dark matter

Creationism vs Science: The separation

Hi,
something like this was not here before. Why did I create such a series now? About week back I started discussion on blog of one Christian. I started with the question “Why can not I feel the existence of Him (the God)?” And then it started, I must say that it was rather peaceful conversation and very friendly and for now it is about 12 word pages with 12 font and normal space between lines, so quite filling. You can find the almost whole conversation here. If you clicked it and searched through you can see that the post itself is just a small part. Roughly there are arguments from the side of science (me) and creationism (her).

Why did I do such a discussion? Well I wanted to know what creationists really say, I talked once with Christian and it was for nothing since back then I knew so much less and I know that if I would suddenly erupt the conversation again it would look as that I am trying to convince her that there is no God, but I do not care much about what they think.

So we started and right now I think that I can make conclusion from the debate

1)It was indeed very interesting. I think that she already done a lot of research since she was able to put hers argument in high numbers. The problem here is that those arguments are kind of old or not understanding the whole concept, if you did not read the discussion here I will pick up some:

On this page there is a lot of them and if you understand just basics, you know that they do not disprove big bang at all:

For example they say that dark matter has not been prove, as I said, this is like 150 years back, because back then this was probably true but not today. It is so simple to look it up on the internet, just write: “Prove for dark matter” and you will get tens of thousands of pages. The problem is that people like to look just on their side of argument. Lets say that I believe in creationism, well I will go on pages like these: 1) 2) 3). All of them are about creation and science that apparently proves it as the pages say. Now there are very good arguments there, somebody who never heard about all the science stuff could so freakin easily believe in creation, I must admit that it so well written with only one side of argument that there is actually nothing else to do than to believe in it!

The problem rises immediately and it is the problem that most people on the world do. If you only look on your side of argument you will always gain evidence for you becoming more and more sure, but is this really what we should do?

As Barack Obama said, people in USA whether they are republicans or democrats tend to look only on the news for their side which makes the gap between both side bigger and bigger creating something what is called extremism (not that I am trying to say she is extremist, I do not even know how much she looked on the “science side”, so I know nothing).

So it does not really matter on what side you are on, what I think is that you should always look on the arguments on the other side and think about them so you know what they think, otherwise it leads just to bigger separation between democrats and republicans or creationists and evolutionists and so on.

This leads to what I will write about in next post in those series: Should we teach creationism alongside evolution?

Dragallur

 

Book review 1) The Particle at the End of the Universe

Hi,
I saw already lot of people to do book review, like Joseph from Rationalising the Universe or Abyssbrain from Mathemagical site. I have already used a lot of parts from this book in posts about dark matter, dark energy, particle accelerators and so on.

It is book: The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll. It is about particle physics and the Higgs boson.

This book has 13 chapters and three extra three parts explaining some stuff around.
Author starts the book with short introduction to history of particle physics, what people thought that was making up everything. He mentions elements, atoms and so on, then he introduces higgs boson and his role in standard model of physics. He explains why he thinks that it is important to study it and what part LHC plays in this.

In second chapter Sean explains why Higgs is also called “god particle” and the relationship of physicists with god. There is also review of properties of Higgs and some things about fields.

In third chapter author introduces whole standard model and how higgs boson changes it. There are parts about all particles and all four interactions.

Fourth chapter is about the story of accelerators and how they work. This continues to next chapter where there is description of all the work that had to be done to build LHC with credit to all people. Author describes how are particles detected and how they decay.

Whole chapter is just about fields and gravitational waves continuing about symmetries and how they are broken. This is also probably the most complex part of the book which I had to read more times to really get to know what is it all about.

He continues with deep look into finding of Higgs boson with stories about all the people around, and the excitement about it.

There are stories about destroying the world with LHC creating black holes and author perfectly talks about the way news are used in magazines and how physicists were trying their best to not let spread a wrong news about Higgs.

In 11th chapter Sean is talking about Nobel awards for particle physics that led towards Higgs.

The book ends with text about the new things that are now opened for scientists to discover when they know that the particle really exists.

In three extra parts author adds some more context to spin, standard model and Feynman diagrams.

 

This book is really well written and I give it 10/10. I really recommend it to anybody who wants some introduction to particle physics because with all those analogies you will never be lost. I like how Sean also describes all those people around the great work and how all of this makes the whole picture and story behind “The Particle at the End of the Universe.”

