Saudi Arabia Will "Take The Gloves Off" -- October 15, 2018

Why I love to blog: yesterday I posted this -- Saudi Arabia: Vision 2030 -- Saudi Aramco IPO -- petrochemical behemoth -- down the tubes?

Today, a headline story in the WSJ -- "Saudi's economic dreams falter as western executives quit conference." Wow. JP Morgan's Dimon among a host of executives pulling out of Riyadh's premier business conference.

Saudi Arabia’s dream of becoming an investment hub in the desert is unraveling.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive James Dimon on Sunday became the latest prominent executive to back out of the kingdom’s premier business conference amid questions about the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Mr. Dimon had been a featured speaker, and his bank has longstanding ties to Saudi Arabia and is advising it on deals.

Mr. Dimon’s decision was swiftly joined by two other Wall Street titans: Laurence Fink, chief executive of the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock Inc.; and Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of private-equity giant Blackstone Group, according to people familiar with the matter.

The three men spoke over the weekend and speculated that the Saudis might cancel the conference, according to a person familiar with the matter. They announced their decisions after it became clear that the event wouldn’t be canceled, the person said.

In a separate story, "BlackRock CEO pulls out of Saudi conference." 

I suspect we will see talk from Saudi Arabia that "the gloves are off." They will push oil to $100. Just in time for the mid-term elections.

Meanwhile, US SecState Mike Pompeo will meet with King Salman of Saudi Arabia at Trump's direction. 

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The Book Page

From Jeremy Bernstein's 2013 A Palette of Particles, the pion and the muon, page 61.

In the mid-1930's the number of elementary particles that had actually been observed could be counted on the fingers of one hand: the proton, the neutron, the photon, the electron, and the positron ... by the time WWII broke out, the muon had been added to the list. The pion was not observed until 1947.

1934: Hideki Yukawa -- predicted a new particle which was originally called a mu-meson (now called the muon). He predicted the mass of this new particle to be about 200x that of the electron. He originally called it a "heavy quantum." In a Feynman diagram, it is a "pi-minus" particle. Yukawa thought it was the source of the "strong force" but he was wrong. The muon was unstable and decayed into an electron and two neutrinos. It had nothing to do with the strong force.

The real Yukawa particle was found in cosmic rays in 1947.

The Yukawa particle became known as the pi-meson (later the pion). Pions came in three varieties: positive, negative, and zero charge. The charged varieties decayed rapidly into muons and neutrinos, and that is why muons were observed before pions: the parent pi-mesons (pions) had decayed away into muons.

The zero-charged pions (the neutral pions) decayed into two very energetic gamma rays.

Gamma rays and X-rays are both electromagnetic radiation and they have a considerable overlap in the electromagnetic spectrum; so that over a range of energies they cannot be differentiated by detection only. To distinguish them their origin must be known, and in the case of X-rays, the origin is outside the nucleus due to electron interaction. 

So, gamma rays from the radioactive decay of the nucleus; X-rays from outside the nucleus, from electron interaction.

For his work, Yukawa was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize -- the first Japanese to have earned one.

The problem with this discovery: physicists now identified a completely unexpected plethora of new mesons.

From wiki:

Mesons are the associated quantum-field particles that transmit the nuclear force between hadrons that pull those together into a nucleus. Their effect is analogous to photons that are the force carriers that transmit the electromagnetic force of attraction between oppositely charged protons and electrons that allow individual atoms to exist, and further, to pull atoms together into molecules.

Bottom line:

• photons: electromagnetic glue, holding the atom together, holding the proton and the electron together
• mesons: the nuclear glue, holding protons together within the nucleus

It is interesting to note, something I have not seen commented on in the literature, is that as the number of protons go up in atoms, the number of neutrons rises more quickly, if that makes sense. For example, in helium: two protons and two neutrons, whereas uranium-92 has 92 protons and 146 neutrons.