The implication of this framing is that neutrons are considerably simpler. I find that rather surprising.
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)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if it is inherently complex in an information-theory framework, or that we simply haven’t yet found its “natural” basis under which its description is most succinct?
My thinking as well. How could something so remarkably stable and functionally indistinguishable among its peers also be so complex?
To your question, I think there is an elegant answer actually; most composite particles in QCD are unstable. They're either made out of equal parts matter and antimatter (like pions) or they're heavier than the proton, in which case they can decay into one (or more) protons (or antiprotons). If any of the internal complexities of the proton made it distinguishable from other protons, they wouldn't both be protons, and one could decay into the other. Quantum mechanics also helps to keep things simple by forcing the various properties of bound states to be quantized; there isn't a version of a proton where e.g. one of the quarks has a little more energy, similar to how the energies atomic orbitals are quantized.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
The title implies it directly.
If you saw an article titled “My Nana is the nicest person you could possibly meet”, would you interpret that to be a statement that your own grandmother is considerably less nice?
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#64So if we understand the internal differences between protons and neutrons, what’s the practical application? Turning neutrons into protons with low energies - alchemy?
Neutrons turn spontaneously into protons, which is called beta decay, and which happens in any nucleus with too many neutrons. This includes the free neutrons, which decay into protons in minutes. Neutrons and protons differ in their composition, a neutron being made of 2 d quarks + 1 u quark, while a proton is made of 1 d quark + 2 u quarks, much in the same way as a nucleus of tritium differs from a nucleus of heli…
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you saw an article titled “My Nana is the nicest person you could possibly meet”, would you interpret that to be a statement that your own grandmother is considerably less nice?
That is what the author would be implying, yes. Though, you may quibble over "considerable".
I like to imagine that people this ridiculous get into fist fights on the street constantly.
Normal person: “My wife is the absolute best.”
Pedant: “Don’t you dare insult my wife!” fists fly
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neutrons turn spontaneously into protons, which is called beta decay, and which happens in any nucleus with too many neutrons. This includes the free neutrons, which decay into protons in minutes. Neutrons and protons differ in their composition, a neutron being made of 2 d quarks + 1 u quark, while a proton is made of 1 d quark + 2 u quarks, much in the same way as a nucleus of tritium differs from a nucleus of heli…
Do you think it’s possible that the periodic table is too simple of an abstraction and that quarkish elements exist which cannot be aligned on the table but perhaps are never seen in nature or extremely rare?
While the leptons may be considered as truly elementary, at least in the current state of knowledge, the hadrons are composed of quarks, and the quarks have non-null color charge.
At present there is no hope of being able to produce any particle where quarks are separated, i.e. any particle with non-null total color charge, because when the distance between quarks increases the attraction force between them also increases (like they would have been bound by an elastic spring), until the force becomes high enough so that a pair quark-antiquark is generated, so the original hadron may split into 2 hadrons, both of which have null color charge and no free quarks can be produced (e.g. the quark initially being pulled apart is split away, but it takes with it the antiquark newly generated, forming a meson particle instead of a free quark).
Attempting to separate the quarks of a hadron has a result somewhat analogous to the attempt of separating the north and south poles of a magnet, when breaking the magnet produces a new pair of north and south poles, so you get 2 new magnets, each with a north and a south pole, instead of getting a north pole separated from the south pole.
Therefore, because neither free quarks nor combinations of quarks where the color charge is non-null can be produced, no "quarkish" elements can exist.
Nevertheless, while the normal chemical elements have nuclei composed of nucleons, i.e. protons and neutrons, it is possible to have nuclei composed of other hadrons, i.e. nuclei where besides protons or neutrons there are one or more of the so-called hyperons, which have a similar structure to nucleons, but which contain some heavier quarks than the u and d quarks that compose nucleons (there are also extremely short-lived heavier hadrons that contain more than 3 quarks, as long as the total color charge is null).
However, all hyperons have an extremely short half-life, much shorter than a second, so if such an exotic element containing hyperons in its nucleus were formed due to a very unlikely sequence of collisions between particles with very high energy, it would decay extremely quickly.
At the huge scale of the Universe, even extremely unlikely events may happen somewhere, so perhaps a few atoms of such hyperonic chemical elements have a transient existence somewhere (during a small fraction of a second), but their quantity must be truly negligible.
While a few atoms of such elements can be produced artificially or naturally, there is no chance to ever produce a quantity great enough to make a piece of material that you could see with your eyes, much less take in your hand (ignoring the extreme radioactivity of such an element, which would destroy anything close to it).
The only possible exception might be in extremely high gravitational fields, i.e. inside neutron stars and black holes, where there may be a chance that such hyperons could become stable due to the extreme pressure, but we do not really know the possible structure of matter in such conditions and in any case at such pressures there would be no chemical elements in the normal sense, as there would be no free electrons.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)
#67I'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 planew…
One of the implications is that there are many interactions where most possible Feynman diagrams contribute non-negligibly. The advances in theory arguably have much more to do with improvements in techniques and the applied math used, such as in lattice QCD and Dean Lee's group for instance.