EXPERIMENT LOG: Using simulators to examine meta-universal differences in standard particle physics, tests 12A-D.
Project Summary: First run of tests to simulate and compare collisions from different universes. This was honestly more of a calibration run to test whether I was doing the right thing with the right settings, so on. Inconclusive results.
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Corresponding personal log: 24 August 2020
Personal Notes: I’ve been working on this since April. It’s a little disheartening to know I can’t even check my own results - I don’t have access to a collider in my universe to double-check what I’m doing, so I’m piloting blindfolded. And because this isn’t my universe, it’s been obstacle after obstacle. I’ve had to do workaround after workaround to get this working on my personal computer - turns out Windows don’t like to run Linux programs! - and I had to TEACH myself C++, then do more workarounds because my command terminal kept throwing a fit. I hope - I really really hope - that this is just a steep learning curve.
Methods: So there’s really only one simulator I can use, because it’s the only one that would run on my personal computer. Took me a week to get the bloody thing set up. Turns out Windows doesn’t like running Linux programs.
But anyway, it should allow me to simulate colliders as well as play with some of the physics laws, once I’m good enough with programming it. It’s already taken me months to properly learn how to program it in the first place, because it’s written in C++, not FORTRAN like I’m used to. (I don’t know if that’s a universe difference or not, because the website lists the iteration before this one as being written with FORTRAN. Despite the difference being years, it could be an update I missed.)
Experiment consists of four runs total.
Run 1: Attempted simulation of my own collider.
Run 2: Collision experiment carried out at Brookhaven’s RHIC.
Run 3: Simulation of the above collision experiment (for comparison).
Run 4: Simulation of my collider, with an attempted adjustment to account for speed of light differences.
Run 5: Simulation of above collision experiment, with an attempt adjustment to account for speed of light differences.
Results: Inconclusive. Honestly, I was expecting them to look far less similar, but I guess that was optimistic thinking. They’re all similar runs - as similar as I can make them, minus the simulation of mine.
I’m going to focus on photon energy right now - I’ll get to analyzing the others later. If the speed of light is different, I’m curious about the differences in light that exist here, so yeah. I’m focusing on photons, since they’re basically light.
Analysis: Honestly, every run looks almost identical. Ugh.
As far as similarity, I expected the real experiment and its simulation to be the closest, because they’re literally the same experiment, one run on a computer and the other run in real life, but no, they aren’t. Either that means there’s more wobble room in this universe than I thought, or I’ve set something wrong on my simulation. They’re dissimilar enough to make me suspicious.
What I find really interesting is that the two closest to each other are the real experiment and the lightspeed-adjusted simulation. That doesn’t completely make sense, because PYTHIA has the numerical speed of light built into it, but... Interesting. This also indicates I may have something wrong with my simulation, because light-adjusted stuff shouldn’t be particularly similar to anything real right now, so I’ll need to keep an eye on that.
Outside of that, I don’t know what that means. I may need to get another beam time request in to compare to.
Least-similar was the simulation of my own collider and run 5, one of the lightspeed-adjusted experiments. At least THAT makes sense - simulated versions of my own collider and a wrong-lightspeed alternate universe collider SHOULD be pretty different.
The rest of it is really inconclusive. Hopefully analyzing more data will yield better results.
ATTACHED: ADDENDUM 12
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Footnotes: Everything simulated here was done with PYTHIA. Please see References for more information. For more footnotes, please see Liv’s corresponding personal log HERE.