B2P writes:
I'm pretty sure that they don't so much dissapear as they do 'annihilate.'
That's more or less correct. They don't simply evaporate into nothingness but rather their energy is released in the form of photons. Energy is still conserved.
Still, Garf's statement about spontaneous particle decay is correct. For example, an isotropic particle will decay somewhere within a probablistic time interval,
but we have no idea what causes it's actual moment of decay and furthermore we have no idea what particles it will decay into. We have probablistic models of the particle's behavior, but it is, essentially, unpredictable. The unpredictability is an inherent characteristic of quantum particles, and therefore there do appear to be somethings that happen without cause.
This message has been edited by ::, 07-22-2004 04:44 PM
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