the scale extends and the rules do not appear to accomodate the new observations, we want to retain these rules and and modify definitions or create rules to bridge the issues between observations and the pre-existing rules. The uncertainty principal in both forms basically says we can not know anything exactly when the scale is small enough, and everything else is just a statistical estimate for a large data set (note dEdt can be much larger than h bar).

Also, what mass-energy is involved in the estimate of 1.29 MeV lost when the neutron decays into a proton? It sounds like the mass of the electron and anti-neutrino asre considered, what about heat and other energy losses?

You've made a number of responses, let me try to address them individually:

You Wrote: "Not really sure that the nature has any codified or set rules. Rather it was early physicist who set the rules based on the limited scale of their own observations about nature. As the scale extends and the rules do not appear to accomodate the new observations, we want to retain these rules and and modify definitions or create rules to bridge the issues between observations and the pre-existing rules."

Sure, that's true

You Wrote: "The uncertainty principal in both forms basically says we can not know anything exactly when the scale is small enough, and everything else is just a statistical estimate for a large data set (note dEdt can be much larger than h bar)."

I wouldn't say we "can not know anything". We just cant know two specific things exactly, Time and Energy or Position and Momentum or angular position and angular momentum. There is actually a great deal that quantum mechanics predicts successfully to a precision matched only by relativity.

You Wrote:"and everything else is just a statistical estimate for a large data set (note dEdt can be much larger than h bar)"

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Quantum mechanics is very successful handling small systems like the Hydrogen atom or harmonic oscillators or predicting the existence of antiparticles or predicting the existence of bosons and fermions.

You Wrote: "Also, what mass-energy is involved in the estimate of 1.29 MeV lost when the neutron decays into a proton? It sounds like the mass of the electron and anti-neutrino asre considered"

The difference between the 1.29 MeV and the rest mass of a W^- Boson represents the energy uncertainty required which in turn determines how long the W^- can exist. That in turn effects things like the rate of beta decay, the size of a proton, etc.

You Wrote:"what about heat and other energy losses?"

Heat isn't involved in the scale we are talking about. Other energy losses are small as compared to the change of mass to energy.