http://apnews.myway.com/article/20130314/DA50T1382.html So, does this mean I'll see Warp Drive sometime before I die? I certainly hope so...
No, it means CERN will be getting another grant and somebody you've never heard of will be getting a Nobel Prize.
What, no warp drive and no nothing? Can't we get at least a teleportation machine, a time machine or a pony?
It should more properly say that the scientists had found a Higg's boson, because they have no idea where that one is at anymore. We pay them billions to find a particle and they don't even bother to keep track of it, or even slap an asset tag on it so they can keep it in inventory. Instead of chasing after the origin of mass, maybe they should hunt for the particle that gives objects expense.
Well, maybe warp drive is a long way away still, but maybe one practical application of the Higgs Field might be artificial gravity and inertial dampeners. The higgs field is responsible for making us not fly at constant lightspeed after all.
No Warp Drive from a Higgs boson. But reducing ship-mass (by blocking the action of the Higgs particle) may allow development of these shuttles, for 'near' light-speed travel...
I am no biologist, but I have a feeling your body won't survive for a long time with almost no mass. One neutron additional in water will kill you, totally reducing your mass sounds pretty gory.
^ Perhaps... just balance the Higgs particle blocking, against the Relativity mass increasing from speed. So your body maintains a same mass - even at near light-speed.
Yeah, my thoughts as well. From http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2135/is-heavy-water-dangerous: Any force exerted on a zero rest mass particle would cause it to instantly accelerate to the speed of light. You'd probably disintegrate before you even felt sick.
Not if you have no particle with mass in your body (you will jump to lightspeed in one piece). Or if your mass is small, but non-zero (admittedly, this would decrease significantly the potential of the technology). As for the mass of chemical elements - what matters is the relative mass of the interacting particles.
Lowering the rest mass increases atomic size. The radius of an atom is inversely proportional to the electron rest mass m, so the radius of atoms (R) would tend to infinity as m -> 0. Intermolecular (London) forces are roughly proportional to the ionization energy I over R^6, and as I is inversely proportional to R, this force would also quickly go to zero as 1/R^7.
Not to mention that when you try to slap yourself in the forehead because you just realized a serious problem with being massless, your arm mass = 0 and bicep force is definitely not zero,so arm acceleration tends to infinity and something really bad is going to happen to your head.
Furthermore, as ionization potential is proportional to electron rest mass (which is where I got the 1/R from in my previous post), all the atoms in your body would soon be ionized by lower energy photons until even infra-red radiation from your own body or your surroundings turns you into a rapidly dispersing ionic plasma.
Except you won't have 0 mass. A soon as you lower your mass to 0, you'll be flying at lightspeed, gaining relativistic mass. 'The radius of an atom is inversely proportional to the electron rest mass m, so the radius of atoms (R) would tend to infinity as m -> 0' - due to the uncertainty principle, not due to mass attraction. As to your wavefunction, the uncertainty principle allows, due to your relativistic mass, for it to be 'squished up' in a region of space not much larger than the one you now occupy (photons don't occupy infinite space for the same reason).
The part about mass attraction is a straw-man argument that you have introduced. The rest of your argument is a mish-mash of concepts from relativistic and quantum physics.
That's a neat discussion here. I'll chime in that, while there's no reason to doubt any of that, the idea that the Bohr radius is inversely proportional to electron mass has experimental support from the study of muonic hydrogen.
If you knew that the relation between electron mass and atomic radius is due to the uncertainty principle, you sure didn't show it in your previous posts, Astro. And the rest of my argument is correct: Δx·Δp ≥ ħ/2 Δx=atomic radius r Δp=Δv·m And the electron's mass is tiny to begin with. r ≥ (ħ/2)/(Δv·m) In words - the electron's mass can be as small as you wish (and rest or relativistic - it doesn't matter); if it's not 0, the wavefunction of the atom will be squished in a volume of space not much larger than the one it usually occupies.