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The 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.
And like the proton, this statement is somehow heavier than the entire article. What an absolutely bizarre, arrogant choice of words.
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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 anythi…
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> 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 b…
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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 b…
You're also trying to argue against a nonzero number of literal physicists who do this type of thinking for a living.
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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…
But neutrons can't go around a tube being guided by magnetic fields
The 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.
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Neutrons are just as complex, they’re much harder to study though.
If i remember correctly Feynman said in one of his lectures that we know the mass of the electron with much greater precision than the proton, which may mean that it electrons are easier to study. I don't know if this is still true though.
Recently, GPT informed me that the strong force is really a tiny after-effect of the "QCD force" (in the same way that the Van der Waals forces are after-effect of EM). Also, more and more questions about "dark matter" seem to be building up, suggesting that the standard Newton-Einstein story of gravity is far from the complete picture.
25 years ago it seemed like physics was mostly complete, and the only remaining work was exploring the corner cases and polishing out all the imperfections. It doesn't feel that way anymore! The confusing part is that modern physics is so unbelievably successful and useful for technology - if the underlying theory was way off, how could the tech work?
Doing away with theory and just keep the guessing. But seriously very interesting, though I barely understand anything.