Dragallur

Picture of Czech book
Picture of English book

The book review of: The Organized Mind
The book review of: On the Origin of Species

The Standard Model for dummies!

Hi,
last time I talked about some stuff like dark matter (1 & 2), dark energy and I did not explain a lot of things which I mentioned and this time I will talk about Standard Model.

Standard model or Standard model of particles and interaction is the model of all observed and proved particles.

The next picture shows how it looks like, you could say that it is the “modern” periodic table or some kind of holy grail of physics.

So in this standard model you have particles that make up everything we know [1].

There are four main groups which are sorted by the forces they interact with.

All of those particles interact with gravity. Quarks also interact through strong nuclear force while leptons do not interact that way, also all of them have whole numbers for charge.

The red part has inside particles which are what is called “force carriers” they carry the fundamental forces with graviton excluded because he is not proven yet.

The most mysterious is the yellow part with only Higgs boson inside, I will make sure to make a whole chapter only about it.

Quarks

Already months and months ago I made post about quarks. Here I will cut it short so, quarks are particles that made everything there is except just a little part which is made from electrons. Quarks normally group together into hadrons – protons, neutrons, pions. Quarks have charge of either +2/3 or -1/3. They also have a property called color which is not color at all and they must group together so their colors cancel into white (white) [2].

Leptons

There are three main particles called: electrons, muons and tauons. Only electrons are actually somewhere while we can create other in the particle accelerator.

All of those have -1 charge but there are other particles called neutrinos. Electrons, muons and tauons all have their neutrino.

I already wrote about neutrinos but they are actually extremely light particles sometimes called “ghost” particles because they can easily go through whole planet Earth without touching anything. They are also electrically neutral.

Force carriers

Gluons are particles that are mass less and they carry the strong nuclear force.
Photons are also mass less and they carry electromagnetism.
Gauge bosons (W+- and Z) carry weak nuclear force.

Most of those particles have mass and that is because of Higgs boson, but that is whole new story which I will have to start with symmetries and fields, stay tuned.

Also main difference between force carriers and everything else is that they do not need any space to exist, there can be millions of them at one spot while only one lepton or quark.

Dragallur

 

[1] I do not talk about dark matter which I mentioned in earlier posts. WIMPs are not here since they do not belong into standard model, those are particles beyond the model even if they exist.

[2] Quarks have 3 basic colors: Red, Green and Blue but there are of course anti quarks which have just opposite colors: Antired, Antigreen and antiblue.

The riddle of DARK MATTER! (Part 2)

Hi,
about three days ago I was asked by the writer of “Oopsmymistake” to update about dark matter, so today I decided to write something more about it, here you go.

Last time I talked about dark matter as stuff that fills about 25% of all matter in whole Universe but we can not feel it and the only way to observe it is by its gravitational effect, for example it is extremely important in whole galaxies.

Now there are some things that I did not mention because actually there are more things that we can deduce from its behavior.

As I said, it is assumed that dark matter is composed of new kind of particle/s beyond standard model.

Lets assume that this is right, now this particle does not react much as we know, it has to be electrically neutral, otherwise it would react through electromagnetism and we would be able to observe the photons which would come out of the interaction.

Also dark matter still exists which means that it has to have half life at least the age of Universe (top and bottom quarks for example do not form anything because simply they are not here, they have too small half life).

We know that it does not interact much, otherwise it would concentrate in the middle of galaxies and not all around. So dark matter can not interact via strong nuclear force.

Now this kind of hypothetical particle is called WIMP – Weekly Interacting Massive Particle.

It is assumed that the mass of such WIMP is about 10-1,000 GeV which is roughly around Higgs boson and other bosons like W and Z.

The amount of WIMPs with such a energy almost perfectly corresponds to the real amount of dark matter. Also model of super-symmetry predicts such particle with the properties we know now. It is definitely more complicated but it is called the WIMP miracle, while it could be just coincidence.

Scientists think that with this model WIMPs should interact with Higgs boson which would create something we call: “The Higgs portal” because Higgs boson would be the particle through which we would be able to observe whole dark universe (the portal between standard model and dark matter).

Of course particle physicists designed special detectors to detect WIMPs. There are two main way to do that, first is cryogenic, which is the detection of heat made by WIMP interacting with some super cooled element and the second one is to measure flash of light during interaction of WIMP and liquid xenon or argon. Such detectors are buried deep under Earth so that normal radiation does not disturb it.

