See also: "Do protons really contain charm quarks?"
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/proton-contain-charm...
Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
141–150 of 591 posts
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#142Reductionist 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…
Nope, the "god of the gaps" critique has nothing to do scientific discovery being a route to omniscience, something only some religious figures have ever claimed to have even the possibility of access to. It's the set of things religions claim the only explanation/evidence for repeatedly shrinking, as we found explanations for weather that have more predictive power than "the wrath/favour of the gods", found cures for the stuff that was supposed to be divine or karmic punishment and found explanations for differences between animals that we can use to make different animals (in increasingly specific ways), until eventually there was nothing left of the original religious explanations of how things came to be except a determination to posit the divine as the cause of anything scientists weren't confident on.
A shift in the position of the faithful from "this an accurate account of how the world was created direct from the creator" to "well actually that stuff was all metaphorical but the Big Bang must have been God's moment because you can't explain anything that happened before then" is not a trend in favour of the explanatory power of religion.
In the case of protons (or for that matter cells), religion never had anything to say about them in the first place never mind an explanation that's more compatible with quantum phenomena than early 20th century physics, and it's quantum physicists not priests that are the people busy making them do weird things in particle accelerators and saying 'told you this might happen'.
(Also, someone should let the theists know that it's the quirkiness of quarks that proves God's design so they stop writing about how it's the perfect orderliness of atomic structure that's God's design)
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#143I 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…
At the end of the day loads of these types of questions boil down to the anthropic principle. If it didn’t work out so that things could be stable, nothing would be asking the question.
That’s not a satisfying answer but we don’t have a better one in the realm of science. All we have left is either randomness/serendipity or spirituality/religion.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
a proton, in the simplist version, is made of 3 quarks. two up quarks one down quark. down qwark is -1/3 e ; up quark is +2/3 e. they sum up to +1 e. neutrons are the opposite made of 3 quarks. two down quarks one up quark. and sum to 0e the unitary quantity is a conveinience. 1 e = 1.602176634×10−19 coulombs,
Yes, yes, I also understand this. But why are they in units of 1/3(e). Why are down quarks not -0.398390847895...(e) and up quarks not +0.6234098129034809234...(e). Why do they add up so damn neatly?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_formulation_of_...
Mathematically it works out that way because the standard model is build up from symmetry groups. The hand wavy explanation is that the symmetries observed in nature wouldn't be reproduced if the charges differed by random irrational numbers.
The same is also generally true of other conserved quantities in the SM. Noether's theorem unifies symmetries and conservation laws as the same thing.
As far as a more fundamental explanation as to WHY the universe is this way, ask your god i guess.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, yes, I also understand this. But why are they in units of 1/3(e). Why are down quarks not -0.398390847895...(e) and up quarks not +0.6234098129034809234...(e). Why do they add up so damn neatly?
Because they are mathematical models built to describe a thing and thus their entire purpose as a concept is to add up “neatly”
I'm getting very strong "angels on a pinhead" vibes from this
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#146Reductionist 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…
I think there's a difference though. The examples you cite relate to artificial things, where reductionism makes sense. Quantum physics describes natural things, where I don't think it does, even at a macro level.
A natural thing's behaviour can't be reduced to the sum of its parts. Example: an organ, taken out of an organism, stops being an organ and becomes a lump of rotting flesh. Its behaviour fundamentally and completely changes. So an organ can only be considered an organ insofar as it's a part of an organism. Similarly, an oxygen atom within a water molecule displays vastly different properties from those it would display when a free radical (or as part of an O2 molecule). Examples could be multiplied. So I don't think quantum physics is any different from the 'macro' world in this regard.
So I think the difference is natural-artificial, not quantum-macro.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a variation on the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Maybe a kind of observer bias. If the universe weren't seemingly-perfectly balanced to allow emergent complexity in matter, we wouldn't be here to point out how seemingly-perfect it seems. (If you subscribe to a multiverse interpretation, perhaps most of the infinitely many other possible universes are dead and void.)
This made me think - is a concept like most even defined for infinity?
Not a mathematician, but if there's a computable limit, then why not? E.g. most integers aren't powers of 2, cause lim(n to inf: n / 2^n) = 0
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting that semiconductor engineers have to directly wrestle with the magic that's quantum tunneling. This theory is really not just a theory.
You mean it's not just a hypothesis. I would really, really expect users of this site to know the difference.
What if they don't? Will they cease to be users of this site? What if they speak a lot more languages than you, just not perfectly? Does it even matter what you would expect?
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a variation on the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Maybe a kind of observer bias. If the universe weren't seemingly-perfectly balanced to allow emergent complexity in matter, we wouldn't be here to point out how seemingly-perfect it seems. (If you subscribe to a multiverse interpretation, perhaps most of the infinitely many other possible universes are dead and void.)
This made me think - is a concept like most even defined for infinity?
Probably a cheeky response but certainly!
We can say most positive integers are greater than 5. Or most real numbers are irrational. Half of all integers are even — even though there's just as many of both!
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#150I 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…
I don’t think this is a stupid thought at all. It’s a very good question and appreciate all the answers, it’s something I’ve wondered myself