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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’

#51

Post by gizmo686 »

mianos wrote: post #42
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…

Imagine you have a bunch of fulcrums in the air and items droping down. If the things that land on the fulcrums don't balance each other out the fulcrum tips and the items keep dropping. Eventually all the fulcrums are balanced. A lot of these things coalesce until they are stable enough they don't fall apart. If there is a stable form and you have enough of them, eventually you get a lot of stable forms. It is not s…

This explains why atoms have 0 charge, but not why protons, which are stable even without electrons, have a charge of 1.

Put in terms of elementary particles, why is it that the ratio of electric charge between a quark and an electron is either 1:3 or 2:3?

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

#52

Post by at_a_remove »

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'll take a shot at this. The "answer," such as it is, is symmetry. The electron belongs to a group called the leptons, which is to say they are lightweight. Leptons obey certain sorts of statistics and consist of the electron, the muon, the tau lepton, the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino, the tau neutrino, and their antiparticles. That's twelve in total.

The mirror of the leptons would be quarks. Up, down, charm, beauty, top, and bottom ... and their antiparticles. Twelve again! Their charges are 2/3e, -1/3e, 2/3e, -1/3e, 2/3e, -1/3e, and the reverse for the antiquarks. One bundle of three quarks is the proton, and it happens to be 2/3e + 2/3e + -1/3e. But so what? There's all kinds of other bundles. Three-quark bundles are typically hadrons (heavyweight) and two-quark bundles are mesons (medium weight). So you have a lot of choices on the other side!

The choices are caused by something called color confinement, which states that you will not get quarks alone. Indeed, you can take a pair of quarks in the aforementioned meson, and if you stretched them further and further apart, when the bond between them (mediated by gluons) snapped, you would have put so much energy into the stretching and snapping to create two new quarks, one at each end of your broken rubber band. Just as you cannot cut a piece of string such that it only has one end, so you have it with color confinement. I don't want to get too far away from the main point but because of this, quarks are found (normally, outside of Big-Bang quark-gluon plasmas) in combination ... and so eventually one of the combinations has a charge number resembling that of the electron.

Also, positrons aren't really the opposite of electrons. They're opposite on the matter/antimatter axis, which automatically flips the charge, q. They are not opposite along the lepton-quark axis, nor are they opposite along the electron-neutrino axis. Instead of one mirror, imagine many mirrors at angles to one another, and "opposite" becomes a less useful term.

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

#54

Post by Rayhem »

blackhaj7 wrote: post #49

I have no doubt quantum physicists know what they are talking about but when I read stuff like: “changes its appearance depending on how it is probed" "you can’t even imagine how complicated it is" "the proton contains traces of particles called charm quarks that are heavier than the proton itself" I always think it is the kind of excuse a schoolkid would give their teachers for their calculations being wrong

> I have no doubt quantum physicists know what they are talking about but...I always think it is the kind of excuse a schoolkid would give their teachers for their calculations being wrong.

Just to emphasize how extreme this dichotomy is, not only is quantum mechanics correct (in that it's a predictive model), it's the most correct physical theory humans have ever devised in that the measurements there have more significant figures than anything else.

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

#55

Post by Crespyl »

clutch89 wrote: post #45
bmartin13 wrote: post #43

[flagged]

But what is the intelligent being made of? Did they come from randomness or from yet another higher-level intelligent being? You're just scratching the surface of this rabbit-hole!

It's Djinns all the way down, that's why you've got to turn to GOD (GOD over Djinns)...

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

#56

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

> 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 all average to a simple scalar number we call "temperature".

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

#57

Post by lazide »

gizmo686 wrote: post #51
mianos wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you have a bunch of fulcrums in the air and items droping down. If the things that land on the fulcrums don't balance each other out the fulcrum tips and the items keep dropping. Eventually all the fulcrums are balanced. A lot of these things coalesce until they are stable enough they don't fall apart. If there is a stable form and you have enough of them, eventually you get a lot of stable forms. It is not s…

This explains why atoms have 0 charge, but not why protons, which are stable even without electrons, have a charge of 1. Put in terms of elementary particles, why is it that the ratio of electric charge between a quark and an electron is either 1:3 or 2:3?

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

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

#59

Post by bigstrat2003 »

lisper wrote: post #46
bmartin13 wrote: post #43

[flagged]

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't have a conversation with a proton.

Technically it requires faith to assert that the universe did not have its origin from some intelligent supernatural being, just as it does to assert the opposite. The only thing we can truly say based on the data is "we don't know for certain at this time".

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

#60

Post by opportune »

SECProto wrote: post #41
aap_ wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charge is quantized. You cannot have just any amount of electric charge. An electron has three elementary units of negative charge, quarks have -1 and 2. Whether it's a coincidence that proton and electron charge are of the same magnitude (and the neutron is neutral) is another question, but at the elementary level you don't have that much choice for what the charge of a particle is.

> quarks have -1 and 2. Wikipedia suggests the quarks that make up the proton have charge ⅔e and -⅓e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_quark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_quark

Is it true that the quarks themselves, in isolation, have that charge? Or is it that combining quarks into a baryon or meson gives the resultant particle a charge according to a fixed ratio of the constituent quarks?

Gemini advanced says it’s the latter, because of color confinement. But I’d defer to a human expert

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