Boffins cross atom-smasher streams, 'excited' beauty pops into being

Topflight scientists operating vast, difficult-to-comprehend machines located in an underground cavern laboratory say that an "excited beauty" has been called into existence after they crossed the streams emanating from two unprecedentedly powerful particle accelerators. Sadly for devotees of such films as Weird Science, the …

[Chazmon]

I love these kind of physics articles because I always imagine them followed up by an article entitled:

Physicists admit they have been making it up for years

'it's all lies but thanks for the giant underground cycle track'

I do hope they continue to expand our understanding of the universe

[Flocke Kroes]

The other explanation

LHC software if about 50,000,000 lines of code. Even one bug per 100,000 lines of code is enough to have more bugs than detected hadrons.

Not to self: Remember to add "hadrons" to the spell checker's dictionary.

[jai]

Don't cross the streams!

Tell him about the twinkie!

etc

[Crisp]

The street market of physics

Get yer bosons! 14 TeV a pahnd!

Get em nah while they're still in a highly excited state!

[Nigel 11]

Re: any other accelerator built by humanity

We don't know what made it, but Google the Oh-My-God particle (a cosmic ray assumed proton with ~3 x 10^20 eV energy, or about ten million times more than anything men can make!)

[jungle_jim]

Re: any other accelerator built by humanity

I was hoping to find something NSFW.

Let down.

[Z80]

Re: any other accelerator built by humanity

"So - not as powerful as ones built by non-humans then."

What makes you think the non-humans' particle accelerators must be more powerful? Theirs could be less powerful for all we know. Let's not assume inferiority eh?

[Gordon 10]

Re: any other accelerator built by humanity

I would assume that non-humans particle accelerators are more powerful. If only for the fact that they are attached to their frikkin space sharks at the head of their invasion fleet.

[TeeCee]

Re: any other accelerator built by humanity

I think they're actually referring to naturally occurring ones, rather than those possibly cobbled together by little green men. There are a few things going on out there that make the likes of the LHC look like a pocket torch with a knackered AAA battery.

Quasars, Hypernovae, supermassive black holes running into each other at nosebleed-inducing velocities......all sorts of things apt to make subatomic particles crap themselves at the thought of being in the affected bits of spacetime.

[Francis Boyle]

Re: any other accelerator built by humanity

You should see the one Slartibartfast used to cut out the crinkly bits in the fjords.

[Muscleguy]

Re: any other accelerator built by humanity

But, but, he clearly states when the mice cancel Earth 2 in favour of probing Arthur Dent's mind that he has a thousand glaciers ready to roll. He was clearly a naturalistic landscaper.

[Loyal Commenter]

Re: any other accelerator built by humanity

Some accelerators not only have not been built by humanity, but have not been 'built' at all (as far as we know*). Active galactic nuclei, for instance (super-massive black holes that are actively accreting matter) can fire out particles with their magnetic fields at energies up to 10,000,000 times those encountered in the LHC.

*Dons tin-foil hat, etc.

[Tom 13]

Re: tin-foil hat

Er, that's not gonna help with THOSE particles.

[PyLETS]

Re: any other accelerator built by humanity

Like the one in which they designed the experiment which went wrong and resulted in the big bang ?

[Dan delaMare-Lyon]

Re: The street market of physics

Glad you didn't say hot - that would make them subject to VAT ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Ξb is pronounced "Csai - bee"

Thanks. How do I pronounce "Csai" ?

[JimC]

Re: Ξb is pronounced "Csai - bee"

is Kseye-bee or Xi-bee any better? The letter in question is basically a classical greek x.

[John G Imrie]

Re: Ξb is pronounced "Csai - bee"

So now we know what really happened to the truly lamented Moderatrix Miss S Bee.

[earl grey]

Don't go breaking my heart

Hopefully the truly missed Ms. Bee is doing just fine,

[BPeterF]

Great funny writing - with a little tiny bit of interesting reporting thrown in! :)

[Mr Young]

Science porn ye!

If it helps, my dick has detected some dark matter over the years now and again; Seriously though - it would be superb if we got a new energy source organised soon!

[Jedit]

I have some bad new for you, Mr Young

It doesn't matter what colour the matter is or how much energy you put into your dick ... it's not going to get excited.

[Mr Young]

Re: I have some bad new for you, Mr Young

Hehe - I noticed when it started to approach FTL things began to look smaller?

[Avatar of They]

Just found it?

Just found it? I learned it when I were in school, I spent hours in lectures about Muons, Hadrons, Quarks and gluons.

With stupid sub-classes like Beauty & Time etc.

Scientists nowa days don't know nowt....

Or more likely I fell asleep at the bit about "Theoretical physics" bit of my lectures and this is indeed them proving themselves right, which ever is more accurate.

[Christoph]

How much beauty?

Did they measure the actual value of excited beauty, in millihelens?

[Destroy All Monsters]

MASS EFFECT!!

We have to read:

"Future discoveries may yet include the Higgs Boson, aka "the God particle", whose appearance or non-appearance will not merely upset but completely pulverise applecarts up and down the entire street market of physics."

What the hell? Let's get this straight:

1) The Higgs Boson may have already been "spotted" as there are currently tentative bumps in the statistics at somewhere arund 130 GeV I think. It will probably be "more strongly confirmed" (the probability that decay events expected trough appearance of a Higgs Boson are due to random chance or mismeasurement will go down, down, down...)

2) World + Dog actually expects the Higgs boson to be there - it means that the last missing piece of the Standard Model is indeed there. Considering that LHC might well not find anything else of interest, that would mean one could leave the arena for the showers, because there would be no definite way to enhance or rejigger the Standard Model into something grander in a testable way.

3) Now, if supersymmetric particles were to show up or something else entirely fresh, THAT would upset some carts. But it's unlikely.

[ian 22]

Brilliant!

"less ambitious red lines on the dial – though these have gradually crept upwards"- have they turned it up to 11 yet?

Brilliant work (I think)! I'll drink to that.

[James 36]

Optional

This

"CMS physicists found the Ξb*0 [excited beauty baryon] signal in a sample of about 530 trillion proton—proton collisions (an integrated luminosity of 5.3 inverse femtobarns) which were delivered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operating at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV in 2011."

is one of my favourite paragraphs ever

Reminded me of Douglas Adams (particularly femtobarns which must house very small chickens)

[Anonymous Coward]

All these big words

are giving me a semi-baryon beauty...

[Crisp]

A semi-baryon beauty

I would have liked to have seen a pair of highly excited beauties entangled...

[mtp]

Yup

the decay chain Xi(b)^- to J/psi Xi^- to mu^+ mu^- Lambda^0 pi^-, with Lambda^0 to p pi^.

Who could dispute that.

[Mips]

Howl?

As in "twin streams of contra-rotating charged particles which HOWL around the LHC's two supercryogenic superconducting magnetic tunnel tracks"

C'mon now. In a vacuum no one can hear you scream.

[TeeCee]

Re: Howl?

Yes, but for all we know, charged particles may be even singing to themselves when moving at a significant percentage of c. We just can't hear 'em.