Barns have physical dimensions of area, even though they are used to express probability distributions. So you can imagine “the broad side of a barn” as being so many square meters, but then scale it way way down to a particle physics equivalent, and you get the barn. Which apparently roughly represents “the broad side of a uranium nucleus”.
Barns have physical dimensions of area, even though they are used to express probability distributions. So you can imagine “the broad side of a barn” as being so many square meters, but then scale it way way down to a particle physics equivalent, and you get the barn. Which apparently roughly represents “the broad side of a uranium nucleus”.
I actually like the barn as a unit of measure.
I am forever haunted by the decision decades ago to refer to two of the quarks as Top and Bottom. Maybe it was cute at the time. It did not age well.