alt.hn

8/12/2026 at 2:26:41 PM

A particle made of force: physicists say they've found mysterious 'glueball'

 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02498-1

by Brajeshwar

8/17/2026 at 7:45:46 PM

> After almost two decades of searching, a team of physicists in China says it has observed strong evidence of a mysterious particle called a glueball, which is made entirely of force-carrying particles. > ... The discovery of glueballs would provide direct evidence that gluons can interact with themselves, researchers say. This is a key prediction of quantum chromodynamics

by lorenzohess

8/17/2026 at 9:44:43 PM

> "quantum chromodynamics"

I had to google it: "the study of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons"

by strictnein

8/18/2026 at 1:07:10 AM

It’s the theory of colour charge essentially, counterpart to electrodynamics. Quarks have colour, rather than electrical charge. Mediating particle is the gluon, analogous to (but entirely different from) the photon

by _kulang

8/18/2026 at 10:14:46 AM

Its called chromodynamics because the interactions are described by the special unitary group of degree 3, which is the same group that describes how we perceive color interactions.

by throwawayffffas

8/18/2026 at 6:34:39 PM

It's just the three dimensional nature of it plus the usual physics practice of giving things cheeky names. The vector space of (visible) colors is not acted symmetrically upon by SU(3); it doesn't transform symmetrically under charge-preserving unitary matrices. A blue strawberry with red leaves would not seem the same to us as a red strawberry with green leaves.

by cynicalkane

8/18/2026 at 12:48:43 PM

Now explain how quarks have flavour!

by mr_toad

8/18/2026 at 8:04:05 AM

Why do they call it a "mysterious glueball" if the theory predicted it?

by amelius

8/18/2026 at 8:59:05 AM

Because it's never been observed.

by Synaesthesia

8/18/2026 at 9:02:11 AM

mysterious: strange, not known, or not understood.

They don't really know what it is or understand it.

by not-kinsale-joe

8/18/2026 at 3:42:36 AM

This led me on a 1.5 hours long, entertaining chat session with Gemini learning about stuff in Physics - hopefully without much hallucinations. But definitely with a lot of typical - "You have arrived at a great insight.." like egging on by the AI :D

But learned a bunch about bosons, fermions, QCD, gluons, Kugelblitz, composite bosons and finally Noether’s Theorem on symmetry. Was a wild ride

by 4mitkumar

8/18/2026 at 4:34:34 AM

How do you plan to make this newfound knowledge 'stick'? Do you have enough relevant/related knowledge that you'll remember it? Or is there a way to have Gemini make a bunch of cards for use with spaced repetition software?

by apparent

8/18/2026 at 7:53:37 AM

Best way is to build a particle collider in your back yard. If you don't have the budget, write a simulator.

by amelius

8/18/2026 at 5:38:36 PM

I was waiting for someone to make a glueball joke, TBH.

by apparent

8/18/2026 at 5:45:19 PM

"You are absolutely right! ..."

by Bluestein

8/18/2026 at 4:48:37 AM

You can use Gemini notebook notebooklm for this

by ilteris

8/18/2026 at 5:07:29 AM

Oh cool, will look into this. Have only used it to make podcasts in the past. I'm a little hesitant to build in a walled garden though. I'd rather store things in an open format that can be used with many platforms, not just the one.

by apparent

8/18/2026 at 8:00:29 AM

Yea, I like the quiz feature a lot. It feel more efficient than both the podcast one (which mostly creates a very superficial high level talk on a level I typically already grasp), and the flashcard one in my experience.

by samuell

8/18/2026 at 11:40:40 AM

share the thread ?

by nobrains

8/18/2026 at 12:03:04 AM

Isn't it significant in some sense that this was discovered in China first, and not the US?

In the sense of: we didn't know splitting the atom would change warfare forever, back when Einstein and others published on it. We don't know if there are discoveries of similar impact lying in wait somewhere. If China gets to such a discovery first, we are in Sputnik territory, to say the least.

by hdivider

8/18/2026 at 3:34:03 AM

We knew. That's why Roosevelt started the Manhattan project after scientists wrote to him warning about it, to be sure that the Germans or the Soviets didn't develop it first.

by SoftTalker

8/18/2026 at 12:29:30 AM

Plenty of things get discovered all over the world and this isn't a particularly earth shattering result. Discovering evidence of a particle predicted for 50 years is interesting but still pretty mundane.

The LHC which is doing much of the particle physics discovery is in Switzerland and France, if you need to be reminded, not the US.

The first strong force theory was published by Hideki Yukawa in Japan in 1935 (which won him the nobel prize) ... so uh, not exactly a sputnik problem.

Sputnik problems (and the nuclear race) are engineering and industrial races, not fundamental physics ones.

by colechristensen

8/18/2026 at 5:01:10 AM

> The LHC which is doing much of the particle physics discovery is in Switzerland and France, if you need to be reminded, not the US.

