RE: First collisions at the LHC with unprecedented Energy! (Ask a particle physisicist)
August 10, 2015 at 12:00 pm
A 5 pack you say....
I ran into a report of this while listening to the FQXi podcast for July.
A couple of questions came to mind...
1) Is there a convention by which you differentiate between particles and aggregates? The 3 quark & 2 quark bundles seem pretty common and discrete, but at what point (or how) do you conclude this is too big to be a particle and call it something else?
2) They mentioned that the pentaquark was "unexpected." I thought you guys had a pretty good handle on what the standard model was going to produce. Is it simply that the solution space for the math is so large that some of it remains unexplored?
FQXi is one of my cherished sources of current physics information for the layperson. Asking perhaps naive questions here is another.
I ran into a report of this while listening to the FQXi podcast for July.
A couple of questions came to mind...
1) Is there a convention by which you differentiate between particles and aggregates? The 3 quark & 2 quark bundles seem pretty common and discrete, but at what point (or how) do you conclude this is too big to be a particle and call it something else?
2) They mentioned that the pentaquark was "unexpected." I thought you guys had a pretty good handle on what the standard model was going to produce. Is it simply that the solution space for the math is so large that some of it remains unexplored?
FQXi is one of my cherished sources of current physics information for the layperson. Asking perhaps naive questions here is another.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat? 
