DaveK
Since: Mar, 2011
Jun 8th 2015 at 9:48:43 PM
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OK, I've re-read the page and see that I've overstated the case here. The trope relates to weapons named after subatomic particles and real weapons; not specifically to the fact that those weapons might be nonsensical.
So I withdraw the suggestion that all references to mesons should be removed, and suggest just that all the bits about them being nonsensical should be removed.
Handily, that's a much smaller editing job too.
Does anyone concur or disagree?
Peteman
Since: Jan, 2001
Octagon8
Since: Nov, 2010
Dec 23rd 2011 at 6:45:51 AM
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What's supposed to be the problem with this title? It comes from an example which lampshades and exaggerates this trope, and it's quite unambiguous. It might be a bit tricky to spell, but that's it.
Mm. If you excuse me, I must go set my own city on fire. Count Selvan, Radiant Historia
I strongly suspect that the article is in error about mesons, and all references to them should be removed.
Mesons have mass and hence kinetic energy, which they can carry and dump into a target. It would be a very bad idea to stand in the path of a powerful beam of highly-energetic mesons.
The article doesn't explain why it thinks a "meson cannon" would be a pointless weapon, so I'm having to guess at the author's reasoning here, but extrapolating from the comment about meson disintegrators leads me to suspect that their short life-time is supposed to be a problem. Perhaps somebody multiplied the speed of light by the maximum meson lifetime (around 10^-8 sec) and calculated that the beam could only travel a few meters? That would be a mistake, because it would be forgetting about relativity. Yes, a meson's life is only a few hundredths of a microsecond and it can only travel a few meters - *in it's own reference frame*. In the reference frame of a stationary observer, time dilation will extend its apparent lifetime, and hence the distance it can travel. Given enough energy to accelerate your meson beam arbitrarily close to c, you could make a meson beam travel arbitrarily far. This is not abstract theorising: real particle accelerators here on earth absolutely rely on this behaviour, often placing the meson detectors at distances further from the meson source than the naive non-relativistic calculation would suggest they could be detected at.
If this was indeed the motivation for listing meson weapons here, they should be removed.
The complaint about the meson disintegrator is also misbegotten. Just because they have short lifetimes doesn't mean they do nothing. The attractive force that binds protons and neutrons together in the nucleus is mediated by the exchange of pions. Their lifetime is entirely adequate to cover the short inter-particle distances within the nucleus. If you had some kind of field-effect weapon that disintegrated them all instantaneously (or at any rate, fast enough that they couldn't cover the distance from an emitting nucleon to a receiving nucleon), all the atoms within the area of effect would fall apart into a cloud of rapidly-dispersing individual neutrons and protons.
Perhaps there is something I'm overlooking here, but it seems to me that meson weapons would be entirely effective. They certainly aren't the kind of blatantly nonsensical concept as a neutrino cannon would be, for example.
So, does the page need a major re-write? I think so.
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