What Are Bosons?

[Rhondazvous]

I always find it helps if I just think of all particles (electrons, protons, fermions, whateverons) as being roughly the size and shape of a small pea.

Boru

I like the ones that are cubicle. They taste good on a salad, though they're hard to get on a fork.

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Croutons

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[vorlon13]

A single grain of sand, just large enough for the human eye to see will visibly move from the decay of a single uranium atom.

[Rhondazvous]

A single grain of sand, just large enough for the human eye to see will visibly move from the decay of a single uranium atom.

I find that interesting. Do you think maybe it belongs in the thread about consciousness?

[vorlon13]

Depending on the isotopes, isomers, decay products and daughter elements, bosons are involved.

[brewer]

Alex, think gravitons are out there?

[ignoramus]

Rhonda, I'm trying to keep it simple, but I believe this is a picture of 2 bosons within each others space...

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[Pyrrho]

Yes it does. But I can't give you a definite answer. Not because the question is bad, but because I am not sure which of the things I think I know about particles are artifacts of the formalism used to analyze the theory, artifacts of the theory we use to describe nature, and which things are really truths independent of how one writes down and treats the theory. Furthermore, my understanding of theory has its limitations. Last but not least, "a particle" in common usage is an idealized thing which does not reflect the intricasies of the theory.

With those caveats: In the Standard Model, the way it is usually written down, elementary particles are excitations of fields. They carry theoretical labels  which distinuish them (which field it is, and in what state precisely). Energy is a secondary property which can be assigned to field configurations, among others such as momentum, charge, etc., and isolated particles correspond to field configurations with certain discrete energy quantities corresponding to their mass via mc^2. In this picture, elem. particles are not containers of energy, but neither would one say they are Energy itself.
One might hoewever be able to simply adopt the speech convention that everything is Energy, and that this Energy can be stored in different fields, or, equivalenty, be assigned different labels.

But I don't feel comfortable giving Energy such a fundamental role.

When are you physicists going to admit it is all a word salad done for the sake of keeping the grant money coming?

See also:

http://atheistforums.org/thread-35974-po...pid1047096

[Exian]

I won a Nobel for discovering the energy absorbing particle in couches that causes laziness; the futon.

[Jenny A]

A Bosun is a warrant officer on a man of war in charge of rigging.     I read too much Patrick O'Brien.

[Alex K]

Alex, think gravitons are out there?

Yes, I would think so. Why - because one can combine the Standard Model with General Relativity in a rather straightforward fashion (straightforward on a scale between tying shoelaces and superstrings), and one obtains a theory which is in principle applicable at energies far enough from the Planck scale. This theory breaks down at some Energy and must be replaced by whatever consistent fundamental description of quantum gravity is suitable, but in the long range/low energy regime where it is applicable, it contains gravitons. It can be, then, that upon closer inspection, these gravitons are no elementary particles, and instead an emergent statistical phenomenon, or a composite object, or whatever, but they would look like gravitons from a coarse grained low energy perspective...