Approximately in the volume of cup of coffee is always one WIMP and it is assumed that they travel at the speed of hundreds of kilometers per second, which means billions of them whizzing through you every second. Also about 10 interactions of WIMPs happen every year with atoms in your body (this is kind of similar to neutrinos).

Dragallur

PS: if you did not understand some terms I will mention them in next posts: Standard Model, Higgs boson and so on..

 

 

The riddle of DARK ENERGY!

Hi,
today I will write about dark energy since last time I briefly covered the dark matter. The dark energy is even more unknown than the dark matter, let’s see why.

As I said before, there is about 70% of dark energy in the Universe of all the energy that there is, rest belongs to dark matter and tiny bit to normal matter.

Dark energy has to do a lot with expansion of Universe which was find out last century by Edwin Hubble. He found out that the Universe is expanding and right now we even know that the rate of expanding even increases (The Big Rip scenario).

Why? Because there is something called dark energy and we know that it works kind of like “anti-gravity” this could be misleading since the gravity is still there so it is also said that it has “negative” pressure.

Dark energy is everywhere at the same amount and as the space is expanding there is more of it created. This does not violate conservation of energy since the force of gravity decreases at the same time with the distance increasing. I guess that this is why the expansion increases.

There are four theories which I found about the dark energy, the first one is that dark energy is not a thing but rather property of empty space and empty space is expanding and as the expansion increases so does the rate.

Second idea is the idea of cosmological constant which was made by Einstein. At the start it was constant which would be zero so that space would be static but as Hubble found out Universe is expanding so the cosmological constant, which is kind of property of space must be higher than zero. Now lot of cosmologists are trying to measure this constant, this is a big problem since when we try to calculate it, it goes with orders of magnitude away from what we can observe and it is simply wrong.

Or also virtual particles popping in and out of existence in space could give energy to this dark energy.

Simply we do not know much about it but we know that it must exist in some kind of form.

Dragallur

 

The riddle of DARK MATTER! (Part 1)

Hi,
I can not believe it took so much time to finally write about dark matter since I knew about it such a long time and thought that I should write about it some time.
Now because dark matter has to do a lot with gravity (and only gravity) then I just have to share with you this meme:

 

OK, enough fun for now, lets see what this dark matter is.

How did we find it?

Once upon a time one great scientist was born and her name was Vera Rubin. It happened in kingdom (federal republic) far far away, over one big ocean and no mountains. Vera wanted to be astronomer since her 10 years. When she signed up for some school they asked her if she does not want to draw space objects since she liked to draw, this was because in 40s female scientists were not very common.

Finally she was able to start to work and with new age of better telescope she began with huge observation. Most people used those telescopes to look at active cores of galaxies and such exciting places but Vera with her colleague[1] Ford rather observed the outskirts of galaxies and they saw very interesting thing, these outskirts were moving way too far.

As object get away from the thing they orbit (as in our Solar System) they tend to orbit slower.

  1. Mercury 47.36 km/s
  2. Venus 35.020 km/s
  3. Earth 29.783 km/s
  4. Mars 24.077 km/s
  5. Jupiter 13.050 km/s
  6. Saturn 9.638 km/s
  7. Uranus 6.795 km/s
  8. Neptune 5.432 km/s
  9. Pluto 4,666 km/s (oops not a planet :D)

So as you see the orbit speed really decreases, this is because there is lower force of gravity so the planet does not need to be so fast to make these forces equal.

In galaxies this should happen too but it does not!

Now here comes the theory of dark matter which is spread over whole galaxies and there is tremendous amount of it making those stars in the outskirts to go faster than they should.

There are only 4% of ordinary matter the one which we know about a lot.
21% is dark matter and 75% is dark energy as you can see on the next picture:

The only thing we know about dark matter is that it interacts with ordinary matter through gravity. We can measure this and measure how much and where it is, also we know that it does not tend to create some piles like normal matter so it seems that there are no dark matter stars. As Sean Carroll says in his book Particle at the End of Universe, dark matter is a clear example of something beyond the standard model of particles.

Dragallur

[1] At first I wrote collieg instead of colleague, it took me a long time to figure the spelling out even using the corrector in Chrome, I think this will make one of my friends really really happy!

19.1.2016 I made second part so click HERE to read more about dark matter.