Posted on 03/19/2021 11:26:20 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Scientists are celebrating the long-sought discovery of the odderon, a strange phenomenon that appears only rarely when protons collide at high energies, such as inside particle accelerators. Though the odderon was first predicted to exist in the early 1970s, it wasn’t until recently that physicists finally gathered the data they needed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to confirm a true discovery.
The discovery contributes to physicists’ understanding of how all the matter in the universe interacts at the smallest levels. Unlike the famous Higgs boson, which was officially discovered in 2012, the odderon isn’t a particle exactly. Instead, it’s the name for a compound of three gluons that gets exchanged between protons (or a proton and its antimatter twin, the antiproton) when they collide violently but aren’t destroyed. Gluons are subatomic particles so named because they “glue” together other particles called quarks; quarks are the tiny things that make up the bigger particles like protons and neutrons that form the atoms we all know and love.
Gluons are funny in that they don’t like to be alone; they’re almost always found together. When it’s an even-numbered group of gluons (two, four, etc.), we call it a pomeron. When the number of gluons in the group is odd (three, five, etc.), well, you guessed it: That’s an odderon. The odderon, for mysterious reasons, is very rarely produced, and though hints of it have popped up over the decades, the evidence was never quite strong enough to say it existed for sure. But the generally accepted theory of quantum physics says odderons should exist, so scientists have continued to hunt for them.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
That’s odd.
Can we weaponize it?
Make our enemies extremely odd?
They already are extremely odd!
Not much is known about the Odderon other than it is a registered Democrat and highly intersectional.
I like to think so. If they weren't odd, they'd be friendly.
Thanks BenLurkin. Hey, Odderon is my paternal grandmother's maiden name! And everyone in town said, she never had one!
I wonder if they hold these ‘discoveries’ back until they need funding. How many other things are in their pipeline?
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