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You appear to think “intelligent being” and “faith” are inextricable, but the word faith exists perfectly fine without a need to believe in an “intelligent being”.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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?
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…
In a simplistic way, I see a neutron star as just being a lump of regular (atomic) matter where the high pressure has forced all the electrons into the protons.
Question for someone who might know: Was pressure so high in the early universe that matter originally formed as neutrons, then as pressure reduced electrons and protons were able to separate? Sort of like the formation of a neutron star in reverse?
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 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…
These 8 particles and their 8 antiparticles are located in the corners of 2 cubes of unit edge in that 3-dimensional charge space. One cube is in the first octant of the coordinates, with 1 corner in the origin, while the other cube is in the opposite octant, also with 1 corner in the origin.
The neutrino and the antineutrino are in the origin, while the electron and the positron are in the opposite corners of the cubes, in the points (-1,-1,-1) and (1,1,1), and the quarks and the antiquarks are in the 12 off-diagonal corners of the 2 cubes.
As functions of the position vector of a particle in this 3-dimensional charge space, the electric charge is the component of the position vector that is parallel to the cube diagonal that passes through origin and the corners of the electron and positron, while the corresponding component that is orthogonal to the diagonal is the so-called color charge (hence chromodynamics; while the electric forces attempt to make null the 1-dimensional electric charge, the strong forces attempt to make null the 2-dimensional color charge), which is non-null only for the quarks and antiquarks, which are off-diagonal, and it is null for electron, neutrino and their antiparticles.
The projections of the off-diagonal corners of the cubes on the diagonal are at one third and two thirds distances from origin, which is why the electric charges of the quarks are 1/3 and 2/3 in absolute value (where the unit of electric charge is the electron charge, i.e. the diagonal of one unit cube), even if in the charge space all the particles have coordinates that are either 1 or 0 in absolute value.
While this symmetry of the charges is interesting, it is not known why it is so.
In any case, if this symmetry had not existed, the Universe as we know it could not exist, because this symmetry ensures that in the nucleons the total color charge of the quarks is null, so they no longer interact through strong forces (except at very short distances, where the residual forces bind the nucleons into nuclei) and at the next level the total electric charge of the atoms is null, so they no longer interact through electric forces (except at very short distances, where the residual forces bind the atoms into molecules).
The same symmetry exists for the other 2 groups of 8 particles and 2 groups of 8 antiparticles, where the muon and the tauon correspond to the electron, because those particles have greater masses but identical charges with the first groups.
In the initial state of the Big Bang, this symmetry of the charges ensures that even if there were only particles in equal numbers and without any antiparticles, the total electric charge and the total color charge of all matter was null.
While the neutrinos do not contribute to any of the charges, their presence ensures that the total spin, i.e. the total angular momentum, was also null.
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…
This is why the "god of the gaps" critique is so short-sighted. It relies on the assumption that as science progresses it will "close the gaps". In reality the opposite happens. Another example is the cell -- in Darwin's day it was thought to be a simple thing, but then we learned more about it and it turned out to be monstrously complex and the mystery intensifies.
Then there are neutrons that are like protons with just a little bit more. It's sort of like infinity + 1. Is it bigger or is it equal? (I know, infinity is not a number, really)
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.
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 sign…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".