171–180 of 591 posts
I enjoyed this sentence “The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form.” Could gravity be the effect of mass in an indefinite form? As sort of a vacuum in spacetime?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More or less the weak anthropic principle. Maybe once people get universal sequence predictors really going there would be a better argument.
Rather than waiting for god-machines, you could just believe in god. Not specifically any religion, just god. Or god-entity. Or god-force. Basically, deus ex machina except for philosophy It's a surprisingly strong position. Respects occams razor, low amount of moving parts, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine you have a bunch of fulcrums in the air and items droping down. If the things that land on the fulcrums don't balance each other out the fulcrum tips and the items keep dropping. Eventually all the fulcrums are balanced. A lot of these things coalesce until they are stable enough they don't fall apart. If there is a stable form and you have enough of them, eventually you get a lot of stable forms. It is not s…
I like your explanation. > There is lots of matter that is still unstable. What are you referring to with this?
I need to read the article, but yeah protons might not be stable, we just need to wait a long time to find out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An interesting point. How about the universe kept starting and collapsing/crashing in an infinite loop until by chance the electron and the proton had the exact charge and the universe as it is now could go beyong the initial stage and could continue? ( Ok this feels like a trial an error of somebody playing universe ).
How about the universe that quantum-emerges in a truly random sequence of quasistates which disintegrate immediately, and once in a while it happens to be the state that includes "your" "memory" of the previous ones. I mean chronologically from your perspective, they don't even have to appear in order. By an amazing coincidence, this particular "frameset" is logically consistent and pretty boring, so you have no inte…
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…
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…
> why must protons and electrons be perfectly complementary regarding charge? According to QED's spin origin of charge, it's because charge comes from spin. What values a particle's spin can take are restricted to certain integer or half-integer values.
Children have the remarkable ability to see the world as it truly is, and so are able to ask the most profound questions. As adults, we learn to obfuscate our, ah, knowledge deficiencies in various ways, and so lose that ability over time. I'm of the opinion that great physicists are like children in being able to see through to the heart of the matter, and ask -- and answer -- questions that matter. This is certainly a theme you can see with Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, and others.
Why do I say this? Because GP's question was profound, and saying "it's because charge comes from spin" is the sort of obfuscatory answer I see most physicists give very, very often when they're faced with such questions.
That's completely aside from the fact that "it's because charge comes from spin" is entirely incorrect. All charged particles have spin, but not all particles with the same spin and other similar properties are charged.
Earlier 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?
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…