Cancer

Putting this here for Lucius, since it's prose follow-up to something in the haiku thread.
 
There seem to be three flavor eigenstates, or just flavors, of neutrinos: each neutrino is associated with a lepton. Electron neutrinos go with electrons (and anti-electrons, a/k/a positrons). Muon neutrinos go with muons and their antiparticle. Tau neutrinos go with tau leptons. These flavors matter for reactions with other particles. As an example, an isolated neutron is unstable and it will decay into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino. That neutrino is *always* an electron neutrino. There are other reactions that will produce particles including a muon and a neutrino. In such a reaction, that neutrino is *always* a muon neutrino.
 
If messed with, though, one flavor of neutrino can turn into a different flavor. That is, once an electron neutrino is made, somewhere later in its travel if you try catching it, it may no longer be an electron neutrino; it may be a muon neutrino.
 
This can only happen if the neutrinos have a nonzero mass (in the original concept, and for decades thereafter, it was assumed they were massless) and if the masses are modestly different and the actual "real masses" of the neutrinos are not exactly the same as the average massese of the three neutrino flavors. In that case, a neutrino in one of these "mass eigenstates" will be a mixture of more than one of the flavors, and the probability of finding a particular neutrino as a particular flavor varies as the neutrino travels. It oscillates among the flavors.
 
We have seen this in more than one way. The "solar neutrino problem" was the situation that Ray Davis's chlorine-based experiment for detecting neutrinos from the Sun did detect neutrinos, but only about 40% of the predicted number; this problem persisted from the mid-1960s into the 1990s. During that time it was the only means capable of detecting solar neutrinos, but because it involved a reaction that made an electron, it could only detect electron neutrinos. An exhaustive theoretical analysis of the solar interior model showed that every possible adjustment to the solar model made the discrepancy worse. With the development of adequate neutrino detectors in the 1990s, capable of seeing both electron and muon neutrinos, the "flavor oscillation" was seen both in neutrinos made by particle accelerators and in the solar neutrinos. Including the effects of the oscillations turns the chlorine experiment's result into a full success, with the brilliant link to then-unknown physics operating in the neutrinos.
 
Finally, the word "eigenstates" is from mathematics; it refers to the "characteristic vectors" of a matrix of equations (linear algebra). In intermediate physics problems for coupled oscillators, the behavior of the system looks messy if you try describing it in terms of the individual oscillators, but is much easier to understand if expressed in these characteristic vectors, which describe the natural modes of oscillation of the *system*, not the individual pieces of the system.

Nah, I don't like Ewoks, DT just doesn't like being compared to me.   

You realize, Bazza, that no married man would willingly answer that question. The side effects of doing so are fatal.

Creepy but cool:
 
Hapsburg Imperial Crypt
 
This place has more skulls than a 40K game!

Six quarks, three colors
(and their anti-versions) make
Mesons and baryons

Z. In which constellation is the star 14 Leo Minoris?
 
(answer: Ursa Major. The constellation boundaries have been changed since Flamsteed assigned his star numbers.)
 
 
Z' In which constellation is the star 10 Ursa Majoris?
 
(answer: Lynx.)
 
Z'' In what constellation is the star 2 Piscis Austrini?
 
{answer: Microscopium}
 
Z''' In what constellation is the star 6 Persei?
 
{answer: Andromeda}
 
Z'''' In what constellation is the star 37 Librae?
 
{answer: Libra, of course.}

Z. In which constellation is the star 14 Leo Minoris?
 
(answer: Ursa Major. The constellation boundaries have been changed since Flamsteed assigned his star numbers.)
 
 
Z' In which constellation is the star 10 Ursa Majoris?
 
(answer: Lynx.)
 
Z'' In what constellation is the star 2 Piscis Austrini?
 
{answer: Microscopium}
 
Z''' In what constellation is the star 6 Persei?
 
{answer: Andromeda}
 
Z'''' In what constellation is the star 37 Librae?
 
{answer: Libra, of course.}

Another oddity you can use in your game

I try not to do that to them if I can help it.
 
I just makes the problems exponentially worse. 

These particles are
Elementary: Bosons,
Also Fermions.
 
Fermions have spin
That is half-integer always
Never integer
 
Fermions follow
Fermi-Dirac Statistics
(Note how they are named)
 
Bosons have integer
Spin, Bose-Einstein Statistics
(Again, note the name)
 
Lucius Alexander
 
The palindromedary hopes I get around to haiku about quarks, as they can be charming

Well, yeah.
 

