jim wrote: So what the heck is that picture of the magnetic field of a muon? What am I missing? Or did the author of the article just throw in a picture of a bar magnet magnetic field for the heck of it?
Yes, I am just a dabbler when it comes to theoretical particle physics. I just like to read about it a lot. I have never worked in a lab or anything (at least not that kind of lab). How could that visual of a magnetic field even remotely be the right way to draw the "magnetic moment" of a muon? I am guessing that it is just hard to show what a "moment" looks like without a "field" to show it (Moment = Force x distance). I am pretty sure you are right that somebody (perhaps not even the author) decided to use some creative commons graphic with "moment" or "field" in the meta data.
So the graphic is kind of laughable, but I think it actually helps illustrate the point for our discussion here about the simulated reality.
Back in undergrad, if we went to college and studied statics and physics (but no worries if you did not, we have the magic world of "google it" today)—when we studied such things, we had to draw both vectors and scalars. Neither of which really have a great deal of physicality. We are just really drawing a thing that is an idea (as much as any other epiphenomenal physicality we try to assign when really at the end of the day it is still just an understanding in the mind) we were simply relaying our mechanical notions about how the physical objects behave by drawing a picture. When drawing "moments" we tended to show them as vectors by a line and an arrow. But isn't that really all just about a reference frame and a point of view you are taking about the reactive forces? And since a muon is one of these "non-macro" (word prefix I am probably making up) phenomenon, then can it ever really be a vector?
Perhaps what this article is saying (even if it being "creative" like everything a theoretical quantum physicists does not want to be) when collecting "data from collisions between electrons and positrons – the opposite of electrons – and use it to calculate the strong interaction’s contribution to the muon’s magnetic moment" ... perhaps the "qualities" of the muon are much more a scalar (i.e. forces without direction) yet we see that a muon acts upon the electron's dipole direction and hypothesize that it is the muon's
effect on the nature of the particles, when actually it might be the rest of the universe's
affect on the muon. In essence we can look at the magnetic moment the universe has on the particle and possibly come up with the same number (i.e. force).
