Some Maths On The First Monday Of Easter Break 🐣🥳

And God said, "Behold! I have created the fourth primordial force: the weak interaction!"

And the angels all clapped and nodded politely, and there was a long silence; and finally Verchiel, the Angel of Grace, spoke up and asked, "Er, what exactly does it do, O Fashioner?"

And God said, "What do you mean, 'what does it do?' It's the fourth fundamental force of the universe."

And Verchiel said, "You mentioned that. Um. But it's just that the other three sort of have a brand, you know? Gravity helps build large-scale structures, acts over vast cosmic distances, shapes time and space. The strong force is secret, hidden, binding together quarks and all that. Electromagnetism, very cool stuff, somewhere in between. We're all big fans of the whole magnetic monopole double bluff, very clever. But, er. What does this 'weak interaction' do?"

And God said, "It mediates radioactive decay. Sort of."

And Verchiel said, "Radioactive decay? All radioactive decay?"

And God said, "No. Just some kinds."

And Zephaniel, the Chief of the Ishim spoke, and he said, "A whole independent force just to mediate some kinds of radioactive decay?"

And God said, "Well. Not totally independent. Technically it's related to electromagnetism."

And Zephaniel said, "Wait, it's not even a real force?"

And God said, "It's totally a real force. It's just that it's one aspect of a combined electromagnetic and weak force. An electro-weak force, if you will."

And Metatron, the Celestial Scribe, scratched his head at this, but said nothing.

And Cambiel, the Angel of Transformation, said, "Maybe you can walk us through it from the top."

And God Sighed an immense Sigh, and said, "All right, fine.

"So the way it works is that all of space and time is permeated by a field that has imaginary mass."

And Cambiel said, "Imaginary mass, O Generous Provider?"

And God said, "Yes, imaginary mass. It's tachyonic, d'you see?"

And Sarathiel, the Angel of Discipline, said, "Wait a minute, I thought we agreed nothing was going to travel faster than light? All that 'c' business and the whole Lorentz transformation thing. What's happening with that?"

And God said, "Let me finish. The field is tachyonic. The particles in the field all move slower than light."

And Sarathiel had to think about this for a second.

And God said, "The point is, a field with imaginary mass has a non-zero vacuum expectation value."

And this really gave Sarathiel trouble, since he had never been very good at math.

And God, seeing this, went back to explain. "Most fields, like the electromagnetic field, have no effect when they are at their lowest energy state. It's like they're not there at all. If you give a field imaginary mass, then it vanishes only when it's at a very high energy state, and at a low energy state, it has a nonzero value everywhere."

And Sarathiel nodded, but he was confused, because he didn't understand why God would create such a thing.

But Verchiel thought he saw where God was going with this, and he was amazed.

"Truly, you are cunning beyond measure, O Only One Certainly Sound and Genuine in Truth! Only now do I understand your design! For in order to make the universe homogenous and isotropic, it is necessary that all large-scale fluctuations in temperature and mass must be evened out early in the history of the cosmos; and therefore, you have designed a field which will rapidly expand space after the Big Bang, many orders of magnitude in brief moments, and then swiftly and spontaneously decay as it gives up the energy it began with, giving rise to radiation and particles of all kinds as it does, which will condense into the material universe! It is a wonder to behold."

And God said, "What? No. I mean I did, but this isn't the inflaton field I'm talking about. This is something else."

And Verchiel said, "Wait, it's not?"

And God said, "No, I'm going to use a different field to drive cosmic inflation. The properties of this field are totally different."

And now Verchiel was also confused, and lapsed into silence.

And God said, "Like I was saying, this field is a scalar field with imaginary mass, and it does spontaneously decay to a ground state with a non-zero value. But it's not the inflaton field. Instead it combines with the W1, W2, W3, and B bosons."

And Metatron began to flip back through the pages of the Heavenly Record trying to figure out where he'd lost the thread.

And Zephaniel said, "The what bosons?"

And God said, "The W1, W2, W3, and B bosons. I'm sure I mentioned them. You know, the massless bosons?"

And Zephaniel said, "I'm pretty sure we only talked about the W+, W-, and Z0 bosons. All of which you said were going to have mass, O Owner of All Sovereignty."

And God said, "Yes, but this is how they get them, you see. Once this field acquires a nonzero value everywhere, the massless bosons interact with it and get mass. Well, some of them do. They turn into the W+, W-, and Z0 boson. And the photon."

And Zephaniel said, "…and the photon, O Accepter of Invocation?"

And God said, "Well, I did say I was going to unify the electromagnetic force and the weak interaction, didn't I? This is how. Above the critical temperature--right now I'm thinking 10^15 K, but I'm open to feedback on that one--electromagnetism and the weak force act as a single unifying force. Below that temperature, the field gets a nonzero value, you get three massive bosons to mediate the weak interaction, and the photon pops out seperately."

And Zephaniel said, "That seems… a bit overly complicated, doesn't it, O Reinstater Who Brings Back All?"

