On Fri Dec-30-2011 10:16, alexander koryagin (2:5020/2140.2) wrote to Roger Nelson:

 ak> Hi, Roger Nelson! How are you?

Fine, and you?

 ak> on Wednesday, 28 of December, I read your messsage to alexander
 ak> koryagin about ""How could you say so! You don't know the half of
 ak> that!"" 

 ak>> Do you say not the Big Ben, but the Big Bang? ;-) No, no mistake.
 ak>> The  probabilty  that  the Universe was created by the Big Ben is
 ak>> higher.  Because scientists say that there was nothing before Big
 ak>> Bang. And nothing cannot explode.

 RN> Too bad the scientists were not asked that question!

 ak> D'you like some more? :=)

 ak> In other  words  they  must admit that before the explosion the
 ak> matter existed. Existed in the form of some object. And if it
 ak> existed it must exist SOMEWHERE. So we can rewrite it:

 ak> An object  of  the  Universe  before there Big Bang existed in a
 ak> place which we called SOMEWHERE.

 ak> After that  we  can  easily  ask  themselves  - why on earth there
 ak> was (there is)  only  one  object  like  our  Universe  in
 ak> SOMEWHERE? What foolish rot! Of course, in SOMEWHERE there are a
 ak> lot of other objects. This place  is called Metauniverse. You can
 ak> travel there. You can move there from  one  place  to  another. 
 ak> Our  Universe is a rank-and-file object that  has  been  going 
 ak> along  his  own  path of evolution. And sometimes such  objects
 ak> blow up. Then, all the object disintegrates at elementary particles
 ak> in explosion. Actually we can compare them with a ball of  gas 
 ak> that  expanded  with acceleration after the explosion in SOMEWHERE.
 ak> All  interactions go on in this ball of particles (which we call
 ak> vacuum).  There  are  many interactions. For instance, a thing we
 ak> call a  quantum of light is just a momentum of energy that passed
 ak> from one particle to another and so on.

Interesting, and as interesting as this:

The Oh-My-God Particle, by John Walker, January 4, 1994

Fly's Eye

The University of Utah operates a cosmic ray detector called the Fly's Eye
II, situated at the Dugway Proving Ground about an hour's drive from Salt
Lake City. The Fly's Eye consists of an array of telescopes which stare
into the night sky and record the blue flashes which result when very high
energy cosmic rays slam into the atmosphere. From the height and intensity
of the flash, one can calculate the nature of the particle and its energy.

On the night of October 15, 1991, the Fly's Eye detected a proton with an
energy of 3.20.9x10^20 electron volts.[1,2] By comparison, the recently-
canceled Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) would have accelerated protons
to an energy of 20 TeV, or 2x10^13 electron volts -- ten million times less.
The energy of the Oh My God particle seen by the Fly's Eye is equivalent to
51 joules -- enough to light a 40 watt light bulb for more than a second --
equivalent, in the words of Utah physicist Pierre Sokolsky, to "a brick
falling on your toe." The particle's energy is equivalent to an American
baseball travelling fifty-five miles an hour.

All evidence points to these extremely high energy particles being protons
-- the nuclei of hydrogen atoms. Recalling that the rest mass of the proton
is 938.28 MeV -- roughly 1 GeV, 1x10^9 eV, all of the rest of the particle's
energy results from the kinetic energy resulting from its motion, which we
can calculate according to basic formulae of special relativity. So let's
crunch a few numbers.

Microbial Mass

First of all, noting that mass and energy are equivalent, we can calculate
the rest mass equivalent of a 3x10^20 eV particle to be about 5x10^-13 grams.
That doesn't sound like much until you recall that this is about 3x10^11
daltons (chemists measure molecular mass in daltons, where 1 dalton is the
mass of a hydrogen atom), just about the same as a single cell of the
intestinal bacterium E. coli (5x10^11 daltons). Thus this single subatomic
particle had a mass-energy equivalent to a bacterium.

How Fast?

How fast was it going? Pretty fast. The total mass-energy of a particle is
given in special relativity by the equation:

 .             M_0
 .    M  = ------------                   [1]
 .                  v
 .         Sqrt[1 - --]
 .                  c

where M_0 is the particle's rest mass, 0, v is the particle's velocity, and
c is the speed of light. Okay, we know that the Oh My God proton has a rest
mass of about 1 GeV, and a total kinetic energy of 3x10^20 eV, so let's solve
equation [1] for v, setting c to 1 to obtain velocity as a fraction of the
speed of light:

 v = Sqrt[m - M_0] / m

 And thus, approximately:

 v = 0.9999999999999999999999951 c

So taking 3x10^8 metres per second as the speed of light, we find that the
particle was traveling 2.9999999999999999999999853x10^8 metres per second,
thus 1.467x10^-15 metres per second slower than light -- one and a half
femtometres per second slower than light. If God's radar gun is slightly
out of calibration, this puppy's gonna be doin' hard time for speeding.
After traveling one light year, the particle would be only 0.15 femtoseconds
-- 46 nanometres -- behind a photon that left at the same time.

