{"id":422,"date":"2006-07-25T12:18:09","date_gmt":"2006-07-25T12:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/25\/new-dorky-poll-favorite-partic\/"},"modified":"2006-07-25T12:18:09","modified_gmt":"2006-07-25T12:18:09","slug":"new-dorky-poll-favorite-partic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/25\/new-dorky-poll-favorite-partic\/","title":{"rendered":"New Dorky Poll: Favorite Particle?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, the extremely dorky poll<\/a> on favorite fundamental constants seems to have petered out at 48 comments, two short of the threshold at which it would’ve become non-dorky. Still, that was a good effort.<\/p>\n

Since that worked pretty well, here’s another dorky poll question: What’s your favorite fundamental particle? And, for the sake of concreteness, let’s stick to particles that have actually been shown to exist– the six quarks (up, down, strange, charm, bottom, top), six leptons (electron, muon, tau, electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino), massive force carrying bosons (W and Z), and the associated anti-particles.<\/p>\n

Only particles with non-zero mass count (no photons), and only particles that have actually been detected in experiments count, so no hypothetical super-symmetric partner particles.<\/p>\n

My answer after the cut.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This isn’t a topic I have very strong opinions about– it just suggested itself as a dorky poll topic when I was listening to a student presentation about developing some experiments for the upper-level labs. But, if I have to pick one, I’ll go with one of the neutrinos– let’s say the electron neutrino.<\/p>\n

Why the electron neutrino? It has the smallest mass of any particle I know of, with an upper limit of something like 1-2 eV\/c2<\/sup>, or half a million times smaller than the mass of an electron. But that mass isn’t<\/strong> zero, which is pretty darn strange. And nobody really knows why.<\/p>\n

The fact that neutrinos have mass<\/a> at all is one of the few experimental observations that definitely point to physics beyond what we know already (most of the other arguments for exotic theories are based on mathematical elegance or the lack thereof), and to the best of my knowledge (which admittedly isn’t great), nobody’s got a solid explanation for them.<\/p>\n

Put that together with the absolutely<\/a> astonishing<\/a> experiments<\/a> people put together to detect the things, and, well, can there be any doubt that neutrinos are the coolest fundamental particle out there?<\/p>\n

(OK, this might actually be dorkier than the previous dorky poll…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, the extremely dorky poll on favorite fundamental constants seems to have petered out at 48 comments, two short of the threshold at which it would’ve become non-dorky. Still, that was a good effort. Since that worked pretty well, here’s another dorky poll question: What’s your favorite fundamental particle? And, for the sake of concreteness,… Continue reading New Dorky Poll: Favorite Particle?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-silliness","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}