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Hi,
I think generally speaking positive= Yang (proton), negative= Yin (electron) and neutral= Yuan (neutron) or original force. Quantum physics has a bunch of particles including the neutrino, and there are three types of neutrinos. You can further research which corresponds to which energetic. (Which is pos, neg, and neutral)
A quick intro (not for the physics challenged)for quantum particles is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepton
Hope this helps, regards.
I would say that elementary particles simply are not accessible through Daoist practices and so there isn’t any reason to have some alternative conception or notion for example to neutrino.
But I don’t know how it’s with Dr. Manhattan. He might be able to do something with this.
HOWDY
I wouldn’t take this question about neutrino too seriously, but still…
My suggestion is to get Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming’s book ‘Qigong, The Secret of Youth: Da Mo’s Muscle/Tendon Changing and Marrow/Brain Washing Classics.’ It supports well Mantak Chia’s books in my opinion, but it also has original Chinese text fragments, their translation into English and there is also romanization of key concepts in hanyu pinyin. It’s very good and thorough book with further explanations by Mr. Yang. Master Chia has written foreword for this treatise.
For neutrinos I initially suggest LEONARD SUSSKIND’s The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. It has in the beginning some particle physics and then those other things.
If that is not enough and one is not afraid of mathematics then one could take ROGER PENROSE’s The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.
First and third are are really important ones, and in this particular order.
Sorry for my broken English.
HOWDY
Ps. More interesting than the book actually might be to check Leonard Susskind’s video lectures. There should be plenty of them for free. But these might be, for real students of physics, too slow spaced and lacking mathematics because his audience in this case are mainly middle-aged people who for an reason or an other are participating. So the manner of presentation is for certain kind of audience with limited possibilities of learning.
I think I have somewhere heard Edward Witten himself explaying that M in M-theory comes from magic, mystery or best of all matrix.
One could also take a look at Joseph Needham’s 2-dim (time/space) analysis of I Ching’s hexagrams from his ‘Science & Civilization in China’ to get some clearance what Chinese have thought about their cosmos.
HOWDY
I hope it’s still OK to add this.
>>>positive=Yang (proton), negative=Yin (electron) and neutral=Yuan (neutron)…
>>>not for the physics challenged…I personally think it’s quite hopeless to try to start to find correspondences between Chinese energetics and modern physics, but I admit that I lack evidently some education.
Or is there some possibility to find any meaningfull links between for example these two trinities. Or what is the reason that it’s not even usefull to really seriously try to do it?
Maybe Steven or Stalker could share something valuable.
I’m also asking because I’m myself very interested.
HOWDY
Finally, there is the actual chemical composition of the universe. In the beginning there were only hydrogen and helium: certainly not sufficient for the formation of life. Carbon, oxygen, and all the others came later. They were formed in the nuclear reactors in the interiors of stars. But the ability of stars to transmute hydrogen and helium into the all-important carbon nuclei was very delicate affair. Small changes in the laws of electricity and nuclear physics could have prevented the formation of carbon.
Even if the carbon, oxygen, and other biologically important elements were formed inside stars, they had to get out in order to provide the material for planets and life. Obviously we cannot live in the intensely hot cores of stars. How did the material escape the stellar interior? The answer is that it was violently ejected in cataclysmic supernova explosions.
Supernova explosions themselves are remarkable phenomena. In addition to protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, and gravity, supernovae require yet another particle -the ghostly neutrino. The neutrinos, as they escape from the collapsing star, create a pressure that pushes the elements in front of them. And, fortunately, the list of elementary particles happens to include neutrinos with the right properties.
-LEONARD SUSSKIND, The Cosmic Landscape, pp. 10Hello!
There are many books about mathematics, but my suggestion is to get ANNE ROONEY’s ‘The Story of Mathematics’ beside those others. It’s short and simple book with many pictures, but it’s very good for learning to visualize some basic mathematics and also historical development of these mathematical tools, in my opinion of course.
For relevant physics I suggest TIAN YU CAO’s ‘Conceptual Developments of 20th Century Field Theories.’
HOWDY
Ps. Let’s see if this picture, where Jon Osterman accidentally is disintegrated in an “Intrinsic Field Subtractor”, comes through.
As medieval alchemists discovered, it’s not easy to transmute one element into another. So where, then, did all the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, silicon, sulfur, iron, and other familiar chemical elements come from? The answer is that the intensely hot nuclear furnace of a star can do what no alchemists ever could – transform the elements, one into another. The cooking process is nuclear fusion, the same kind of fusion that powers nuclear weapons. Fusion combines the hydrogen nuclei in all sorts of permutations and combinations. The result of these nuclear reactions were the familiar elements.
