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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’

#491

Post by notahacker »

geye1234 wrote: post #467
notahacker wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, the "god of the gaps" critique has nothing to do scientific discovery being a route to omniscience, something only some religious figures have ever claimed to have even the possibility of access to. It's the set of things religions claim the only explanation/evidence for repeatedly shrinking, as we found explanations for weather that have more predictive power than "the wrath/favour of the gods", found cures fo…

> Nope, the "god of the gaps" critique has nothing to do scientific discovery being a route to omniscience, something only some religious figures have ever claimed to have even the possibility of access to. It's the set of things religions claim the only explanation/evidence for repeatedly shrinking, as we found [scientific] explanations... The 'god of the gaps' argument, which is pushed very hard by the new atheists…

The idea that if something wasn't explicable in terms of contemporary science it must be evidence of a role for divine fiat was around (and lambasted even by fellow theists) decades before the New Atheists turned up. It's also implicit in the argument I'm replying to.

The fact that other arguments exist for religious belief systems (though attempting to deduce the necessity of an unchanging omni-being from the observation "there is change" sounds like it'd be a stretch that makes Anselm's Ontological Argument seem respectable) doesn't alter the frequency with which "contemporary science can't explain this stuff ergo the explanation must be divine" arguments are implicitly or explicitly made. Or indeed the tendency of longstanding religious beliefs to have to drop axioms once considered fundamental enough to execute dissenters for in the face of overwhelming evidence. None of which has anything to do with quantum physics, which no religion that I'm aware of has anything to say on the matter.

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

#492

Post by lagadu »

Balgair wrote: post #126
rolph wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a proton, in the simplist version, is made of 3 quarks. two up quarks one down quark. down qwark is -1/3 e ; up quark is +2/3 e. they sum up to +1 e. neutrons are the opposite made of 3 quarks. two down quarks one up quark. and sum to 0e the unitary quantity is a conveinience. 1 e = 1.602176634×10−19 coulombs,

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?

You're effectively asking why universal constants are the value that they are. Eventually there's no answer other than "it's a property of the universe we live in that we observed."

If you keep asking why eventually you'll reach a ratio between two values: constants and you can't really go further deeper than that. Even if the values we have now end up not being the most fundamental, eventually you'll run into the fundamental ones and still have the same question unanswered.

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

#493

Post by lagadu »

amelius wrote: post #413
oldandtired wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After about 15 minutes, the neutron has changed into another proton and electron, so bar now has a bigger party on its hands.

How do they split the bill?

This is a good question. Should the bill be split by mass, charge or spin?

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

#494

Post by lagadu »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #63
lazide wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the universe is old, then how do you expect atoms to exist if this was not the case?

Couldn't there be a different physics where protons had a charge of 0.5 and, therefore, every atomic nucleus would have twice as many protons as electrons? Or pick any other ratio you like. Or course, I don't mean to hand-wave away the potential implications of this. Maybe there would be no atomic nuclei in such a universe, for all I know. But if not, why not?

If that were to be the case, we'd have to change the values of the other forces that these charged particles interact with, such as the strong force.

Not that it wouldn't necessarily be possible, but it would require everything we know about physics to be remodeled because the consequences are vast, fundamental even. So yes, with an entirely different model of the universe that would likely be possible.

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

#495

Post by jononomo »

geye1234 wrote: post #467
notahacker wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, the "god of the gaps" critique has nothing to do scientific discovery being a route to omniscience, something only some religious figures have ever claimed to have even the possibility of access to. It's the set of things religions claim the only explanation/evidence for repeatedly shrinking, as we found explanations for weather that have more predictive power than "the wrath/favour of the gods", found cures fo…

> Nope, the "god of the gaps" critique has nothing to do scientific discovery being a route to omniscience, something only some religious figures have ever claimed to have even the possibility of access to. It's the set of things religions claim the only explanation/evidence for repeatedly shrinking, as we found [scientific] explanations... The 'god of the gaps' argument, which is pushed very hard by the new atheists…

Wow, this is well-stated!

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

#496

Post by [deleted] »

geye1234 wrote: post #468
notahacker wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't read The God Delusion or wherever the "god of the gaps" critique originated - what is this actually referring to? A rare point of agreement between Nietzsche and the evangelist Henry Drummond was that the Christian apologetic approach of "ah, but that hasn't been explained yet, so it must be God's will" to all the discoveries of the Enlightenment wasn't a very impressive one. Not least because of the tend…

> Augustine, since you're apparently a fan, was pretty confident that the problem of pestilence was the product of a literally occurring Fall involving two actual First People, which doesn't square very well with evolutionary biology. My understanding is that the current hypothesis says we are, in fact, all descended from one couple. I could be wrong about that though. In any case, there's no contradiction between Or…

[deleted]

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

#497

Post by jodrellblank »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #455
jodrellblank wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure, but Protons are ~1800x more massive than electrons even though they have the same electric charge, so it seems like they would need 1800x more energy to move them. Power in an electric circuit is Watts, which is current in Amperes times voltage. Amperes are one Coulomb or 6.241509x10^18 electric charges per second flowing through a conductor. So a fixed amount of power (Watts) moves a known amount of charge…

Electric Power isn't like a pipe and water wheel where you need a net flow of electrons. The work is done by the electric field, which is why we can have AC power where electrons don't have any net travel. This also is why electric power flows along a wire at the speed of light, while electrons can only travel along a wire at the speed of a snail, or about 1 mm per second

> "The work is done by the electric field, which is why we can have AC power where electrons don't have any net travel."

Still though, you asked how we know electricity uses electrons rather than protons and I'm sticking with "they're 2000x different in mass, there would be some measurable difference between them" even in an AC circuit. Oscillating a more massive conveyor belt back and forth 'in-place' is harder work than oscillating a lower mass belt. "Electrically charged" means "interacts with the electric field" and if energy in the electric field is moving heavier protons back and forth, wouldn't that be distinguishable from moving lighter electrons back and forth? Slower movement of protons, more heat generated, something like that?

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

#498

Post by jononomo »

notahacker wrote: post #412
knightoffaith wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's the set of things religions claim the only explanation/evidence for repeatedly shrinking I haven't read The God Delusion or wherever the "god of the gaps" critique originated - what is this actually referring to? Are we just talking about like, pagan polytheistic explanations of natural phenomena? What serious Christian or Buddhist thinkers using religion to explain things like weather or medicine are being ref…

> I haven't read The God Delusion or wherever the "god of the gaps" critique originated - what is this actually referring to? A rare point of agreement between Nietzsche and the evangelist Henry Drummond was that the Christian apologetic approach of "ah, but that hasn't been explained yet, so it must be God's will" to all the discoveries of the Enlightenment wasn't a very impressive one. Not least because of the tend…

Well, a lot of things don't square well with evolutionary biology, which is why the field is in crisis.

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

#499

Post by lagadu »

mianos wrote: post #222
undersuit wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quark stars, a type of star whose density sits between neutron stars and black holes are theorized to exist, though we have no conclusive observations of one yet.

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

#500

Post by supportengineer »

hwillis wrote: post #218
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…

We see gravity whenever we see large "clumps" of matter. We keep looking for a physical property of matter than explains gravity, but perhaps it's the lack of something. So when matter appears to attract other matter, maybe they are both "falling towards something".
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