Reminds me of that silly string theory first surfaced (under my Christmas tree) some 51 years ago.
Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
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Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#42Thanks to reading The Three Body Problem, I can imagine.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#43I've heard this quote before, and I don't get it. This article fails to show me just how complicated that is. When I think "complicated," I think of a multiplicity of interconnected chemical molecular processes like what must happen in the cell, or layers of recursively connected neurons in the brain. Not some mindless cloud of gluons. What they've described seems less "complicated" and more "confusing." "We don't un…
My non-physicist but curious-about-the-topic take is similar. Things at the quantum level are not "complex" in the systems-theory sense. They couldn't be, I think, since we're dealing with the most basic constituents of the universe. They are mysterious, confusing, wildly counterintuitive... but they are fundamental. The most basic stuff there is.
The study of these things, on the other hand, is genuinely complex and difficult. But that's epistemology, not ontology.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#44When I was a physics student, there were four forces: strong, weak, EM, and gravity. That picture seemed neat and clean. Strong kept the nucleus together, EM kept molecules and atoms together (or broke them apart), gravity kept astronomical bodies together, weak was some kind of momentum-accounting device. Recently, GPT informed me that the strong force is really a tiny after-effect of the "QCD force" (in the same wa…
> Recently, GPT informed me that the strong force is really a tiny after-effect of the "QCD force"
Maybe you should not take everything GPT tells you at face value? I have no idea what this QCD force is supposed to be. The strong force is _the_ force of QCD. The Standard Model still considers the electromagnetic, weak and strong force. The description of the weak and EM force can be unified into the electroweak force and there are theories that try to also unify it with the strong force and even gravity, but there are issues on the theory side and no clear evidence on the experimental side as to which direction is the correct one.
The Standard Model and General Relativity are still our most successful theories. It is clear that they don't tell the whole picture, but (annoyingly?) it is not clear at all where this is going.
Just for dark matter there are probably a dozen proposed hypothetical particles, but so far we have found none. But maybe it's something completely different...
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Why do you say they're "pretty well understood" when there's been a long-standing unresolved discrepancy between lifetime measurement techniques?
I think they mean that what happens when a neutron decays is well understood. One of the neutron's down quarks change to an up quark, facilitated by a virtual W boson with negative charge. The W boson is very unstable and immediately decays into an electron and an electron anti-neutrino, both of which are ejected leaving behind the former neutrino which is now a proton because of that quark change.
When that happens is less understood, hence the discrepancies you mentioned.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#46The 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.
Because the failure to write about neutrons is conspicuous considering that they're always together in nuclei, similarly composed of three quarks etc.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#47[flagged]
One thing I've always wondered about is why crazy people are always fixated on quantum physics and then vague musical terms like "resonances".
LLMs do the same thing when they develop psychosis* except GPT also starts talking about "recursion" and Claude starts trying to enter nirvana.
* historical term "going Rampant"
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#48When I was a physics student, there were four forces: strong, weak, EM, and gravity. That picture seemed neat and clean. Strong kept the nucleus together, EM kept molecules and atoms together (or broke them apart), gravity kept astronomical bodies together, weak was some kind of momentum-accounting device. Recently, GPT informed me that the strong force is really a tiny after-effect of the "QCD force" (in the same wa…
> 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?
Who says "way" off? It's not complete to explain everything, but it explains a lot correctly enough to use it for calculations, predictions and practical effects. Same way Newton was and remains useful, and how people have been using maths and technology to solve problems for a long time since before Newton was born.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#49When I was a physics student, there were four forces: strong, weak, EM, and gravity. That picture seemed neat and clean. Strong kept the nucleus together, EM kept molecules and atoms together (or broke them apart), gravity kept astronomical bodies together, weak was some kind of momentum-accounting device. Recently, GPT informed me that the strong force is really a tiny after-effect of the "QCD force" (in the same wa…
> Recently, GPT informed me that the strong force is really a tiny after-effect of the "QCD force"
This is kind of just semantics. QCD describes both the force binding quarks inside protons and neutrons, and the residual force binding protons and neutrons. This is all part of the Standard Model, which has been essentially unchanged for the last 50 years. The big theoretical challenge is to incorporate gravity into this picture, but this is an almost impossible thing to explore experimentally because gravity is very weak compared to the other 3 forces. That's why the Standard Model is so successful, even though it doesn't incorporated gravity.
You might enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#50I've heard this quote before, and I don't get it. This article fails to show me just how complicated that is. When I think "complicated," I think of a multiplicity of interconnected chemical molecular processes like what must happen in the cell, or layers of recursively connected neurons in the brain. Not some mindless cloud of gluons. What they've described seems less "complicated" and more "confusing." "We don't un…
It's complex in a physicist's sense of the word: the equations are hopelessly complicated to solve even in very simple cases. This means it's hard to build intuition or describe in simple terms.
Quantum chromodynamics is actually pretty similar to Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. The big difference is that unlike photos, gluons interact with each other. This means goodbye to linear equations and simple planewave solutions. One can't even solve the equations in empty space, and only recently have supercomputers become powerful enough to make good, quantitative predictions about things like the proton mass.