Comment on Jordan Sullivan, Neutrinos and Antimatter Video
Neutrinos and antimatter at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcpNhPBxwfo
Jordan,
You can combine a particle and its anti-particle into a stable form, if you provide angular momentum. The external charge and magnetic dipole moments are effectively zero, and the particle is effectively all binding energy which has no mass. The pair can store most any amount of energy, but the conditions will be as balanced and precise as a Mossbauer experiment. Next time you make a video, put things on the screen and stand beside the viewers looking at, commenting on, and collaborating on it. My best candidate for neutrinos and dark matter is stable particle-antiparticle pairs. They can be found as solutions of the nonlinear Schrodinger equation, but there are many equivalent forms on the Internet.
“neutrino” OR “neutrinos” has about 17.5 Million entry points on Google today (5 Oct 2021) and those individuals and groups are not working Internet wide in collaborations. Rather they are talking to each other. What is needed is a way for groups to put their ideas, models, equations, data, data streams onto one gameboard, where everyone can work on it together. The multiplayer games have experimented with groups of millions. The groups like Zooniverse can motivate millions of volunteers, but they don’t support complex problems and they have no mechanism for volunteers to work alongside each other. They only benefit a few.
Look at all the HTML and PDF books and journals you have had to read. Let alone blogs and videos, chats and rants. Every one of them requires you to read from paper or paper equivalents, rely on your own memory to resolve things the authors did not bother to share with you. And that is what has slowed diffusion of new ideas, learning and truly global open collaboration to a crawl. It can take decades for problems and opportunities to resolve on the Internet – because effectively the human species is still only sharing by word of mouth. We look down on societies that transmit wisdom by works, gestures and stories from generation to generation. Then ported that same method to the Internet. The whole of the Internet is still using paper methods, it just gets to more people — then they are not working together.
I have looked at “neutrino” OR “neutrinos” and it is not that complicated. Just a small group of full time people, many tens of thousands of part timers, lots of people with ideas, and lots of people reading about it, and wondering. It has generated incomes for some. But “global open sharing” – no. Each group does its own thing on the Internet. There is no accumulation of best practices, and lazy efforts to truly share.
The nonlinear Schrodinger equation, or any equations that admit 3D soliton or wavelet solutions can represent fairly complex interactions and events. But they are still very crude compared to the space of computable solutions and simulations. and tiny compared to what human brains are capable of. But human brains cannot share directly (yes, of course, there are the usual ten thousand groups working on that too). The problem is not “neutrinos”, but how to get all the people working on it, or interested, or just wondering what that is all about – to see the whole of it, all the data, all the models, all the people, ideas, applications, phenomena – neatly accessible across all ages, human languages and backgrounds.
It is possible to take the millions of cross cutting topics, where tens of thousands or hundreds of million or billions of people are involved. We have about 4.9 Billion people with some access to the Internet. But EVERY writer only gives enough for a few hundred thousand to read and understand. Mostly because the material require human eyeballs and ears, and pre-trained human memories to make the process of absorbing and responding to the material fast enough to cover all the ambiguities and variations in a reasonable time. Look how long it takes to read one paper on neutrinos – because the “paper” is only images on paper or a screen, and the computer or browser or operating system or network is not helping to remember all that has already been done, and have the immediately available for a new or old reader. You read and see “Schrodinger equation” and can’t quite remember the details. You don’t want to remember the handwritten derivations and word stories from some classroom or lecture. You just want to grab “SE” and use it on your data.
My favorite “bad” example is site:wikipedia.org (“FFT” OR “Fourier transform”) with its 36,000 entry points. Wikipedia is supposed to gather all human knowledge AND share it with everyone efficiently in the context and purposes of human lives. Multiply the 4.6 Billion people who might have occasion to hear about FFTs and want to use them by “just” those 36,000 entries (all jumbled up) on Wikipedia. There is no way that is working. And it is getting worse. Every government, every large project, every corporation, every university, ever school, every nonprofit, every groups, every individual posting things on the Internet leaves their residual and virtually no one curated, simplifies, standardizes, cleans up the mess – or requires everyone to do at least as good a job if they were posting to a journal or magazine. And making all the equations real and usable, all the data real and usable, all the numbers with their units an uses.
So to stop and finish my small story on FFT – no where on Wikipedia is FFT usable. There are no tools to actually apply “FFT” to sample sounds, videos, images, data streams or simulated data. No way to say, “do that for my data”. No way to share what you create or discover with the world, and to tag it with what you hope it might be for.
I work on all of human knowledge, but I have some favorites. “Global Climate Change”, “poverty”, “famine”, “virus domestication”, “solar system colonization”, “global collaborative model of suns and stars” and a few ten thousand more. That is tiny tiny tiny compare to what is going on, but even after 23 years, every single day, for 12-18 hours a day, since I took over TheInternetFoundation from Network Solutions, I have only scratched the surface of a few things that I feel are important for the survival and prosperity of the human species. And some things I have wanted to know or do since I started studying chemistry and spectroscopy about 60 years ago.
If you find “neutron stars” (“models” OR “simulations”), or “quark stars” (“models” OR “simulations”) keep an eye out for proton superconductors (protons binding in pairs to form superconducting fluids), or “quark gluon” “matter”. I asked a few of them to look for particle-antiparticle pairs. Because when protons and antiprotons pair, they form something that has no charge, no magnetic moment. So it is not easily detected by electromagnetic methods. It is electromagnetically transparent. And, if all its binding energy just stores a little energy, that is no visible as matter. I have come to think that the quark gluon stuff is the same stuff as the gravitational potential, and that is electromagnetically invisible. I wrote to Emilio Segre (antiproton) back about 1981 to ask him about the spectrum for positronium. He assured me I was going in the right direction and that let me think that bound states for pairs are achievable and maybe practical.
It is several years since you posted this. I hope you are doing well. I hope you haven’t gotten into “paper” slavery like too many students. I read many hundreds of dissertations each year, and sometimes follow up to ask people about their work. And almost always they either churn out variations of what they wrote, or abandon those dreams and ideas completely. And all of them never learn how to work on the whole of a topic, as we all should be doing. There is nothing wrong with sharing “individual works” – but it has to have feedback and collaboration, it has to be in forms where the equations stay as living equations that can be compared, combined, simulated, tested, calibrated – by computer, not only by human eyes and memories.
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
