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Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#111

Post by dist-epoch »

lisper wrote: post #70
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically it requires faith to assert that the universe did not have its origin from some intelligent supernatural being, just as it does to assert the opposite. The only thing we can truly say based on the data is "we don't know for certain at this time".

No, it doesn't (at least not if you are adhering to the scientific method). This is a very common bit of religious propaganda, and it is 100% wrong. Intelligence has some very specific and readily identifiable characteristics. In particular, it has high Kolmogorov complexity [1]. This is what distinguishes intelligence from other forms of complexity, like chaos or the decimal expansions of irrational numbers. And the…

If we live in a simulation, there is a simulation creator.

Serious physicists agree that the simulation hypothesis is a possibility, so you are the unscientific one saying that believing there might be a creator is believing in the Tooth fairy.

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#112

Post by AnimalMuppet »

missingET wrote: post #78
OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #5

Is it surprising there are signs of the heavy quarks? The diagrams that include them have tiny but nonzero values. Hearken back to Hitchhiker's - it is not impossible, just highly improbable.

What’s interesting is that there’s a net charm content: there are more charm quarks to be found than anti-charms. Given that charm quarks are heavier than the proton, you’d expect to only find them in deep inelastic collisions when they are produced in pairs with an anti-quark, so it is surprising that there’s an asymmetry.

Wait, what? I read the article as saying that it's an open question whether there's a charm asymmetry.

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#113

Post by ludsan »

m3kw9 wrote: post #62
andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #18

I just had a really stupid thought, after finishing reading the article. So, the electron is an elementary particle, right? Compared to the proton, the electron is "simple", yes? Despite this difference in complexity, an electron has a charge of -e and a proton has a charge of +e. They are exactly complementary regarding charge (if I am understanding right, I am not a smart person). my question is... why? why must pr…

Then I’ll ask why can’t you use protons as electricity?

the proton motive force powers us all

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#114

Post by neuromanser »

jononomo wrote: post #67
calibas wrote: post #34

Reductionist philosophy is very common in science. It's essentially the idea that you can break things down into simpler parts to better understand how everything works. It's kind of "common sense", if you understand how all the components on a circuit board function individually, then you can piece together how the entire board will function. In computer science, you can reduce everything to operations comparing 1s…

> the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know This is why the "god of the gaps" critique is so short-sighted. It relies on the assumption that as science progresses it will "close the gaps". In reality the opposite happens. Another example is the cell -- in Darwin's day it was thought to be a simple thing, but then we learned more about it and it turned out to be monstrously complex and the mystery…

And yet, biology has grown with the complexity of the cell as we know it, as opposed to the bronze/iron-age myths of near-east goat herders.

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#115

Post by OldGuyInTheClub »

pdonis wrote: post #13
OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #5

Is it surprising there are signs of the heavy quarks? The diagrams that include them have tiny but nonzero values. Hearken back to Hitchhiker's - it is not impossible, just highly improbable.

No, it's not surprising theoretically, but experimentally it's still quite an achievement to be able to spot even these rare events.

From the article's description it sounds like they tortured the data until it told them what they wanted. If the charm did show up, how long did it exist? In conventional spectroscopy, the broader the line, the shorter the lifetime (and v.v.) It smells like a sub-attosecond lifetime, if that.

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#116

Post by timschmidt »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #96
aap_ wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charge is quantized. You cannot have just any amount of electric charge. An electron has three elementary units of negative charge, quarks have -1 and 2. Whether it's a coincidence that proton and electron charge are of the same magnitude (and the neutron is neutral) is another question, but at the elementary level you don't have that much choice for what the charge of a particle is.

But why is charge quantised? In the Standard Model properties are defined as relationships within/between symmetry groups. There are only so many things you can do to/with/in a symmetry group, and that's where the quantisation comes from. But... that's a mathematical metaphor applied to observations. It's a good fit, but it doesn't explain why it's those symmetry groups and not others, or why symmetry groups are a go…

Resonance seems a candidate.

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#117

Post by dylan604 »

bugbuddy wrote: post #73
femto wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same vein, a neutron can decay into a proton, an electron and a neutrino (Beta decay), so in some sense the neutral neutron is the combination of an electron and proton. (A connection is there?) In a simplistic way, I see a neutron star as just being a lump of regular (atomic) matter where the high pressure has forced all the electrons into the protons. Question for someone who might know: Was pressure so high…

I also have a question. Why should any theoretical predictions be regarded as Science if there is no feasible way to test them?

As long as it's called a theory instead of fact, then why isn't it science. We might not have enough tech or information on being able to create the test.

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#118

Post by dylan604 »

dboreham wrote: post #79
andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #18

I just had a really stupid thought, after finishing reading the article. So, the electron is an elementary particle, right? Compared to the proton, the electron is "simple", yes? Despite this difference in complexity, an electron has a charge of -e and a proton has a charge of +e. They are exactly complementary regarding charge (if I am understanding right, I am not a smart person). my question is... why? why must pr…

Something...something...gauge theory. Or perhaps -- it's a constant in the simulator source code.

Maybe it's so difficult because it's not a constant, but a magic number used in the code. (yeah, I'm dealing with lots of magic numbers in some code currently being worked on)

Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

#120

Post by lnauta »

opportune wrote: post #60
SECProto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> quarks have -1 and 2. Wikipedia suggests the quarks that make up the proton have charge ⅔e and -⅓e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_quark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_quark

Is it true that the quarks themselves, in isolation, have that charge? Or is it that combining quarks into a baryon or meson gives the resultant particle a charge according to a fixed ratio of the constituent quarks? Gemini advanced says it’s the latter, because of color confinement. But I’d defer to a human expert

Quarks can not be alone, because of this confinement. What we see experimentally is that when we add energy to particles at some point they split into new particles and we never see a naked quarks.

We explain this by saying the quarks have a color charge and it must always be neutral. A single quark would be lets say red, but that's for some reason not possible. If we try to rip the quark out, it takes so much energy that this energy can be used to create another quark that results in a color neutral particle (red, antired)=meson, (red,green,blue)=baryon.

NB: this is a bit simplistic and other comments explain this quite in detail NB2: this color charge is just a name, its not an actual color

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