One of the things firing my crackpot alarm:

No, he didn't. Or if he did, he didn't tell anyone about it, or meaningfully tell how he did it (and that is overwhelmingly likely because he didn't, in fact, do it). It would have made quite a splash if it had withstood scrutiny, and appear rather prominently in textbooks and historical accounts. That would entail producing meaningful images of, e.g., a hydrogen atom, that were about a meter across. Emphasis on meaningful, also. That picture of "a magnetic atom" is so obviously fake (flat? really? no hint of a third dimension? really?) that I would guess some third-grader scrawled it with chalk on blacktop. 
There's no citation of him doing that, publishing results, reporting a discussion of how he tried it, etc. That lack of citations is a BIG FRICKIN RED FLAG that this is at least fallacious, and more probably fatuous. Whoever wrote that has no clue what they are writing about.
 
Then, back to physics: that feat of magnification can't be done with anything like conventional light microscopy. (The Wikipedia entry for "Limitations" under "Microscopy" is flagged as unsourced, so I'll do this myself.) Conventional light microscopy is subject to the limits of diffraction, one of the consequences of the wave nature of light. Your angular resolution, in radians, is limited angles no smaller than (wavelength) / (aperture of apparatus) or in this case, (wavelength) / (size of object being viewed). Atoms are hundreds of times smaller than the wavelength of visible light. You cannot make meaningful images of anything under those circumstances. If you go to x-rays, the wavelength is now comparable to the dimensions of an atom, so you can start getting information on that scale, but (1) not of an isolated atom and (2) that isn't conventional light microscopy. But there is the technique of x-ray crystallography, which uses diffraction of x-rays through crystals to learn the crystal structure, the atomic-scale 3-d structure of the molecules making the crystal; this was developed in a well-documented way in the 19-teens (including the Nobel prize in physics in both 1914 and 1915), and "everyone" uses it these days; it was the means by which Rosalind Franklin found the double helix structure of DNA in the mid-1950s.
 
Everything that follows at that site seems to hinge on that unsupported and impossible claim, so it's kind of analogous to the silly things you can "prove" if you divide by zero in some unobvious way. Everything after that equally meaningless.

Leftover chicken curry with rice and peanuts for lunch. Yum.
 
But alas, no lager.

On one of her post-cancer-treatment albums, Melissa Ethridge has a rather spacey little cut that says, "All there is / Is atoms and space / Everything else is an illusion".
 
When I first heard it, my immediate reaction was, "It has been shown that that is incorrect." My wife hit me.

Four things snoring lightly: three cats, one spouse.

On one of her post-cancer-treatment albums, Melissa Ethridge has a rather spacey little cut that says, "All there is / Is atoms and space / Everything else is an illusion".
 
When I first heard it, my immediate reaction was, "It has been shown that that is incorrect." My wife hit me.

As opposed to physics departments, where radioactive crashing bores run rampant.

"Set yourself on fire. All the cool kids are doing it."
 
In deliberate imitation of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in a town where wights and zombies were an all-too-common problem: "Bring out your undead!" (clank of cowbell) "Bring out your undead!"

As opposed to physics departments, where radioactive crashing bores run rampant.

Yttrium. It's a first-peak s-process element, as is its neighbor in the periodic table, zirconium. And I did my master's on zirconium.
 
Scandium, on the other hand, is less interesting in a nucleosynthetic sense; it's kind of what you get when you're aiming for calcium and miss high. However, an ionized scandium line is the signpost neighbor to the forbidden oxygen line at 6300.311 angstroms, which does count for something.
 
 
Inexplicable and incomprehensible ramblings:
 
Handwaving high-level comments invoking nucleosynthesis, or entirely idiosyncratic little bits dropped from the associative memory of a spectroscopist.
 
N.B. changing your major to mechanical engineering is viable third alternative.

As opposed to physics departments, where radioactive crashing bores run rampant.

I walked along the avenue.
I never thought I'd meet a girl like you;
Meet a girl like you.
With auburn hair and tawny eyes;
The kind of eyes that hypnotize me through;
Hypnotize me through.

And I ran, I ran so far away.
I just ran, I ran all night and day.
I couldn't get away.

In the town where I was born
Lived a man who sailed to sea
And he told us of his life
In the land of submarines

So we sailed up to the sun
Till we found the sea of green
And we lived beneath the waves
In our yellow submarine

We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine

And our friends are all on board
Many more of them live next door
And the band begins to play

We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine

[Full speed ahead, Mr. Parker, full speed ahead!
Full speed over here, sir!
Action station! Action station!
Aye, aye, sir, fire!
Heaven! Heaven!]

As we live a life of ease (A life of ease)
Everyone of us (Everyone of us) has all we need (Has all we need)
Sky of blue (Sky of blue) and sea of green (Sea of green)
In our yellow (In our yellow) submarine (Submarine, ha, ha)

We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine