Unstable subatomic particles

Usage examples of muons.

But if these muons are not sitting at rest in the laboratory and instead are traveling through a piece of equipment known as a particle accelerator that boosts them to just shy of light-speed, their average life expectancy as measured by scientists in the laboratory increases dramatically.

Because at last we had a nondestructive means of scanning the exact state of muons through infinitesimal passages of time, we were able to find some astonishing correlations between memory and the barely detectable muon states of slant and yaw.

This slowing of time applies not just to the watches worn by the muons but also to all activities they might undertake.

The fact that the bosons were generating muons had become common knowledge and it had created a real hysteria, exceeding, if possible, the hysterias about the use of nuclear weapons.

If people were to zip around as quickly as these muons, their life expectancy would also increase by the same factor.

Just as both George and Gracie had an equal right to declare that they were stationary and that the other was moving, the muons we have described as being in motion are fully justified in proclaiming that, from their perspective, they are motionless and that it is the "stationary" muons that are moving, in the opposite direction.

The arguments presented can be applied equally well from this perspective, leading to the seemingly opposite conclusion that watches worn by the muons we christened as stationary are running slow compared with those worn by the muons we described as moving.

To avoid ever more severe anthropomorphizing, let's switch from muons back to George and Gracie, who now, in addition to their flashing lights, have bright digital clocks on their spacesuits.

Have one produce a stream of similar color muons, ones that can't bind to strange quarks, and set up a magnetic field to create a capture bottle.

What we found was: During the moment of memory retrieval, when the neuron was stimulated and went into the standard memory-retrieval state, there is a moment—a moment so brief that until fifteen years ago we had no computer that could have detected it, let alone measured its duration—when all the muons in all the protons of all the atoms in all the memory-specific RNA molecules in the nucleus of the one neuron—and no others!

In short, it seems that the pertinent muons change their slant to a new angle, and in that angle they are encoded with a snapshot of the brain-state that will cause the subject to remember.

For as far as we know, it is only in the living brain of organisms that the very slant of the muons within atoms can be changed.

There are even theorists who believe that there are no particles, only attributes of regions of space, and theoretically there is no reason why the same point in space cannot be occupied by an infinite number of muons, as long as they have different slants and, perhaps, yaws.

For theoretical reasons that I do not have the mathematics to understand, I am told that while coterminous muons of the same yaw but different slants could impinge upon and influence each other, coterminous muons of different yaw could never have any causal relationship.

And there could also be an infinite series of infinite series of universes whose muons are not coterminous with the muons of our universe, and they, too, are permanently undetectable and incapable of influencing our universe.