this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
454 points (99.1% liked)
tumblr
3372 readers
1 users here now
Welcome to /c/tumblr, a place for all your tumblr screenshots and news.
Our Rules:
-
Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.
-
Must be tumblr related. This one is kind of a given.
-
Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
-
No unnecessary negativity. Just because you don't like a thing doesn't mean that you need to spend the entire comment section complaining about said thing. Just downvote and move on.
Sister Communities:
-
/c/[email protected] - Star Trek chat, memes and shitposts
-
/c/[email protected] - General memes
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The probability of interaction between a nuclei and a particle is called a "barn" - because its a bit like shooting the broad side of a barn.
Its a standard Sci unit, too, so real actual papers will use "megabarn" as a real unit of measure.
Its subunit is called a "shed", because physicists don't get out enough.
Barns have physical dimensions of area, even though they are used to express probability distributions. So you can imagine "the broad side of a barn" as being so many square meters, but then scale it way way down to a particle physics equivalent, and you get the barn. Which apparently roughly represents "the broad side of a uranium nucleus".
I actually like the barn as a unit of measure.
I am forever haunted by the decision decades ago to refer to two of the quarks as Top and Bottom. Maybe it was cute at the time. It did not age well.