The chain of nuclear reactions in stars that starts with the lightest elements and leads to to iron is complicated. The most familiar example is is the fusion reaction that begins with hydrogen and produces helium. Here is where the weak interactions come in. The first step is the collision of two protons. Many things can happen when two protons collide, but if you know the Feynman diagrams for the Standard Model, you can find one that ends up with a proton, a neutron, a positron, and a neutrino.
The positron finds a wandering electron in the star, and together they self-destruct into photons that eventually become the star’s thermal energy (heat). The neutrino just zips away and disappears with almost the speed of light. That leaves one sticky proton and one sticky neutron that stick together to form an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium.
Next, a third proton strikes the deuterium nucleus and sticks to it. The nucleus with two protons and a neutron is a form of helium called helium-three, but it’s not the stable kind of helium that we use to fill balloons. That stuff is called helium-four.
The story continues: two helium-three nuclei collide. All together that means four protons and two neutrons. But they dont’t all stick together. Two of the protons fly off and leave a nucleus with two protons and two neutrons. That’s an ordinary helium-four nucleus. You don’t need to remember all that. Very few physicists do.
Most of the nuclear reactions that take place in stars consist of a single proton colliding with an already present nucleus and increasing its atomic weight by one unit. Sometimes the proton turns into a neutron by giving off a positron and a neutrino. Sometimes a neutron will become a proton, electron, and antineutrino. In any case, inside the star, step-by-step, the original hydrogen and helium nuclei turn into heavier elements.
But what good are the complex elements locked up inside the stars? Science-fiction stories might posit strange forms of life made of swirling hot plasma that thrive at millions of degrees, but real life needs a cooler environment. Sadly, the carbon and oxygen remained imprisoned in the star’s interior throughout the entire lifetime of the star.
But stars don’t live forever
Eventually all stars, our sun included, will run out of fuel. At that point a star collapses under its own weight. before the fuel runs out, stars are kept in equilibrium by the heat and pressure generated by nuclear reactions. There are two competing tendencies in the star. Like a nuclear bomb, it wants to explode, while at the same time gravity is trying to crush it under its own enormous weight. These two tendencies, exploding and imploding are kept in balance as long as there is fuel to burn. But once the fuel runs out, there is nothing to resist the pull of gravity, and the star implodes.
There are three possible end points to the implosion. A star like our sun is relatively light, and it will collapse only until it forms a white dwarf. A white dwarf is made of more or less ordinary material – protons, neutrons, and electrons – but the electrons are squeezed up against one another to a far greater degree than in ordinary materials. It’s the Pauli exclusion principle that keeps the electrons from collapsing even further. If all stars ended up as white dwarfs, the freshly cooked elements would remain imprisoned inside them.
On the other hand, if the star is many times heavier than the sun, the force of gravity will be irresistible. The inevitable disastrous collapse will end in the most violent process imaginable – the formation of a black hole. Elements trapped in black holes would be even less available than those in white dwarfs.
But there is middle ground. Stars within a certain range of masses collapse past the white dwarf stage but not all the way to a black hole. In these stars the electrons,
in a sense, get squeezed out, while the protons turn into neutrons, and the end result is a solid ball of incredibly dense neutron matter: a neutron star. Surprisingly, the weak interaction play an indispensable role. Each proton, as it becomes a neutron, gives off two particles, a positron and a neurino. The positron quickly combine with the electrons in the star and disappear.
Such an event, called supernova, is not a gentle one. A supernova can outshine an entire galaxy with a hundred billion stars!
In everyday physics and chemistry, neutrinos are of no importance at all. They can pass through light-years of lead without disturbing it one bit. Neutrinos from the sun are continually passing through the earth, through our food and drink, and through our bodies with no effect at all. But our existence is totally dependent on them. The neutrinos flying out of the supernova implosion are so numerous that, despite their feebleness, they create an enormous pressure, pushing matter in front of them. The pressure exerted by neutrinos blows off the outer layers of the collapsing star and, in the process, sprays out the complex nuclei that were cooked before the star collapsed. So as its final act, the star in its death throes donates its complex nuclei to fill the universe with matter.
-LEONARD SUSSKIND, The Cosmic LandscapeSorry that I again picked citation, but position and role of neutrino at least should be now clearer, only theoretically still of course.
But did Laozi know all this? As far it’s true, he was a librarian or archivist. He should have had very much available for himself what ancient Chinese knew and he must have been similar beta type as Eratosthenes was.
Or if Laozi didn’t know, maybe Wei Boyang did.
HOWDY
I read atoms. I see the ancient spectacle that birthed the rubble. Beside this human life is brief and mundane.
-Dr. Manhattan
(Dr. Manhattan-Watchmen-Tribute)
When you start to think about what it takes for life to be possible, the Landscape becomes a nightmarish minefield. The requirements for a universe fall into three main categories: the Laws of Physics must lead to organic chemistry; the essential chemicals must exist in sufficient abundance; and finally, the universe must evolve to create a large, smooth, long-lived, gentle environment.
