Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Is a Particle? (2020)

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 196 posts

Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)

#111

Post by heresie-dabord »

at_a_remove wrote: post #78
AlbertCory wrote: post #2

I'm reading "The Big Picture" (Sean Carroll) right now. I'd love to have a real physicist explain this, but: When we think of what a particle IS, we often think as though it were dirt, or a billiard ball, or something. As though there were some other substance of which it's made. At least I do. But the definition is as low as you can go. It's hard to wrap your head around that. Unless you're trained to do so, I guess…

It's a useful fiction, but the map is not the territory. This sounds blithe but ... it is as close as you will get to the truth. I only got the bachelors' version of physics, though I did take some grad classes, so here is what I will tell you: The human mind learns from experience and it thinks of things in terms of the past experiences it has had. We are big assemblages which exist in a narrow range of temperatures…

Thank you for this post. Given the limitations of human understanding and experience, one could safely use one metaphor or another for casual description. But at a deeper level of understanding, we do understand that our common experience does not apply, and that human language is too imprecise.

Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)

#112

Post by FollowingTheDao »

griffzhowl wrote: post #92
bbor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a physicist, but as an arrogant philosopher of science: isn’t it just field excitation? Like, every particle looks like a circle bouncing around a 2D piece of paper, but if you look reeaaaaally closely it’s just a localized 3D spike of energy in a usually 2D field of energy? So it’s made of the field/paper itself. I must be under-thinking this, but that’s what’s worked pretty convincingly for me.

So what is a field?

A probability.

Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)

#113

Post by mensetmanusman »

yahalo wrote: post #105
mensetmanusman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://youtu.be/j2oSyAfPzWg?si=bwM2NAsORzkqLQLk Fun fields discussion on what particles are…

What a trip, the guest speaker was clearly a pseudoscientist, talking about "evolution fields" and "mind fields" and equating fields to souls.

If anyone that attempts to explain the nature of consciousness in a non-falsifiable is a pseudo-scientist, then yes. I thought it was fun to hear perspectives like this.

Also, the soul discussion was pointing more at the history of language and concepts versus a crude equation of the two :)

Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)

#114

Post by bbor »

griffzhowl wrote: post #92
bbor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a physicist, but as an arrogant philosopher of science: isn’t it just field excitation? Like, every particle looks like a circle bouncing around a 2D piece of paper, but if you look reeaaaaally closely it’s just a localized 3D spike of energy in a usually 2D field of energy? So it’s made of the field/paper itself. I must be under-thinking this, but that’s what’s worked pretty convincingly for me.

So what is a field?

It’s everything! Idk, I don’t think the universe owes us an answer there. What is a human? Well, it’s a human. You can think of all sorts of mental tools for understanding humans (eg “species”), but ultimately they just are.

Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)

#115

Post by passion__desire »

lisper wrote: post #45
AlbertCory wrote: post #2

I'm reading "The Big Picture" (Sean Carroll) right now. I'd love to have a real physicist explain this, but: When we think of what a particle IS, we often think as though it were dirt, or a billiard ball, or something. As though there were some other substance of which it's made. At least I do. But the definition is as low as you can go. It's hard to wrap your head around that. Unless you're trained to do so, I guess…

Richard Feynman gave what I consider to be the best possible answer to questions like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q

In similar vein, the following question is very apt. Please read the question because it captures all of our intuition when we try to understand something.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/46573/what-are-t...

What are strings made of?

One answer is that it is only meaningful to answer this question if the answer has physical consequences. Popularly speaking, string theory is supposed to be the innermost Russian doll of modern physics, and there are no more dolls inside that we can explain it in terms. However, we may be able to find equivalent formulations.

Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)

#116

Post by kayo_20211030 »

geye1234 wrote: post #58
kayo_20211030 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find the reference at the moment. But, I think it was about the "creation" of the quark. (I'll find it eventually). Either way, a search for reality, no matter how far we've progressed thus far, is either a search for a platonic reality, or an experimental reality. The former is "discovery" and the latter is "invention". It really doesn't matter. I don't think, right now, we're quite smart enough to pry into…

It's both discovery and experiment (but not invention). Forms are real, but not in the way Plato thought. He thought they existed in some empyrean realm. In reality, they exist in objects themselves. We discover what a thing's form is by experimenting with (or on) it. Aristotle was largely right. The big philosophical problem with much of this is that people assume that the smallest things are the most fundamental. S…

I found the reference. It was an interview with Freeman Dyson where he said "quarks were invented", and I don't think it's a slip of the tongue.

It's at 3:17 in this video of an interview with him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV41QEKiMlM

It's representative of a view that there's a thing (a particle) that explains another thing (a force) that was consistent with both theory and experiment. Thus, a quark could be a particle, and it was whatever the experimentalists and theorists said it was, however it was measured or contemplated.

For a deeper meaning it becomes an exercise in hermeneutics i.e what does it mean when we say "particle"? That was the point of the original piece - there is no uncontested view of a particle's form, should one even exist. Each field, in order to advance, finds it useful to interpret it, or think about it, in different ways.

Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)

#117

Post by hydrogen7800 »

aaa_aaa wrote: post #96
lisper wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he does not have an answer Well, yeah. That's the whole point.

He could simply say so.

He does repeatedly. And continues to explain why there is no satisfying answer, because we normally stop asking "why" once we reach a level of familiarity. That level of familiarity to the layperson is different between electromagnetism and slippery ice.

Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)

#118

Post by oezi »

graycat wrote: post #104
scotty79 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The electron mass and charge send out signals. This affects them.

So LIGO detects a gravitational wave. Optical telescope data indicates that the wave was generated 10 billion light years away from two neutron stars. So, then, LIGO today affected the two neutron stars 10 billion years ago? Affected them today?

Absolutely. But this not a causal effect, but it collapses the probabilities of what has occurred.

Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)

#119

Post by datavirtue »

lisper wrote: post #59
aaa_aaa wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I was impressed with that video. Then I felt he does not have an answer and unnecessarily gets edgy with it, because question is valid.

> he does not have an answer Well, yeah. That's the whole point.

I see what you did there.

Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)

#120

Post by FollowingTheDao »

khazhoux wrote: post #68
michaelsbradley wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild,…

The answer of "the universe was created by a creator" is no more satisfying. It claims to answer everything, by answering nothing (since "a creator always existed" is axiomatic).

> It claims to answer everything, by answering nothing.

You missed the wisdom in your own statement.

Post reply on HN