On Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 09:02:17PM -0400, Stephen Paul King wrote: > Dear Russell, > > I hope you meant to write that photons are bosons with spin1. Otherwise
Yes, you are right. Mea culpa! Put it down to the couple of decades since I studied this stuff... > we would have a hard time explaining Maxwell's Field equations. ;-) About > the differences between neutrinos and photons, we could also point out that > photons have a null extension in the time direction and neutrinos, having a > small but non-zero mass have an extension in the time direction - I am > thinking here in terms of how we would embed our particles in a Minkowski > or equivalent space-time diagrams. > Indeed - I thought about raising this difference also. Neutrinos are now accepted as having nonzero mass, although that wasn't the case when I was studying physics. Also, this guy would probably come back with photons having nonzero rest mass! After all, he reckons Einstein goofed, and that relativity is a load of old cobblers, so having nonzero restmass particles traveling at the speed of light wouldn't be a problem for him! > Kindest regards, > > Stephen > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Russell Standish" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: "John Ross" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: "'Stephen Paul King'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; > <everything-list@eskimo.com> > Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 6:12 PM > Subject: Re: Neutrino shield idea > > > Neutrinos are fermions with spin 1/2. Photons are bosons with spin > 0. This is about as chalk and cheese as you can get. The difference is > not energy. -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics 0425 253119 (") UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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