It's articles like that that caused me to quit subscribing to magazines. 8-/
It starts to go downhill from here: "In the experiment, the laser ionizes and accelerates electrons". Ionizes electrons, as in knocks something off an electron to give it a charge? Riiight. Wouldn't, shouldn't that have been: knocks (shared valence?) electrons off the gold and accelerates them?
"On their way, the electrons interact with the gold nuclei" Could this be any more vague? This tells me next to nothing about the process.
The article scrapes bottom here: "The electrons give off packets of pure energy". Pure energy: what the hell is that? It seems to me that energy must always take a form, like, gravitational, electromagnetic, kinetic... It seems to me that energy is always tied to physical interactions between particles or an aspect of the particle itself. Go ahead, if I'm wrong, set me straight, my physics courses were way back sometime last century and I can't remember everything. This "pure energy" shit smacks of dumbing it down for the trekkie dweebs. If they bothered to explain it better maybe I could get a vague idea what's going on when the "pure energy" "decays into matter and anti-matter".
"decays into matter and anti-matter". Details, please? What, are excited electrons birthing something that then breaks up into positrons and more electrons? Or maybe hadrons, quarks, bosons and who knows what? Come on, it won't kill me to know. Such details would sure help to grasp the scope of the reaction. Well, at least we know that there are positrons getting emitted down the line (otherwise there wouldn't be an article).
"By creating this much anti-matter, we can study in more detail whether anti-matter really is just like matter". Vague, vague, vague! OK, you have a cloud of positrons that you don't seem to have any plan on manipulating (vacuum? magnetic bottle?) and here you are talking about comparing anti-electrons to all forms of matter: electrons, protons, neutrons -- molecules! This sounds to me to be as much of a stretch as cloning dinosaurs from 65 million-year old DNA fragments!
"and converted to pure energy (gamma rays)" So electromagnetic radiation (light) is pure energy now? I thought photons were force carrier particles, not the force itself. Or maybe gamma rays are just, special. Every dweeb loves gamma rays. Made Dr Banner into the Hulk he is today. *sarcasm*
Last but not least, there is absolutely no mention of frequently used sources of positrons, such as the beta decay of the fluorine-18 in the 2-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose used in PET scans. So I suspect mentioning wide use of anti-matter emitting substances would dilute the wow factor of zapping gold with a laser.
Now I can make guesses and try and fill in the holes in that article and maybe even most of them will be right guesses but then again, all my guesses could be wrong. So I would have wasted my time reading paragraph upon paragraph of filler and vague notions to glean just one thing: that Hui Chen at the Jupiter laser facility has succeeded in generating more positrons at once via laser excited gold than before. Just that. And that is why I don't buy newspapers or "science" magazines anymore.
By the way, this NOT a reflection on theweaselking. I do appreciate the news he brings. It is entirely a rant on the nature of reporting in the media, where all is hyperbole and ancient history is presented as if it were the new in thing. I apologize if I ruffled any feathers, especially that of our host. (Well not those of journalists spewing out such pap -- in the case of those people, ruffling is intended. Not that any journalists read this.)
I generally ignore anything that looks like the writer wrote it, look at the direct quotes from the scientist, and interpolate what they're most likely working on once you remove the "talking down to reporters" and "reporters still not understanding" part.
You're right. I went back and reread only the parts of the article that were direct quotes and it was much more palatable. Not enormously informative but at least not misleading or dumbed-down.
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Date: 2008-11-24 08:26 pm (UTC)The future looks a lot like the past
Date: 2008-11-24 09:19 pm (UTC)It starts to go downhill from here: "In the experiment, the laser ionizes and accelerates electrons". Ionizes electrons, as in knocks something off an electron to give it a charge? Riiight. Wouldn't, shouldn't that have been: knocks (shared valence?) electrons off the gold and accelerates them?
"On their way, the electrons interact with the gold nuclei" Could this be any more vague? This tells me next to nothing about the process.
The article scrapes bottom here: "The electrons give off packets of pure energy". Pure energy: what the hell is that? It seems to me that energy must always take a form, like, gravitational, electromagnetic, kinetic... It seems to me that energy is always tied to physical interactions between particles or an aspect of the particle itself. Go ahead, if I'm wrong, set me straight, my physics courses were way back sometime last century and I can't remember everything. This "pure energy" shit smacks of dumbing it down for the trekkie dweebs. If they bothered to explain it better maybe I could get a vague idea what's going on when the "pure energy" "decays into matter and anti-matter".
"decays into matter and anti-matter". Details, please? What, are excited electrons birthing something that then breaks up into positrons and more electrons? Or maybe hadrons, quarks, bosons and who knows what? Come on, it won't kill me to know. Such details would sure help to grasp the scope of the reaction. Well, at least we know that there are positrons getting emitted down the line (otherwise there wouldn't be an article).
"By creating this much anti-matter, we can study in more detail whether anti-matter really is just like matter". Vague, vague, vague! OK, you have a cloud of positrons that you don't seem to have any plan on manipulating (vacuum? magnetic bottle?) and here you are talking about comparing anti-electrons to all forms of matter: electrons, protons, neutrons -- molecules! This sounds to me to be as much of a stretch as cloning dinosaurs from 65 million-year old DNA fragments!
"and converted to pure energy (gamma rays)" So electromagnetic radiation (light) is pure energy now? I thought photons were force carrier particles, not the force itself. Or maybe gamma rays are just, special. Every dweeb loves gamma rays. Made Dr Banner into the Hulk he is today. *sarcasm*
Last but not least, there is absolutely no mention of frequently used sources of positrons, such as the beta decay of the fluorine-18 in the 2-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose used in PET scans. So I suspect mentioning wide use of anti-matter emitting substances would dilute the wow factor of zapping gold with a laser.
Now I can make guesses and try and fill in the holes in that article and maybe even most of them will be right guesses but then again, all my guesses could be wrong. So I would have wasted my time reading paragraph upon paragraph of filler and vague notions to glean just one thing: that Hui Chen at the Jupiter laser facility has succeeded in generating more positrons at once via laser excited gold than before. Just that. And that is why I don't buy newspapers or "science" magazines anymore.
Re: The future looks a lot like the past
Date: 2008-11-24 09:29 pm (UTC)Re: The future looks a lot like the past
Date: 2008-11-24 09:48 pm (UTC)I generally ignore anything that looks like the writer wrote it, look at the direct quotes from the scientist, and interpolate what they're most likely working on once you remove the "talking down to reporters" and "reporters still not understanding" part.
Just the gist
Date: 2008-11-24 10:15 pm (UTC)