The thing about half life, that the way I’m understanding it, may imply that there are stray Higgs Bosons or Strange/Charmed Quarks here and there that could stick around unreasonably long, maybe, for minutes or hours… is that even possible?

The existence of a connection on a manifold enables one to reason consistently about geometric concepts on the whole manifold.

The geometry of the cosmos itself. Tracing good ol’ fashioned circles and triangles with the full extent of the visible universe and even beyond. This stuff blows my mind, even just the mere fact that we’re doing it, let alone the fact that we’re getting such incredible, counter-intuitive results.

Picture yourself having a time machine, going back to visit Euclid or Pythagoras, or even Kepler or Galileo, and blowing their mind with four words: The Geometry Of Spacetime.

Not only does time itself have a geometry, it must curve and contract to accommodate the absolute speed of light… nuts I tell ya.

Then there are at least four spatial dimensions, but there may be as many as eleven. To think that Copernicus thought epicycles were weird, wait till he gets a load of THIS!

Spinoza? Meet quantum entanglement with no hidden variables!
“Oy vey!”

“Wait, they’re ALL metals?”
“Always have been.”

What is happening is happening because people don’t vote and regularly allow right-wing shitheads to erode the government and society in bad faith, and George Carlin also said “wHy BoThEr VoTiNg?”

So George Carlin was no messiah and no prophet.
There are no messiahs. There are no prophets.
Yet people insist on “if it’s not perfect and requires my patience and consistency, I’d rather eat shit than lift a finger once a year”.

Holy Minkowski spaces, Batman! It’s the old man himself!

“Now all you are is the secret ingredient in my prize-winning chili recipe!”

Yeah, but is it a wave or a particle, eh, Einstein? Answer that!

Put a monocle on him and make it The Speed Of Causality.

All I know is that when matter and antimatter particles annihilate, what that usually means is that they become photons, so that their rest mass - what we usually mean when we say matter itself - is gone, having turned into pure energy, mainly gamma rays I believe.

The other part that you allude to, has to do with how at the quantum level, processes are time-symmetric or time-reversible, look exactly the same if you view their behavior forwards or in reverse, you cannot tell which way it’s going. Antimatter behaves just like matter, but from our perspective like an egg un-breaking, or a car un-crashing, or an ice cube un-melting.

What’s puzzling me is how photons, other bosons like gluons or majorana particles are supposed to be their own anti-particle, how does that affect their time-related behavior and interactions with themselves and other particles, I have no idea… at least not yet.
In fact, I hadn’t even thought about this strange question until just now, and I love it!

Photons can interfere creatively or destructively with each other, but they don’t annihilate on contact, they do not interact with each other that way. I am also pretty sure the same applies for gluons, and I have no idea what the deal is with the two Weak Force bosons, which have mass even though they are bosons!

The Weak Force is a very, very strange, abstract, lovely thing, and if you have a coin with Electromagnetism on one side, the Weak Force on the other side, and flip it with enough energy, that’s when they realized that at higher levels it’s actually the Electroweak Force.

If that is so, if neutrinos really are their own antiparticle, would that theoretically mean that there is no such thing as neutrino annihilation?
Like photons, which are their own antiparticle, and don’t annihilate on contact with each other, but those are bosons with a completely different spin, and also have zero rest mass, unlike neutrinos/antineutrinos, which DO have mass, but seem to somehow draw it out from something other than the Higgs Field.

In the way you describe it, electromagnetic charge is kinda easy to visualize. But when we get into Weak Force interactions, that’s when these other, much more abstract features come into play.

For example, when you say “Spin” you don’t mean regular ol’ Angular Momentum, I’m guessing, but other weird types like Isospin or I-don’t-know-what.

This is all fascinating stuff, truly. And way beyond my pay grade, lol!

On further thought, this is really strange.
I can visualize a negatively charged electron and a positively charged positron making contact and annihilating, how the minus and the plus cancel each other.

But what is it about neutrinos and antineutrinos that make them cancel out when they come into contact? What is it about their positive and negative characteristics that can make them go “poof!” in a burst of photons?

I’m going to copy-paste the exact relevant bit here:

For each neutrino, there also exists a corresponding antiparticle, called an antineutrino, which also has no electric charge and half-integer spin. They are distinguished from the neutrinos by having opposite signs of lepton number and chirality. As of 2016, no evidence has been found for any other difference.

I knew about the chirality difference, that there are no right-handed neutrinos nor left-handed antineutrinos (or something along those lines, breaking what was thought to be a fundamental parity or symmetry), but what puzzled me was that I thought the charge difference was the one big fundamental difference between matter and antimatter, and suddenly tonight the neutrino question popped into my head. At the very least I knew that it’s not a mass/negative mass type of difference.

Now as for that bit that says “opposite signs of lepton number”… I’d never even heard of this concept or characteristic, until right now.

“What the hell are you kids doing down there in the basement, that you need these more specific units?”
“Um… nothing, sir. Everything is quite all right, quite all right.”
“Hrumph! Very well then, I shall be in my study. And do try to keep the bloody racket down, for chrissakes!”
“Yes sir, thank you sir, goodnight sir… Whew… that was a close one!”

As close to nothing as something can be and still exist… as far as we know.
That mass is so small, and behaves so strangely (it fluctuates), that the theories say the neutrino does NOT get its’ tiny fluctuating mass from the Higgs Field.

And if that ain’t a mind-blower of what is at the very edge of human knowledge and understanding of reality, I don’t know what is.

That’s just the half of it.
Watch the weight on the scale fluctuate, as the kitty neutrino keeps adorably creepily gazing at you.

It Egg Even States

IS THAT A TWISTED SISTER DELTA PLEDGE PIN?!!
ON YOUR UNIFORM?!!

I wanna ROCK

(insert banjo twang here)

I don’t care what all the avant-garde, intellectual nambie-pambies say, IT IS FILTH!