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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’

#351

Post by TeMPOraL »

IshKebab wrote: post #90
TeMPOraL wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things are supposed to get less complicated as you get smaller, not more complicated! They're not. In general, once you take a lot of little things to make a big thing, you may notice a bunch of emergent properties, but one of the major emergent property is that... all the variability cancels out, or averages to a simple quantity. See e.g. all the complex dancing of great many particles making up everyday objects,…

That doesn't happen for everything. Biology is an obvious counterexample.

Or is it? Biology at micro-scale seems much more complicated than at macro-scale. It has this thermodynamics quality to it.

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

#352

Post by scotty79 »

calibas wrote: post #34

Reductionist philosophy is very common in science. It's essentially the idea that you can break things down into simpler parts to better understand how everything works. It's kind of "common sense", if you understand how all the components on a circuit board function individually, then you can piece together how the entire board will function. In computer science, you can reduce everything to operations comparing 1s…

Smallest parts are less complicated. Even some mammals that have zero intuitions about that scale managed to develop math to describe it pretty much perfectly. Which is impossible with larger scale systems such as cells or organisms where the best we can do is some statistics that accurately predicts some thing sometimes.

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

#353

Post by scotty79 »

gus_massa wrote: post #230
gweinberg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't it weird how one elementary particle can become completely different elementary particle by "absorbing" (?) yet another elementary particle? How exactly does that happen?

Doesn't each particle species have it's own separate quantum field? How does one convert into another?

Electromagnetic field can convert into quantum electron field by spawning electron-positron pair from a single photon. But all those exchanges are just weird. It's really shocking that people managed to figure out the math that rules over this.

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

#354

Post by AdamH12113 »

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?

In solids (like metals and semiconductors) the atomic nuclei form stable structures (often crystals). Protons are bound to their nuclei, and the nuclei don’t move, so neither do the protons.

Electrons, on the other hand, can move between atoms, which allows them to form an electrical current.

There are special cases, but that’s the basic answer.

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

#355

Post by vladms »

dcow wrote: post #331

“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…

In the opposite direction, I feel mildly annoyed when people expect a precise/clear answer to questions which can be answered mostly/better with probability distributions.

Considering how you can test statistics in real life (ex: Buffon's Needle) there must be something very "statistical" embedded in reality itself (it is true that quantum mechanics pushes everything very far so can seem to complex).

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

#356

Post by hansbo »

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…

I am reading this as "it has to be this way, or the model does not hold", but it does not explain why. What causes it? Consistency of a model cannot be the ultimate reason, right?

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

#357

Post by cdogl »

ryandamm wrote: post #299
timeagain wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok here’s the problem. What hubris does it take to assume the fundamental constants could be changed? Just because they appear in math equations doesn’t mean they can be twiddled and tweaked like programming variables. We have no prior knowledge or justification to believe any constants have been “tuned”, because we have no justification in suggesting other possible values. We could just as easily say that life on ea…

You're not entirely wrong that it's unscientific, I think we're answering metaphysical questions. (It seems like questions of "why" ends up unerringly in either metaphysics or religion at some point.) That said, I believe the chain of logic (haven't watched the PBS video yet) is simply that were these fine-tuned constants to take any other value, there wouldn't be intelligent life to observe them. If the values were…

Your comment was an excellent synthesis of the discussion that preceded it - thank you.

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

#358

Post by Mistletoe »

Mistletoe wrote: post #203
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 believe the end of my physics textbook in college just said “be grateful that the charge on the electron is what it is because without it our universe wouldn’t exist if it was even slightly different” or something to that effect. Our universe may be the trillionth trillionth one created and we are in an anthropomorphic universe just like we are on an anthropomorphic planet. It always makes me grateful. >The charge…

Sorry that should say anthropic and not anthropomorphic haha. Too much time has elapsed to edit it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

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

#359

Post by coldtea »

hansbo wrote: post #356
importantstuff wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am reading this as "it has to be this way, or the model does not hold", but it does not explain why. What causes it? Consistency of a model cannot be the ultimate reason, right?

Not a physisist, but "consistency with the model" doesn't mean "because that's how some arbitrary model says it should be".

It's more like: "Because we have arrived at a model that describes well most other aspect of those particles and their behavior, and has verified predictive power, and given the constrains and calculations based on that model, that's what its charge would be".

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

#360

Post by tarruda »

lisper wrote: post #295
tarruda wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at least not if you are adhering to the scientific method All the information you have comes from your five senses. Isn't some kind of faith necessary to believe that the scientific method would lead to an accurate understanding of reality?

That depends on what you mean by "an accurate understanding of reality." One can observe empirically that the scientific method converges towards something which enables you to predict the outcomes of experiments more and more accurately is it converges. Whether you want to call that "an accurate understanding of reality" is a terminological quibble, but it seems like an apt label to me.

Note that I'm not arguing against the scientific method, but I'm arguing against your claim that it alone can deliver an accurate understanding of reality outside of what we can experiment and observe. This is your parent response:

" You are objectively wrong. It requires no faith. There is simply no evidence for an intelligent being at the root of creation, no data that cannot be explained with much simpler mechanisms than intelligence. The proton is complicated by human standards, but it still is nowhere near as complicated as intelligence"

You can look at the CMB and take that as evidence of the big bang, but you are relying on faith when you make either of these statements:

- The singularity that resulted in the big bang was created from nothing, time didn't exist before.

- The big bang was created by God

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