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Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
11–20 of 67 posts
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#12The implication of this framing is that neutrons are considerably simpler. I find that rather surprising.
Where are you getting that implication? I didn't see anything in the article suggesting that neutrons were simple and I would share your skepticism if someone claimed they were. The fact that neutrons can spontaneously decay into protons (plus other stuff) suggests otherwise.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#13The implication of this framing is that neutrons are considerably simpler. I find that rather surprising.
Neutrons are just as complex, they’re much harder to study though.
If it was possible to build a direct neutron accelerator/collider, I suspect we'd get some new physics pretty quickly.
Analysing hand-me-down neutron events from indirect collisions isn't quite as useful.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neutrons are just as complex, they’re much harder to study though.
If it was possible to build a direct neutron accelerator/collider, I suspect we'd get some new physics pretty quickly. Analysing hand-me-down neutron events from indirect collisions isn't quite as useful.
Neutrons are not that different from protons. The decay from neutrons to protons is pretty well understood, and there’s no reason to think that the nature of quark/gluon interactions in a neutron are significantly different from those in a proton. What kind of new physics are you imagining we’d get?
Of course more experimental data is a good thing, but in this case it doesn’t seem obvious that it would lead to anything really new.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neutrons are just as complex, they’re much harder to study though.
If it was possible to build a direct neutron accelerator/collider, I suspect we'd get some new physics pretty quickly. Analysing hand-me-down neutron events from indirect collisions isn't quite as useful.
There absolutely are direct neutron experiments, but they are much lower energy and have a different focus, partly because neutrons being neutral means they’re very hard to accelerate.
There’s an ultra cold neutron source at Paul Scherrer that is used to measure if the neutron has an electric dipole moment. This is complementary to high energy experiments.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neutrons are just as complex, they’re much harder to study though.
If it was possible to build a direct neutron accelerator/collider, I suspect we'd get some new physics pretty quickly. Analysing hand-me-down neutron events from indirect collisions isn't quite as useful.
At ISIS (Oxford neutron source)…
Spallation generation: High-energy protons (~800 MeV) hit a heavy target, releasing a wide spectrum of fast neutrons up to hundreds of MeV. These are then moderated down to useful energies for experiments.
It’s not the LHC, sure. But I don’t see any reason (apart from “why bother”) why they can’t do spallation in Geneva. OK maybe there’s a cooling problem…
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#17[flagged]
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#18[flagged]
> processes over objects
this is correct, waves are a product of pressures, so, are emergent also, the real question is, where does the pressure originate
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#19[flagged]
> processes over objects this is correct, waves are a product of pressures, so, are emergent also, the real question is, where does the pressure originate
Waves don’t come from pressure. Pressure comes from constrained waves… constraints prevent oscillatory relations from freely satisfying their phases. Pressure is a local manifestation of the same idea behind gravity. When many interacting modes lock into a persistent configuration, they impose constraints on nearby modes. To us on the inside it looks like curvature and attraction. But the comment section on HN is a bloodsport…
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#20> The results suggested that in even higher-energy collisions, the proton would appear as a cloud made up almost entirely of gluons. The gluon dandelion is exactly what QCD predicts. I find the proton as a gluon dandelion cloud enthralling
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