Quicktime

Recall also that time passes more slowly in a moving reference frame, by the
factor:

 .             t0
 .    t = ------------
 .                 v
 .        Sqrt[1 - --]
 .                 c

Since we know v/c, we can immediately calculate:

 .    t
 .    -- = 3.197x10^11
 .    t0

and thus, moving in the reference frame of the particle, time passes three
hundred billion times slower than in a rest frame. Thus, given that the
particle travels with essentially the speed of light, an observer traveling
along with the particle would perceive the flight time from the following
objects to the Earth.

                    Distance[3]           Perceived
  Object            (light years)         Travel Time
 ===============    ==================    ===========
 Alpha Centauri     4.36                  0.43 milliseconds
 Galactic nucleus   32,000                3.2 seconds
 Andromeda galaxy   2,180,000             3.5 minutes
 Virgo cluster      42,000,000            1.15 hours
 Quasar 3C273       2,500,000,000         3 days
 Edge of universe   17,000,000,000        19 days

Thus, if you could accelerate yourself to the speed at which the Oh My God
particle was traveling, you'd be able to travel to the edge of the visible
universe in a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, even assuming you found a
source for the energy it would take and invented a means to accelerate
yourself and Intergalactic Vessel Omega Point to this velocity, you wouldn't
get far before being disrupted into subatomic goo due to interactions with
photons in the ubiquitous cosmic microwave background radiation. Sokolsky
has calculated that at 3x10^20 eV, even a single proton could travel no
farther than 10 megaparsecs, about the distance of the Virgo galaxy cluster,
before losing energy in this manner.

Warp Factor Oh-My-God -- Engage!

It is interesting to observe that a real particle, in our universe, subject
to all the laws of physics we understand, is a rather better interstellar
voyager than the best fielded in the 24th century by the United Federation
of Planets. Their much-vaunted Galaxy Class starships are capable of speeds
slightly in excess of Warp Factor 9, an apparent velocity of 1516 cochranes
(or 1516 times the speed of light).[4] At a velocity of 1516 c, traveling
to the centre of the galaxy would take, as perceived by the life forms on
board, a little more than 21 years. By contrast, an observer on board the
Oh-My-God particle would arrive at the nucleus of the Milky Way, according
to his clock, just about 3 seconds after leaving Starbase Terra. That's more
than 9,700,000 times faster than the starship. In the time the starship
spends vacuum-whooshing and rumbling its way to the nearby star Aldebaran,
the particle could travel to the edge of the visible universe.

Go Fast -- Grow Thin

Finally, let's consider the length contraction in the direction of motion
which results from the Lorentz transformation -- objects in the direction
of travel are seen to contract in that direction by a factor of:

 .   l             v
 .   -- = Sqrt[1 - --]
 .   l0            c

And thus, paralleling the time dilation calculated above, in the frame of
the particle, oncoming objects are seen as contracted by a factor of
3x10^11, three hundred billion times, in thickness. Thus, seen from the
particle, the objects below will have the following thickness.

 Object                  Rest Frame Thickness    Particle Frame Thickness
 ================        ====================    ===========================

 Earth's diameter        12,756 km               0.0399mm

 Solar system            80 AU                   37 metres

 Sun/Alpha Centauri      4.3 light years         127 km (79 mi)

 30 kiloparsecs          2,895,000 km            Milky Way galaxy
 .                                               about ten times the
 .                                               distance from the
 .                                               Earth to the Moon

But How?

How was such an extraordinary particle created? What cosmic process
accelerated a mundane proton to a brick-on-the-toe-energy?

Nobody knows. A particle with such energy would be deflected little by
galactic magnetic fields, and so its impact track should point right
back at the source.

Astronomers see nothing unusual in that direction.

Nature remains rich in mysteries.

References

 [1]Physical Review Letters, 22 November 1993.

 [2]G. Taubes, Science 262, 1649 (1993).

 [3]Ottewell, G. The Astronomical Companion. Greenville SC: Astronomical
 Workshop, 1979-1992. ISBN 0-93456-01-0.

 [4]Sternbach, R. and M. Okuda. Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical
 Manual.
 New York: Pocket Books, 1991. ISBN 0-671-70427-3.

Disclaimer

These calculations involve some elementary but easy to mess up algebra and
some very demanding numerical calculations for which regular IEEE double
precision is insufficient. If you'd like to double-check these results, be
sure to use a multiple precision calculator with at least 30 significant
digits of accuracy. I generally use Mathematica for symbolic work and Mark
Hopkins' package C-BC for number crunching. It's entirely possible I've
made one or more mistakes of order-of-magnitude or greater significance.
But even so, (and please correct me!), this is, particle physics wise, a
genuine Oh Wow event.

by John Walker

... It is better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot.


Regards,

Roger 
--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+