Life is of course a chemical process. Something about the way atoms are constructed makes them stick together in the most bizarre combinations: the giant crazy Tinkertoy molecules of life – DNA, RNA, hundreds of proteins, and all the rest. Although chemistry is usually regarded as a separate branch of science – it has its own university departments and its own journals – it is really a branch of physics:
that branch which deals with the outermost electrons in the atom. These valence electrons, hopping back and forth or being shared between atoms, give the atoms their amazing abilities to combine into diverse array of molecules.
How is it that the Laws of Physics allow marvelously intricate structures like DNA that hold themselves without collapsing, flying aprt, or destructing in some other way? To some degree it is luck.
The Laws of Physics begin with a list of elementary particles like electrons, quarks, photons, neutrinos, and more, each with special properties such as mass and electric charge. No one knows why the list is what it is or why the properties are exactly what they are. An infinite number of other lists is possible. But a universe
filled with life is by no means what one would expect from random choice of the list.In my opinion there is still some essential pieces missing…what could they be?
First observation about science could maybe be it being very dogmatic. One is not allowed to think as one likes, but one has to learn to think in some particular manner.
But do Daoists or Buddhists have access to the elementary particles?
HOWDY
The Three Stooges were an American vaudeville and comedy act of the early mid-20th century best known for their numerous short subject films. Their hallmark was physical farce and extreme slapstick. In films, the Stooges were commonly known by their first names: “Moe, Larry, and Curly” and “Moe, Larry, and Shemp,” among other lineups.
-WIKIPEDIAJeffrey Manchester is McGyver of the criminal world.
-Captain Charles Franklin of the Belmont Police Department, North CarolinaNow, these microvita move throughout the entire universe, from one celestial body to another. They move everywhere, crossing the boundaries of nebulae, piercing through Milky-way, galaxies, stars and planets. Like other psychic and psycho-physical beings, they also have got basic characteristics – such as existing, multiplying and dying.
-Shrii Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar
Puzzle will never be solved,
I don’t think I will ever
be intellectual enough to
understand it all, it is
easier to feel it thru the
nei kung practices. I have
family in Japan, so I have
been reading up all I can
on nuclear stuff…thanks
for all of your input.Many thanks,
AdelThe inverse relation between wavelenght and energy explains one of the all-pervasive trends in twentieth-century physics: the quest for bigger and bigger accelerators. Phycisists, trying to uncover the smallest constituents of matter (molecules, atoms, nuclei, quarks, etc.) were natuarally led to ever-smaller wavelengths to get clear images of these objects. But smaller wavelengths inevitably meant higher-energy quanta. In order to create such high-energy quanta, particles had to be accelerated to enormous kinetic energies. For example, electrons can be accelerated to huge energies, but only by machines of increasing size and power. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) near where I live can accelerate electrons to energies 200,000 times their mass. But this requires a machine about two miles long. SLAC is essentially a two-mile microscope that can resolve objects a thousand times smaller than a proton…throughout the twentieth century many unsuspected things were discovered as physicist probed to smaller and smaller distances. One of the most dramatic was that protons and neutrons are not at all elementary particles. By hitting them with high-energy particles, it became possible to discern the tiny components – quarks – that make up the proton and neutron. But even with the highest -energy (shortest-wavelength) probes, the electron, the photon, and thequark remain, as far as we can tell, pointlike objects. This means that we are unable to detect any structure, size, or internal parts to them. They may as well be infinitely small points of space…the various equations and formulas of physics contain a variety of different numerical constants. Some of these constants are numbers derived from pure mathematics. An example is the number 3.14159…, better known by its Greek name, pi. We know the value of pi to billions of decimal places, not by measuring it, but from its purely mathematical definition: pi is defined to be the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Other purely mathematical numbers such as the square root of 2 and the number called e, may also be computed to endless precision if anyone were motivated to do it. But other numbers that appear in physics equations have no special mathematical significance. We might call them empirical numbers. An example that is important in nuclear physics is the ratio of the proton mass to the neutron mass. Its numerical value is know to seven figures – 1.001378. The next digit cannot be obtained by mathematics alone. One must go into the lab and measure it. The most fundamental of these empirical numbers are crowned with the title “constants of nature.” The fine structure constant is one of the most important constants of nature. Like pi, the fine structure is named for a Greek letter, in this case alpha. It is often approximated by the fraction 1/137. Its precise value is know to a limited number of decimal places – 0.007297351 – but it is, nonetheless, one of the most accurately known physical constants.
-LEONARD SUSSKIND, The Cosmic Landscape“Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.”
-Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749-1827), reply made to Napoleon when asked why his celestial mechanics had no mention of GodThis must be the most fascinating scientific achievement of them all…
HOWDY
http://tiger.towson.edu/users/twilli13/images/particle_chart.jpg
(Standard Model of Fundamental Particles and Interactions)
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