From: Bob Higgins
Ø Ø To Jones' point regarding annihilation and disintegration ... These are not the same. Annihilation is the total conversion of entities having mass into energy. Disintegration is the breakup of a composite particle into its constituents. OK Bob, I will buy that semantic distinction – but it is largely a function of applying time delay. Let’s return to the Holmlid premise of nucleon conversion into composite particles, most of which decay rapidly. We do not need annihilation since disintegration is almost as energetic – it just takes a few milliseconds longer. The main difference is that “disintegration” proceeds in well-defined steps instead of instantaneously. But after milliseconds, after muons have decayed – the GeV of mass-energy which was once a proton is gone, and what we have left is a few positrons and electrons (from muon decay). A few MeV remains instead of the GeV. We do not need these few remaining leptons to annihilate, since they represent only a tiny fraction of the original mass, now almost completely converted to energy in the form of neutrinos.
