At 9:28 PM 2/18/96, jim bell wrote:
I love to be picky about such things. Yes, I think bosons _DO_ interact with each other. Before all you physics nerds flame me, hear me out:
I won't "flame you," just correct you. It is well-known that photons are affected by gravitation...from the Mossbauer effect to the bending of light by the sun (seen in eclipses) to the gravitational lensing effects. ....
Thus, presumably photons self-gravitate, and thus, SOME bosons "interact," although admittedly this kind of interaction is a few dozen orders of magnitude lower than what you probably intended when you said "Bosons don't interact with each other at all."
What is being referred to is a term of art related to Bose-Einstein statistics (the origin of the term boson, as contrasted to fermions, which are affected by the Pauli Exclusion Principle, while bosons are not). No list relevance that I can see, but then neither do nuclear triggers have anything to do with the list. --Tim May Boycott espionage-enabled software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."