Talk:Positronium

message: The lifetimes cited for para-positronium are inconsistent. The derived result is outside the bounds of the experimental result from 2007. As a more recent and experimental result should it perhaps be left in preference to the theoretical result in the case of positronium?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.9.63.178 (talk) 19:09, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inconsistent Lifetimes

message: It would make more sense to me to place the di-positronium at the bottom, and the discovery/prediction above it.
Any wanna do it? 
=== LifeTimes ===
From my understanding, positronium can either exist in para- or ortho- states.  (There is no way to add two spin-1/2 particles so you get total spin other than 0 or 1.)  If the lifetime of the para state is 10^-10, and the lifetime of the ortho state is 10^-8, then how can the (presumably average) lifetime of positronium be 10^-7?  What's going on here? Ckerr 08:24, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Could be a difference in meaning of "lifetime" the 10-7 number is "at most". — Omegatron 06:28, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If so, that's an unusual use of the term "lifetime", since there is no such thing as a maximum lifetime.  It's "possible" to have any compound, no matter how unstable, living for an arbitrary amount of time, since radioactive decay is a stochastic process. Ckerr 08:24, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reorder? 

message: From my understanding, positronium can either exist in para- or ortho- states.  (There is no way to add two spin-1/2 particles so you get total spin other than 0 or 1.)  If the lifetime of the para state is 10^-10, and the lifetime of the ortho state is 10^-8, then how can the (presumably average) lifetime of positronium be 10^-7?  What's going on here? Ckerr 08:24, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Could be a difference in meaning of "lifetime" the 10-7 number is "at most". — Omegatron 06:28, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If so, that's an unusual use of the term "lifetime", since there is no such thing as a maximum lifetime.  It's "possible" to have any compound, no matter how unstable, living for an arbitrary amount of time, since radioactive decay is a stochastic process. Ckerr 08:24, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  LifeTimes 

message: From where the two formulas follow?--188.26.22.131 (talk) 15:56, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Time calculations

message: The obit for Martin Deutsch, as well as his wiki page, says its properties were predicted in 1932 by C.D. Anderson of Caltech. This page says it was predicted by Stjepan Mohorovičić in 1934. Which is correct? --24.147.86.187 23:51, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  prediction in 1932 or 1934?  

message: The singlet state is a superposition of the two antiparallel spins and is antisymmetric as mentioned in the comment above, and two of the triplet have parallel spins, but one of the three has symmetric antiparallel spins, as also stated in the comment above. I think this should be made clearer, probably by just writing out the spin states or linking to a page where this is done. What do people think?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.59.185.159 (talk) 17:46, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Referring to triplet state as parallel spins is misleading 

message: Shouldn't it be n=1 2S+1=3 L=0 J=L+S=|L-S|=1 ?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.75.220.9 (talk) 23:41, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spectroscopic nomenclature of ortho-positronium 

message: What are the wavelengths of the EMR emitted during state transitions (i.e. the emission spectrum of postronium)? Has that radiation been experimentally? 
--Jorge Stolfi (talk) 18:59, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Optical spectrum 

message: Shouldn't this article also talk about the similarity to anti-hydrogen? If conceptually think of the electron as the pseudo-nucleus, then it looks like anti-hydrogen. 65.93.12.101 (talk) 12:05, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anti-hydrogen 

message: If my memory serves me well, Ps is the symbol for Praseodymium.... And Positronium? For a lack of better words, what's up with that? Cossacksson (talk) 03:56, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Apparently it's Pr, as a moment's effort reveals.  —Tamfang (talk) 06:08, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, to make it clearer, praseodymium is Pr, while positronium is Ps. Protonium is Pn, though that could also mean a generic pnictogen (P, As, Sb, or Bi). Double sharp (talk) 08:17, 11 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Same symbol as Praseodymium? 

