OT: Carbon Dioxide races -> known vs unknown -> terraforming mars -> is or is not

[Suicide Junkie]

They would have to be immensely smaller than photons anyways, as we have never been able to detect or see the evidence of any such gravitons.

Not sure how much you can say about the 3D "size" of the force particles besides wavelength.
An imporant note is that Gravitons would be much more weakly interacting with matter, though.
About 8x10^37 times weaker. (Weak, as opposed to rarely interacting like neutrinos)
Building a detector sensitive enough is a challenge.

if it's smaller than an electron, i don't see how we can be sure it's there. least until we have something that can see smaller than an electron.

Electrons are point particles to the limit of current instruments.
Protons are known to be composed of multiple subparticles (3).

To see this:
Take the above particles, Zing them towards each other at higher and higher speeds and watch what happens.
Electron/electron, proton/proton, proton/positron.

They will bounce off each other due to the electromagnetic repulsion, and you'll see the basic 1/r^2 force.
But at high energy, the details of the other particle becomes important.

Think of it like two streams of sand and a hole in your sandbox...
From a distance, its a normal hill of sand, but when you get close, you see the two up-bumps and a down-bump.
If you roll a tiny ball (positron) up the hill (proton), it will start moving in odd dirctions due to the different slopes near the peaks.
Analyse the tracks with your computer to figure out what's going on.

[ July 17, 2003, 13:23: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[PvK]

I haven't been paying a lot of attention to new physics for over ten years, but Last I heard, practically all of our ability to observe all phenomena was fundamentally electro-magnetic. Therefore, it's quite difficult to prove the existence, not to mention the non-existence, of phenomena which have zero or near-zero electro-magnetic effects.

There could be entire classes of phenomena which we simply haven't observed, because we haven't noticed any interactions with our senses or equipment.

PvK

[Taera]

exactly my point. well, part of it, because i did not know about the EM detection.

[ July 18, 2003, 00:45: Message edited by: Taera ]

[Fyron]

Yes, but that would not be any form of matter suitable for life.

[Taera]

how do you know?

[deccan]

Originally posted by Taera:
how can you claim we know all particles in the universe? perharps somewhere there are atoms that have gravitons orbiting electrons and thats it for the atom. and dont start telling me there are no gravitons, its not proven. Or perharps atoms with quadraple cores? and how you know its impossible to have 1/2 of a particle? if we cant do it it doesnt mean its impossible. You cant go at the speed of light - who said its impossible?

In principle, all of that could be true. In principle, it could be true that there is a Santa Claus who has magical powers to avoid detection. In principle, it could be true that there's an invisible, pink unicorn looking over my shoulder as I write this.

The only thing that separates things that could be true in principle and things that we do know to be true is evidence. And the weight of evidence so far doesn't favor your propositions.

[TerranC]

Just to point this discussion into another topic;
What about Europa?

[Lord Chane]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
There are only so many sub-atomic particles, and we know what they are.

I am certainly not an expert on physics in any of its forms (e.g. high-energy, particle, etc.) nor do I understand the complicated mathmatics that physicists use to explain our universe. That aside, I'm not quite so certain that we know what all the sub-atomic particles are. I suspect if we did, then the grand unification theory would be complete and we'd have a far better understanding of the universe than we do. Various pundits down through time have proclaimed such things as "man will never fly", "man will never travel faster than a certain speed", "it's impossible to travel to another celestial body", and so forth. All of these have since been proven wrong. But at the time the statements were made they seemed true because sience hadn't yet delved deep enough to prove them false. Yes, it's possible we have seen all the particles and sub-particles. It seems equally likely that we have not and that when we discover a few more of them we'll be positioned to explain such things as gravity, to use one example.

[Taera]

thanks lord chane

[Fyron]

From the context of my post, it was clear that I was talking about the first level of sub-atomic particles, those things like protons, neutrons, electrons, positrons, etc. Not the smaller things, such as quarks, neutrinos, photons, etc.