Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 591 posts

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

#331

Post by dcow »

“The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form.”

I’m getting really tired of hazy probability distributions and waves that only collapse and materialize when observed. I 100% accept that QM is a useful tool to model our current understanding based on increasingly sophisticated observations, but I fundamentally don’t believe that a proton is some shape shifting quantum soup of energy that doesn't form until someone comes around and thinks about it. That is unless reality is approximated and expensive compute is directed only toward what’s being observed to better enhance the simulation.

I probably need to add that I am also tired of simulation theory.

I really suspect we just aren't good enough at observing things or don’t exist in enough dimensions to understand what we’re observing. And so the cross sections we are able to pin down end up looking like they are part of some probabilistic system.

I still have bets on this all being a massive game of life.

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

#332

Post by roland_nilsson »

Reading this I couldn't help thinking of the epicycle theory of planetary motion. Under the holy assumption that planets had to move in perfect circles, people invented increasingly complicated circles-on-top-of-circles models in order to explain all observed trajectories. Then Kepler came along and said "hey, it's an ellipse!"

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

#333

Post by vihren »

trenchgun wrote: post #318
ajkjk wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the actual answer, but from my understanding of QFT the answer is going to be roughly this shape: Charge is not actually a quantity on the real number line; it's more of a "count" of something. Not sure what exactly. The "topological defect" model of charges in 2d is a decent analogy though, in which a charge can be e.g. a count of how many vortices there are in a field which are oriented in a certain di…

Is there a reason why we say quarks have fractional charge instead of having just +-1 or +-2? And Then electron and proton would have -3 and +3?

That's purely by convention. It's just that we fist discovered electrons and protons and quarks with their fractional charges came in much later.

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

#334

Post by [deleted] »

Smoosh wrote: post #17
indigoabstract wrote: post #11

> “In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.” Well, maybe someone could imagine it, otherwise, all that complexity would have led to a gargantuan number of bugs and the universe would have crashed..

Maybe all the other instances crashed, but we got lucky and get to apply the anthropic principle. The real question is, are we running on bare metal, in a VM, or in a container?

[deleted]

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

#335

Post by hugryhoop »

cocoa19 wrote: post #329
okamiueru wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly dislike PBS Space Time, but I find it hard to explain why. I might also be just too dumb to get it. It's just the feeling of the goal not being the "listener gaining understanding", but rather "expressing how confusing and complicated it is".

The channel is definitely not targeted for the lay person. A counter example, Derek from Veritasium, he did a phd in physics education and it shows. Some of his videos are complex in content, but dumbed down so most people can understand. I enjoy PBS space time and listening to Matt O’Dowd, but I understand at the most 20-40% of what is covered on the videos. It is frustrating because I like the topics being discusse…

Derek tackles easier subjects than PBS space.

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

#336

Post by importantstuff »

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 who has replied to your question has got the right answer. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21753/why-do-ele... has the right answer. There are multiple aspects to this argument, but essentially, the symmetries of your system force the charges in the Standard Model (quarks and leptons) to be the way they are due to gauge anomaly cancellation. If you believe in quark confinement, which is extremely well motivated, computationally, theoretically and experimentally, then the fact that the proton has exactly charge +1 follows naturally.

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

#337

Post by mise_en_place »

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…

I mean it's not that complicated to understand. e is just a physical constant. It's been measured as such, with varying degrees of precision. The creator is as lazy a programmer as we are. To make the math work, + and - are used.

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

#338

Post by freetime2 »

Razengan wrote: post #267
jodrellblank wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> AKA “God did it” + "Just for us" ^^ e.g. Earth is the only place where life could have formed. We have yet to set foot on even 1 another planet but we are pretty sure we are alone in the entire damn Universe.

This is an incredible misunderstanding of the Anthropic principle. It has nothing to do with god, it does not suggest that life could only exist on Earth, and it does not suggest that we are alone in the universe.

If anything it's an argument against Intelligent Design. E.g. life is the statistical result of a vast universe (or multiverse) of permutations - some of which are not conducive to life, and some of which are. And when life looks out and says "wow it's uncanny how perfect this place is, there must be a divine hand at work" - it's only observational bias that makes it appear that way. Because life could only exist to make such observations in regions of the universe which are suitable for life.

But on the other hand it also prevents one from saying "we exist, therefore intelligent life must be commonplace".

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

#339

Post by polskibus »

importantstuff wrote: post #336
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 who has replied to your question has got the right answer. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21753/why-do-ele... has the right answer. There are multiple aspects to this argument, but essentially, the symmetries of your system force the charges in the Standard Model (quarks and leptons) to be the way they are due to gauge anomaly cancellation. If you believe in quark confinement, which is extremely w…

Which answer on physicsexchange is the right one? The top scored ?

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

#340

Post by namaria »

Mauneam wrote: post #287
knightoffaith wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you're reading into my comment more than what I intended to say. In the context of fine-tuning arguments for God, we really are just arguing that an intelligent designer designed the universe. In isolation, this doesn't necessarily commit us to some mainstream religion, and in this context, God is just the intelligent designer of the universe, nothing more (though proponents of the arguments will go on, thr…

Saying "because God did it" as an answer to any question has the same value as saying "because pixel cooked the music". If you want to consider those two groups of words "explanations" go for it. They are grammatically correct, and if they satisfy the curious mind they are good enough.

You keep insisting that 'anthropic principle' = 'god did it' when it's anything but. It's like you don't even read to the replies to your comments.
Post reply on HN