I do not have the tools to understand everything he says. Physicists can read about it here: http://nohiggs.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/why-top-quark-mesons-must-exist/#comment-1789

I see that you prefer not to publish my previous comment. Can you edit the text in my comment? If it is possible, please change from:
“particle physicists do not have answers – all they have is a set of excuses”
to:
“there are no answers”

and publish it?

Thank you. I am following Comay’s blog for several months and I do not understand why no one answers his questions. Matt Strassler wrote that he is silly and stupid. You wrote that you do not trust him. And according to his blog he solved in the past a problem that was open for 30 years (a paradox called “the hidden momentum” or something like that). I think that he deserves better “treatment” from the community. Instead of saying that he doesn’t understand physics, people in the community should answer his claims, using scientific arguments.

That’s what I think.

In the meantime, I posted a question in his blog about your comment regarding the decay channels of W,Z.

Valery

Eliyahu Comay is a physicist since the 1960s and he has many publications. One of the most recent publication is about the W boson equations. The blog (which is written by his son) says that Comay proved that the equations show that W is not elementary.

In his blog Comay claimed that top quark mesons exist and in Matt Strassler blog he mentioned his claims. Matt Strassler said that he doesn’t have time to answer (he said he has better things to do). So my conclusion, for now, is there are no answers – all they have is a set of excuses. I hope that someone in CERN would answer to the specific points that were raised in Comay’s son blog blog or in Comay’s article and change my feeling about the whole thing…

All the best

Valery

I am no expert on the matter but I completely trust the judgement of Matt Strassler, a very reputed theorist from Rutgers University. In his blog, he answers the arguments brought by Mr. Conway. See http://profmattstrassler.com/new-start-here/ and search for “Larsen”. As I said before, it is believed that top mesons decay too fast to have time to form a bound state. And everything measured so far for the top quark, and the W, Z and new bosons are in agreement with the SM predictions. So I am happy to go with that.

I read the blog from Conway. All I can say is: I am always suspicious of people claiming to have the answers to everything and claiming that everybody else is wrong. If his arguments were sound and published in scientific journals, other theorists would have listened or cross-checked his claims. If he cannot convince anybody, it is probably that his arguments are faulty as Matt Strassler argues. He simply claims the top quark lives long enough when all evidence points to the contrary. To me, all this sounds like a “conspiration theory” attitude, stating that the whole scientific community somehow has an agreement to hide something. I know this is not the way it works. Usually, people state their arguments and it progresses from there.

I hope this will help you form your own opinion.

Cheers, Pauline

I am afraid the author of the article you read was misinformed. First of all, top quarks are not expected to form bound states. Second, such a particle would have specific decay modes, incompatible with the decay modes observed for the new boson and for the W and Z bosons.

Cheers, Pauline

What do you think about this argument? The article continued and claimed that it is possible that the new particle is a top meson (consists of top and top-bar). It says further and claims that W,Z are top mesons as well.

in fact, after careful cross-checks by other experiments and by the OPERA experiment itself, it turned out to be an experimental error. Neutrinos have a speed inferior to the the speed of light.

Regarding the experiment in the Creighton Mine in Minnesota that you refer to, what was measured there was not the speed of the neutrinos but their number. Ray Davis measured that only a third of the neutrinos produced by the sun reached the Earth. The reason was that the electron neutrinos produced on the sun can change into other types of neutrinos on their way to Earth. The cleaning product used to detect them contained chlorine and it only reacts to electron neutrinos. To test this hypothesis, another experiment was built in Sudbury in Northern Ontario in Canada in the Inco Mine. There, they used heavy water, a substance that was sensitive to all types of neutrinos (electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos). They were able to show that the sum of the three types of neutrinos corresponded to the number of electron neutrinos produced on the sun. So this was a different problem.

This other experiment implies that neutrino have masses. This allows them to mix into each other. Since they have mass, they should travel at less than the speed of light. This is also now proven after redoing this experiment in Italy with different detectors.

I hope this helps, Pauline

in the detector, we can see the two photons clearly. All that is needed then is to measure the angle between them like one measure any angle. Have a look at some of the event displays for Higgs bosons decaying into two photons taken by the ATLAS experiment: https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AtlasPublic/EventDisplaysFromHiggsSearches#H

Cheers, Pauline

Two bosons in the same quantum state are indeed indistinguishable. However, there are still *two* bosons there.

For example, in the future one of them can leave this state, while other can stay: say, two photons in the same quantum state enter a slice of some material, one is absorbed but other isn’t. Clearly, for that to be possible, there have to be two particles: it’s impossible to absorb a half of a particle.

Same for the Higgs boson. All Higgs bosons will have the same characteristics (spin 0, same mass (125 GeV if what we found is the Higgs boson), parity +, etc). It will also decay in very specific ways, each way having a given rate.

Bosons are different from fermions (particles of matter with half spins like the electrons or quarks) in that they obey different statistical rules. Fermions cannot exit in the same quantum state. This is why one only finds 2 electrons (one with spin up, one with spin down) per atomic level as we learned in high school chemistry. This is why larger atoms with many electrons have many levels and many sub-levels, each one with at most 2 electrons.

Now bosons can all exist in the same quantum state. You can put as many boson as you want in one given quantum state. True, they become absolutely indistinguishable. I suspect that unlike humans, they do not care about loosing their identity.

Cheers, Pauline