And God said, "No, it's exactly what we need. Look, that way the W and Z bosons have something to do, but the weak interaction still only travels short distances. Gravity is still the star of the show on cosmic scales, as it were. But now quarks and leptons can swap their flavor!"

And Zephaniel said, rather weakly, "Their… flavor, O Source of Good?"

And God said, "It's this new quantum number I'm trying out, to give the three generations of matter more unique identities."

And Cambiel said, "Three generations of matter? Now I'm really confused."

And God said, "I'm sure I mentioned this. You've got the lightest quarks and leptons, and then two heavier versions of each that can decay into the lighter versions."

And Cambiel said, "What do they do? New kinds of chemistry, is it?"

And God said, "Well, no. Mostly they just decay in a couple microseconds. Or even faster."

And Zephaniel began to rub his temples, and Cambiel sniffed.

And Cambiel said, "This all seems a bit ad hoc to me. Not really the stuff of an elegant and obviously ordered Creation. Why not have four generations of matter? Why not a trillion?"

And God began to grow irritable, and said, "Well, that's not really up to you, now is it? We're going to have three generations of matter, and the electroweak force, and that's that!"

And Zephaniel said, "As long as we are unifying fundamental forces, perhaps we could somehow also unify the electroweak interaction with the strong interaction, or even gravity."

And God hesitated saying, "Well, I haven't decided about that yet. I'm not sure I want gravity to be quantized, you know? Seems to take some of the geometric elegance out of general relativity."

And now it was Zephaniel's turn to sigh, and he bowed his head. "As you wish, O Possessor of Authority of Decisions and Judgement."

Rating LHC detector logos & names

CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has 4 crossing-point detectors: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb. This is a totally accurate 100% true absolutely not biased summary of how well they rank in name and logo

ALICE: A Large Ion Collider Experiment

Name: 5/5 (we love a woman in STEM, plus it's a fairly easy and informative acronym)

Logo: 3/5 (simple, cool colours but does look slightly evil, and the fact the lines aren't the same length upsets me)

TOTAL: 8/10

ATLAS: A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS

Name: 3/5 (loving the mythology name, very cool. However, a point has to be deducted from having two letters in the acorynm from 'Apparatus', especially as one is from the end of the word. Another point is deducted from using an acronym in your acronym)

Logo: 5/5 (perfect, and apparently it's also modelled on an actual physicist from the experiment)

TOTAL: 8/10

CMS: Compact Muon Solenoid

Name: 1/5 (it's so boring! You get 1 point for being informative)

Logo: 1/5 (it looks like a child designed it. Where's the pizzazz? I know those are meant to be muon tracks but they really do look like tentacles)

TOTAL: 2/10

LHCb: LHC-beauty

Name: 2/5 (Yes okay it's not really any better than CMS', but the fact it has LHC in the name makes it feel very Important™. The beauty is from the fact its doing bottom quark physics, and bottom quarks are also called beauty quarks and I just think that's neat)

Logo: 2/5 (A Basic Bitch of a logo, though it gets 1 redemption point for the red line suggesting CP violation, which is physicsy and cool)

TOTAL: 4/10

Hey remember when US and Russia was all like “We’re the best!!! We’ve won the space race!!!!” But India sent a kick-ass space probe to Mars and the whole mission was fuel efficient, costed less and a roaring success in the first try and then they were like “…..wait no that can’t be true” and still have the audacity to call us “underdeveloped” or only view us as a ‘third world country’? :)

For anyone who needs more info, the probe was called Mangalyaan (which literally means space probe vehicle) or Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) and you can also get more information here and here

[ one hundred days of productivity: 3/100 ]

sun 18 august

powering through some physics revision while listening to ‘come from away’ before i retire for the night and watch some himym :)

finally beginning to reach the end of term two- the easter break is next week and after that i’m back at school for two days and then off on exam leave for a month! and then because the school system is odd here we begin the next year of school at the start of june and break up for summer a month later, not long!!

30th april 2019,

suddenly seems very real that two years of modern studies comes to an end tomorrow oh my word. i did my biology exam today, i think it went well but there was a big focus on maths and very little on unit 3 (which was fine by me but a lot of people are unhappy as unit 3 is massive !!) but that’s biology over !! forever !! oh my gOSH

29th april 2019,

past papers, model papers, specimen papers, so many papers 📑 biology exam tomorrow! i’m a little nervous but i’m not really too worried 🧬

some pressure notes (i find it deeply amusing that there’s charles’ law and boyle’s law because of the character charles boyle in b99) (me and my friends often write each other notes on our books and recently our humour mostly involves brexit and theresa may- in retaliation to this i wrote brexit and drew a heart around it on her hand oops)

$57 can i get a life?? PLEASE can i get a life???

this one’s for the boring people

boys complimenting me:

me: :// 

my teacher leaving an ‘excellent work!!!’ on my essay: 

me, holding a wall for support: bro i’m just…..bro i’m just really teary i’m ghjdgfsdhjfjsdhf i’m hgjggjkhfkdjgj wow thank you idk what to say….bro idk why i’m fjhdsfkjdfg crying right now