message: For a while there was an issue of the experimental lifetime disagreeing with theory that was resolved in 2003.  How much should be discussed?  The 'Prediction and Discovery' section could be changed to a 'History' section.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2003/may/28/positronium-puzzle-is-solved  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Timetraveler3.14 (talk • contribs) 20:37, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: It was apparently resolved in 2003 by a group at U Michigan (Phys.Rev.Lett. 90 (2003) 203402).  However, a short article in Progress in Physics in 2007, Twenty-year anniversary of the orthopositronium lifetime anomalies: the puzzle remains unresolved.(A Letter by the Editor-in-Chief): An article from: Progress in Physics indicates the Michigan experiment didn’t actually resolve the problem!  So my question is: was this discrepancy resolved once and for all?TonyMath (talk) 08:12, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I checked. The O-Ps lifetime puzzle seems to have been resolved.  The latest experiments seem to be conclusive as they can differentiate between the  O(\alpha) and O(\alpha^2) corrections to the lowest order decay rate.  Some references are Y. Kataoka, S. Asai, and T. Kobayashi, Phys. Lett. B 671, 219 (2009) [preprint arXiv report 0809.1594v1 [hep-ex]] and T. Namba, Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics 04D003 (2012).This wikipedia site needs to be updated accordingly though.TonyMath (talk) 00:31, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I added some text, but I see that figures for this ortho-Ps lifetime in the Wikipedia article are quite inconsistent. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 13:07, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lifetime Puzzle - History and Resulution 

message: There are references to 1.244 \times 10^{-10}s, 142.05±0.02 ns, and 1.386 \times 10^{-7}s.  This would be much easier to read if it was all in ns:  0.1244 ns, 142.02±0.02 ns, and 138.6 ns.  (In particular, it makes it much easier for a reader to compare the lifetime of para- and ortho- forms.
62.2.246.66 (talk) 15:58, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I have changed them to ns. Are they correct? (I think that what was s-1 was an incorrect unit dimension.) Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:30, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inconsistent units for lifetimes

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thread_title:  External links modified (January 2018) 

message: Unstable particles decay in random time (actually, every change on the Planck scale happens in random time). For this reason, complexes like positronium do not have a lifetime (this talk page keeps using the term "lifetime"). They, like atoms of radium, have a half-life, the time required for a macroscopic quantity of a substance to reduce to half of its initial quantity, on average. This quantity may be measured in grams, moles, number of atoms, etc. The article needs the half-life of positronium to be added. Articles on the Web tend to give a "mean lifetime" value of roughly half a nanosecond, but not a half-life. Strange. David Spector (talk) 02:37, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Half-life? 

message: I'm no expert, so I'm guessing... but comparing the formulas from the reference (PRECISION STUDY OF POSITRONIUM: TESTING BOUND STATE QED THEORY) I suspect: instead of
: \frac{1}{2} 9 h
we should read
: \frac{1}{2} 9 \pi \hbar
Anyhow, the h without the bar can hardly be correct.
Can someone more knowledgeable verify my guess?
--H.Marxen (talk) 19:36, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lifetime formulas 

message: This is a perfect example of the pure antiscience. The chapter "Natural occurrence" must be removed. Zyavrik (talk) 01:13, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, I agree. Any natural occurrence section of an element should deal with where it is currently found today. I moved it over to Timeline of the far future which cites that article quite a bit. --Nanite (talk) 04:29, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: It is speculation, but very significant, in the far future all that may be left! Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:06, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Natural occurrence 

message: First the image of the electron and positron orbiting the common center of mass: I think that this image does not contain any information apart from that it consist of an electron and a positron, as the classical picture of the particles moving along defined orbits does not help anything (nowhere in the rest of the article any classical argumentation is used). Perhaps at least one could use directly the illustration for protonium (which has the diffuse cloud in the background, indicating delocalization), changing p to e and moving the bar to the other particle. And the caption is definitely misleading -- electron-positron scattering does not only happen when they meet at a point, and in any case this is a stable configuration. 
And the section Formation and decay in materials: what is missing here is that there is the main distinction between metals (where this will not happen) and non-metals (where positronium can form). Further, the specific percentages are for some specific material, but which? I did not find anything in the two references there. Seattle Jörg (talk) 10:35, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inaccuracies 

