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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’

#211

Post by foobarbecue »

clankyclanker wrote: post #208
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…

So, PBS Space Time did a video on this “fine tuned universe” theory and it, like all of their videos, is great. The concept seems to be that in an unbalanced universe, life couldn’t form, and we’d be incapable of having this conversation. So, either there are infinite universes and we exist as a result of being in the right one, or there’s one universe and we exist as a result of the one we’re in being right. Either…

AKA the "anthropic principle."

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

#212

Post by DonHopkins »

jacquesm wrote: post #183
DiscourseFan wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting very strong "angels on a pinhead" vibes from this

With the minute difference that we do not have experimental validation for Angels dancing on a pinhead whereas there is a massive amount of experimental validation for the standard model.

I thought he meant "angles on a pinhead".

Now you're talkin' tri-angular!

https://cidu.info/2022/05/06/thats-a-cute-angle/

Right angles are wrong angles! Death to th' T-square!

https://comicskingdom.com/zippy-the-pinhead/2023-07-02

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

#213

Post by rvba »

blueprint wrote: post #153
Balgair wrote: post #126

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?

when you understand quantum theory correctly, you will realize that particles don't exist by themselves. They are a temporary localization. this means that the number of quarks inside a proton is not actually fixed. when a particle becomes disentangled with the system, that localized it, there's no longer a particle I mentioned this recently, in the context of the laziness in language, leading to the miseducation of…

What do you mean by "temporary localization"? That protons move? That they can poof? They dont seem to self destruct.

On a side note: are there any models that assume that there are fields/shapes that are constanly bombarbed by neutrinos and other stuff. Thks bombardment seems to be always ignored

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

#214

Post by mettamage »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #200
andoando wrote: post #194

Is it possible the universe is infinitely complex? i.e, "turtles all the way down?". I find the concept of duality and replication in physics very interesting. Everything seems to have an opposite, with properties such that when these opposites come together, they form a bigger unit, which itself has an opposite.

I don't "believe" too many things that can't be evidentiarily substantiated, but as silly of a thing to reference for this kind of discussion, I personally have the irrational, unscientific belief that this Simpsons opening is unironically the most accurate model of the Universe that we have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycvlJ9XMd94&ab_channel=cakta...

There is a fractal-like nature to the universe due to certain math thingies working out on all levels (e.g. scale free networks/power laws being all over the place).

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

#215

Post by computerfriend »

carabiner wrote: post #107
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…

Why does light decay quadratically and not linearly? Why are the laws of physics algebraic at all? Why did the Big Bang happen? Ask enough why's and get to: we just don't know. Turtles all the way down.

The first one is well known. It's because it's radiating in three dimensions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law

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

#216

Post by JimmyRuska »

Sounds like it's just a Haskell thunk but as a probability wave

Lazily evaluated until there's a probability it has to interact with something. Since you can never really see the value of the actual function, but only see what it looks like when it's forced to evaluate a computation in some context, an interaction, you can never get a precise definition of the function

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

#217

Post by gus_massa »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #91
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…

> 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.

I never heard this. I'm almost sure it's wrong. Do you have a link?

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

#218

Post by hwillis »

supportengineer wrote: post #83

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?

> As sort of a vacuum in spacetime?

Definitely not. For one thing, gravity isn't just mass. The gravity of a moving baseball is higher than a nonmoving baseball. The gravity of a charged battery is higher than a discharged battery. Same protons, neutrons, and electrons, but if you change their velocity or how they are arranged then they have more gravity. It's the stress-energy tensor, not just the mass (by which you mean matter?).

> Could gravity be the effect of mass in an indefinite form?

A very clear way to see this is not true is to compare stars and black holes to quarks. The space between quarks acts like they are different, larger or smaller quarks depending on how the real quarks happen to be arranged at that moment.

So, if we apply the same idea to a very large star, it would sometimes act like a black hole or a supernova or a star depending on where it was and how it happened to be doing and also maybe just sometimes spontaneously?

But mostly, if it was really far away you would expect it to act like a black hole, because from a far distance it seems like its all in one small point, and a black hole is an irreversible phase transition. But that doesn't happen, and stars look like stars no matter how far away you are. If reality worked like this, we'd expect nearby galaxies to have almost no dark matter and faraway galaxies to have lots and be very small. But instead galaxies and dark matter are pretty much the same no matter how far away they are from us.

This is a pretty ill-posed question though. I'm cramming it into a box that has an interesting answer just for fun, and I don't think it answers much of what you are asking.

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

#219

Post by DonHopkins »

anon84873628 wrote: post #23
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…

No one knows. That's part of the great mystery. But also in some sense "it has to be that way," since without charge balance atoms wouldn't exist as we know them, and thus neither would all the chemistry that creates the macroscopic world we inhabit.

On the topic of the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’:

Imagine that physics is like Microsoft COM (or C++ pure virtual function tables), so there's a base IUnknown interface, hiding innumerably different possible concrete implementation classes, that can expose arbitrarily many other abstract interfaces, so you can call iUnknown->QueryInterface(uuid, &otherInterface) to ask for other interfaces like IAtom, IElectron, IProton, IQuark, IParticle, and IWave, and there are also many other obscure higher level dynamic and reflective interfaces like IDispatch, ITypeInfo, and IPersist, just waiting to be discovered and exploited, if only we knew the right uuid to ask for.

And then physics research boils down to QueryInterfacing objects with random uuids, and when that succeeds in finding new interfaces, calling their random functions with random arguments to see what happens. That's probably what the black hole supercomputer at the center of the galaxy is doing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975257

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593432

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

#220

Post by jodrellblank »

foobarbecue wrote: post #211
clankyclanker wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, PBS Space Time did a video on this “fine tuned universe” theory and it, like all of their videos, is great. The concept seems to be that in an unbalanced universe, life couldn’t form, and we’d be incapable of having this conversation. So, either there are infinite universes and we exist as a result of being in the right one, or there’s one universe and we exist as a result of the one we’re in being right. Either…

AKA the "anthropic principle."

AKA “God did it” with a sciencey sounding name. An answer which explains nothing, predicts nothing, satisfies no curiosity, and closes the book on any further questions.
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