Which is ironically an example of particle collider science happening overseas primarily because the US relinquished its lead on scientific discovery, despite having a similar-scale particle collider practically finished and ready to go [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

by lukeify

8/18/2026 at 7:44:48 AM

That would be classical 80:20 or more like 90:10 rule, few kms of tunnels ain't close to delivery in any feasible way, just the first baby steps.

The amount of continuous effort (and budget) that goes into just keeping CERN up and delivering is non-trivial. I live nearby and sometimes chat with folks working there (its >15,000 folks although not all do science).

by kakacik

8/18/2026 at 8:07:45 AM

Well they have plenty of spare time to do things like, for example, invent the web browser.

by amelius

8/18/2026 at 8:12:46 AM

That was a time saving part and parcel of the job of exchanging text and images between researchers.

If you're reaching for examples of spare time activities, this was squeezed into 20 minutes of downtime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e1eLe1ihT0

by defrost

8/18/2026 at 7:10:27 AM

"practically finished and ready to go" is a bit of an overstatement. They made some holes in the ground, and did preliminary research and manufacturing, but it was heavily mismanaged and fantastically over budget, so congress killed it

by voidUpdate

8/18/2026 at 1:30:48 AM

But nuclear fission was discovered by scientists working in Nazi Germany (except Meitner who had fled to Sweden by then).

by wiml

8/18/2026 at 2:18:58 AM

It's foundational science. The US scuence system calls for utility and time to merket. In such a system there is little space for gluons.

by jhoechtl

8/18/2026 at 6:22:25 PM

That is untrue. US science is also funded by NSF grants - or were, before the Orange Idiot and his crew of apes began defunding science they didn't understand.

Much science is done by international (i.e., borderless) cooperation between teams of scientists, as well. Science is becoming, and ultimately should be, nationless.

by IAmBroom

8/18/2026 at 1:08:31 AM

you are trying to see something that's not quite there in this case. there is shit ton of very good research that happens all over the world. but i also sympathize with what you are trying insinuate and that's also probably happening.

by prometheus1992

8/18/2026 at 12:33:06 AM

HEP is undeniably an international effort, and it's silly to try and spin this into something akin to the space race. While this is a useful and frankly brilliant potential confirmation of existing theory, that's what it is: confirmation (sort of). Without CERN, without universities across the world including all across Asia none of this would be possible.

Very few endeavors are as truly international as this because the problems are so hard to even explore, and the machines required to do so are the most complex and highly engineered on Earth. Lets not lose that international spirit in science because the blowhard narcissists who run our countries would find that temporarily useful to them.

by EA-3167

8/18/2026 at 12:50:29 AM

[dead]

by aaron695

8/17/2026 at 10:59:52 PM

are we going to have force-fields now?

by cat-whisperer

8/18/2026 at 10:20:41 AM

We have them now. You are not floating into space because of one right now. Also magnets.

by throwawayffffas

8/17/2026 at 11:03:36 PM

No.

by krapp

8/17/2026 at 11:18:43 PM

I thought a Plasma Window is a form of force-field.

by yndoendo

8/18/2026 at 3:40:34 AM

> I thought a Plasma Window is a form of force-field.

Kind of. It weakly repels Gnome users.

by CoastalCoder

8/17/2026 at 11:55:25 PM

Plasma is matter, not a force

by GroksBarnacles

8/18/2026 at 12:00:09 AM

Yet what is matter but a (strong) force

by foobarian

8/18/2026 at 7:35:17 AM

Matter is usually made of fermions (half-integer spin) whereas force is mediated by bosons (integer spin).

by ndsipa_pomu

8/18/2026 at 12:07:47 AM

Matter is not a force. Matter and forces are two different things in physics.

And the "strong force" is another thing altogether.

by krapp

8/18/2026 at 12:41:44 AM

I think their point might be that matter is what defines the location of the force field. I.e. it's the EM field doing the actual work.

by aeonik

8/18/2026 at 5:35:10 AM

Yea, that is it, and I agree with them. When we say that a particle is at some x,y,z, we just mean that the space at that location behaves in a certain manner, for some reason.

And since we don't like mysteries, we say that there is a "particle" there with so and so properties..

by qsera

8/18/2026 at 8:21:06 AM

It's more like "behaved", because particle measurement events are always historic. Quantum fields are statistical distributions of possible future particle measurement events within spacetime.

by TheOtherHobbes

8/18/2026 at 3:38:22 AM

That is, until we find a way to unify the fields

by CGMthrowaway

8/18/2026 at 12:58:12 AM

[dead]

by ziiinq

8/18/2026 at 5:49:20 AM

[dead]

by jfkffkfktk

8/18/2026 at 9:39:24 AM

[flagged]

by abc123abc123

8/18/2026 at 9:10:12 AM

Interesting how should someone uses it IRL at the end of the day

by ArtemKhymenko

8/18/2026 at 2:23:45 AM

AI-made?

by germandiago

8/18/2026 at 5:49:54 AM

Oh no. A new particle. Who would have guessed %]

by bronlund

8/17/2026 at 10:27:25 PM

And here I am, thinking I discovered "glueballs" in elementary school when we were given rubber cement to use.

by Hobadee