Posted on 02/21/2005 6:26:33 PM PST by wagglebee
IIRC he worked on the "Second Pyramid". The Great Pyramid is known to have a variety of chambers but comparitively few chambers had been found in the Second Pyramid. Alvarez described in his autobiography how he received a call during the experiment that positive results had been found, but after travelling all the way back to Egypt, he found that the results were due to an experimental error known as "double binning".
"In truth, he succeeded in proving that there were no hidden chambers in the Great Pyramid."
Waaaaah! Are too! It's just that they're lined with an alien material unknown to science that threw off his instruments.
Question: Since muons seemingly pass through everything, pretty much, how do you detect one?
Muons have an electromagnetic charge. As they pass by atoms, they can strip off electrons. The free electrons and ionized atoms can be detected in a number of ways.
One method would be to have a series of wires held at a high voltage in some easily ionized gas, such as argon or neon. As the passing muon leaves a trail of ionized gas molecules in its wake, the molecules drift in the vicinity of the wires and are attracted to them. The charge is deposited on the wires, which gives a measurable signal on the wires. Trace a curve through the wires with signals on them, and it shows the path of the muon. This is called a wire chamber.
Another method, more common for muons, is to wait for the ions to recombine with the electrons that were stripped from them, which results in the emission of light. This process is called "scintillation". The light can then be collected with a photomultiplier tube. A typical scintillation counter would consist of a series of rods made of a very special plastic that is very clear, and which ionizes easily.
So why are muons so much better at passing through matter than other charged particles? Well, for one thing, they have a long lifetime. The only charged particles that last longer are electrons and protons. Electrons and protons do travel through matter, and can be measured by the detectors I described, but they don't go as far, and for different reasons.
Electrons have very little mass, which makes them emit energetic photons very easily (a process called "Bremsstrahlung"--German for "braking radiation"). Muons, being more than two hundred times heavier, don't do that as readily.
Protons, being heavier still, also don't suffer much Bremsstrahlung, but they are subject to the strong nuclear force. Every time a proton smacks into an atomic nucleus, it either bounces off at some angle, or it breaks the nucleus apart. Nuclei are pretty small, but there sure are a lot of them, so naturally a proton will suffer many interactions as it passes through matter. Muons, by contrast, are totally blind to this force.
Lord, your world is so big and my brain is so small.
Great summary. Thanks a million.
I won't ask you to turn the thread into physics 101, even though I can't for the life of me figure out why muons are blind to the strong nuclear force.
Thanks wags, looks like blam just barely beat ya to it. :')
This one goes into the GGG catalog though, obviously, and I'll ping the other one. Thanks again!
Cosmic Rays To Solve Ancient Mexican (Pyramid) Mystery
Scotsman | 2-21-2005 | John von Radowitz
Posted on 02/21/2005 12:26:52 PM PST by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1348047/posts
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
Teotihuacan (northeast of Mexico City) where this pyramid is located existed around 200 BC to 600AD not much is known about the builders and their civilization, the Aztecs and Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City) did not really come on the scene until 1200-1300AD. Calling the Pyramid of the Sun pre-Aztec is only correct in that it was built long before the Aztec emergence but that's the only connection.
Thank God they ended it.
When you consider the elementary particles, you see that they fall into two groups: force particles that have integer spin and which carry a force (such as photons, gravitons, gluons, Z particles, and the like, collectively known as "bosons") and matter particles that have half-integer spin and which do not carry a force (collectively known as "fermions").
These fundamental fermions--the "matter" particles--are further split into two kinds: quarks and leptons. There are six kinds of quarks, and six kinds of leptons. These two groups mirror each other in all sorts of ways, so that it seems each type (or "flavor") of lepton has a corresponding flavor of quark, and vice-versa. Nobody knows why that's the case. There's some symmetry there we haven't discovered yet.
The main difference between the quark and lepton families is that the quarks carry "color" charge, while the leptons do not. The color charge is the charge associated with the strong nuclear force. If a particle has color charge, then the strong force can push it around, but if not, then the strong force has no handle on it. (This is exactly analogous to electromagnetism: if a thing is charged, then it can be moved around with an electrical field, but if it isn't, then it can't.)
So the answer to your question is this: muons are leptons, and as such, they have no color charge, so the strong nuclear force can't move them around. Protons, on the other hand, are made of quarks, so even though the protons themselves are colorless, the strong nuclear force does have a handle on the proton's constituents.
Once again, thanks a million.
I don't think they even knew all of that when I was in college back in the 70s.
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