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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’

#221

Post by sixQuarks »

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…

You would think that with my username, I should know the answer. But I have no clue

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

#222

Post by mianos »

undersuit wrote: post #174
lavasalesman wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your explanation. > There is lots of matter that is still unstable. What are you referring to with this?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay I need to read the article, but yeah protons might not be stable, we just need to wait a long time to find out.

And free quarks within stars in conditions where they are not confined. They can exist unconfined for a real short time. At the start of the big bang there were a lot of them.

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

#223

Post by Avicebron »

rvba wrote: post #213
blueprint wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

by drawing a hypothetical box around your system with and measuring it, you've bounded it locally.

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

#224

Post by empath-nirvana »

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…

One thing to note is that up and down quarks are separated by exactly one unit of charge (2/3 is 1 more than -1/3).

The charge coincidence is one of the reasons that scientists are looking for a grand unified theory -- part of which would ultimately mean that in some sense quarks and electrons are _the same thing_, and the electroweak and strong forces would be unified.

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

#225

Post by gus_massa »

m3kw9 wrote: post #62
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…

Then I’ll ask why can’t you use protons as electricity?

It is posible if you remove the wires.

In a CRT monitor, you have a ray of electrons that travel in vaccum and it is electricity outside wires. With a similar device, you can create a ray of protons and have also electricity with protons instead of electrons.

Another posibility is to use a water solution with acid. A part of the electricity is made of H+ that are just protons. (Actually, each proton is atached to a water molecule, so it's more like H2O+ than a plain H+.)

I'm triying to imagine a wire where protons can move. I don't think it's theoreticaly impossible, but they are mmuch heavier and bigger than electrons, so they it looks very difficult to find a material where they can move freely.

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

#226

Post by empath-nirvana »

calamari4065 wrote: post #123
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That just deflects the question one level down without explaining anything. "Because it is" is not a helpful answer to "why?"

You eventually have to take _something_ as given.

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

#227

Post by lying4fun »

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...

I’m going to entertain this literally because it’s fun: so we need to zoom out enough to find those big galaxy surrounding atoms which are actually universes, or conversely to zoom in more to find galaxies and a universe within atoms. But it seems that there’s either missing understanding how to cross that zoom in/out threshold or it’s impossible by the laws of physics to zoom so far to make a full circle, like it’s forbidden for the snake to bite its tail. I imagine people have discussed this stuff a lot, and came up with better analogies and more nuanced models

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

#228

Post by cozzyd »

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…

Disclaimer: I am not a theoretical physicist (but I am an experimental one...).

If the universe, at the time of the big bang, had no net charge to begin with, and charge is conserved, then it follows that we would have particles whose charge will on net cancel out, and therefore charge would be quantized in some reasonable way. Note that there are doubly charged particles (e.g Delta++) but they're not stable. Some theories do predict fractionally charged particles (millicharged is the term of art) but there is no experimental evidence.

Now, was the universe neutral to begin with? If it wasn't , then that would presumably leave a strong imprint on early universe cosmology. I believe that current measurements of galaxy structure formation, cosmic microwave background and big bang nucleosynthesis probably place extremely strong constraints on early universe neutrality, though there may be caveats I'm not aware of.

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

#230

Post by gus_massa »

gweinberg wrote: post #33
Tagbert wrote: post #4

Then there are neutrons that are like protons with just a little bit more. It's sort of like infinity + 1. Is it bigger or is it equal? (I know, infinity is not a number, really)

Yes, just what I was thinking: a neutron is actually more complicated than a proton, it's like a proton with an electron stuck inside it.

No. you can'tput an elelctron inside a proton to get a neutron. If you make them colide and you are lucky, one of the up quarks of the proton changes to a down quark, and now you get a neutron. Both up and down quarks are elelmentary particles as far as we know.
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