message: It's likely there is no more recent source. Why would there be? The authors made a model for a specific assumption. Later research has shown that assumption to be wrong. The topic is dead. Why would anyone else publish more about that topic? Does that mean we have to keep it in for eternity now? Two random outdated primary sources, no secondary reception that I could find with a quick search. At the very least we should add that the model assumes no dark energy, but I strongly prefer removal. --mfb (talk) 22:41, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: It is a referenced speculation. Dark energy is another kind of speculation. So please don't consider that one speculative idea debunks another. We should just leave this idea in the article, as it is interesting. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:03, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Comparing this to dark energy is absurd. Can you find any secondary sources for the positronium? Currently the paragraph violates WP:PRIMARY point 3. --mfb (talk) 16:40, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

text: If no secondary reception can be found, I'll remove it per WP:PRIMARY and WP:FRINGE. --mfb (talk) 01:56, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

text: Is there a reliable source that confirms the initial papers should be doubted? Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 11:54, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

text: I am going to support the inclusion of the far future existence of positronium. It is not FRINGE, but it is conditional speculation. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:27, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

text: Not sure that the current text is even a good summary of Page and McKee. fiveby(zero) 16:57, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for finding the 2004 publication, that is much better. @Graeme Bartlett: Currently the article doesn't mention these conditions - which are now known to be false. The new publication discusses that. Leaving the text unchanged is grossly misleading readers. A discussion in the historic context is certainly possible but feels undue. Wikipedia has no responsibility to add every publication of negligible impact that has ever been written. --mfb (talk) 18:44, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I would say "known to be false" is far to strong a statement. Believed by some more likely. Others like me do not "believe" in dark energy. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 02:57, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

text: In light of this 2004 paper, the original wording was definitely misleading in wikivoice. However, I think it’s also misleading to declare it as definitively incorrect or fringe. A short attributed sentence may be possible, and could be encyclopedic as a history of the development of theories in this area. Something like “In 1981, result X was argued, however in light of the subsequent development of theory Y, result X is now considered to only hold in condition Z”. Depends if the wording can be simplified so as to be . Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 08:31, 11 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Science doesn't work based on beliefs, it uses measurements. Dark energy is a well-measured phenomenon and the uncertainties on its energy density and equation of state are just a few percent. We write Wikipedia based on the scientific consensus here. I still favor keeping in out. Proposal if we want to keep it in: "In 1981, positronium was proposed as dominant form of matter in the very far future[old refs] in a model with proton decay and without dark matter and dark energy.[new ref] A 2004 reanalysis after the discovery of dark energy concluded that in a universe dominated by dark energy no significant positronium production will happen.[new ref]" I used the new reference at the end of both sentences because "without dark energy" is only discussed explicitly in the new paper, the one written after its discovery. --mfb (talk) 11:25, 11 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: From the paper: "We are particularly interested in the annihilation of electrons and positrons left over after baryon decay in a k = 0 Friedmann model." Is that Friedmann–Einstein universe or Einstein–de Sitter universe or FLRW? Can we identify the correct WP article which describes the model and then look at adding the content there? They say they are following the approach of John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler's "Eternity is unstable" and there is a tiny bit of commentary in their The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (they doubt McKee and Page). But i can't tell which WP article is appropriate for "k = 0 Friedmann model" which is probably WP:BLUESKY for others. The major point for this article is that McKee and Page are nowhere to be found in the current literature. fiveby(zero) 18:14, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

text: I also favor keeping it out; as speculation goes, it's too obscure to be worth including here. XOR'easter (talk) 21:11, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Far future content