Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 591 posts

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

#81

Post by mr_toad »

femto wrote: post #64
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…

In the same vein, a neutron can decay into a proton, an electron and a neutrino (Beta decay), so in some sense the neutral neutron is the combination of an electron and proton. (A connection is there?) 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…

Makes me wonder if the universe as a whole is electrically neutral. Someone should check!

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

#82

Post by derefr »

yifanl wrote: post #76
pdabbadabba wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How would we ever distinguish what half-a-proton is in a universe where all protons ever are _always_ paired off?

Presumably the same way we distinguish individual quarks: by smashing the atoms up.

(The more interesting question would be the opposite: what if it was two electrons per proton? Then you could throw around some photons and end up with a half-proton negatively-ionized molecule. What would that look like?)

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

#83

Post by supportengineer »

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?

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

#84

Post by vacuity »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #56
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,…

As I understand it, many "laws" in science, such as Ohm's law, also emerge from this sort of "neatness at scale".

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

#85

Post by s1artibartfast »

m3kw9 wrote: post #62
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…

Then I’ll ask why can’t you use protons as electricity?

Who says you can't?

Who says we don't always use it?

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

#87

Post by ncneieixk5 »

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.

where did all these building blocks come from then? you still know nothing

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

#88

Post by AnimalMuppet »

wrycoder wrote: post #65
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…

It’s even more complicated. The charge on the electron is partially screened by virtual positive charges emerging briefly from the vacuum, so what we measure is less than the actual charge.

But isn't the same thing going on for the proton?

(Of course, absent some good reason, one wouldn't expect the two screenings to exactly balance...)

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

#89

Post by AnimalMuppet »

mkw5053 wrote: post #25
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…

First, I am not a physicist. That said, he's my attempt at an answer that satisfies me: Part of the reason is charge quantization. Neither could be some fractional charge. We also observe charge conservation and electromagnetic force laws as described by quantum electrodynamics (QED). These necessitate that the electron and proton charges be precisely balanced for the universe to function as it does.

But in fact, quarks are fractionally charged: +2/3 and -1/3.

For this to work, there have to be as many quarks in the proton as the denominator of the quark charge fraction. (And what mechanism forces that?)

And why should the charges on quarks be some nice low-number fraction of the charge on the electron? Why not sqrt(3) or something?

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

#90

Post by IshKebab »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #56
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 doesn't happen for everything. Biology is an obvious counterexample.
Post reply on HN