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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Richard Feynman gave what I consider to be the best possible answer to questions like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q
At first I was impressed with that video. Then I felt he does not have an answer and unnecessarily gets edgy with it, because question is valid.
I'm reading "The Big Picture" (Sean Carroll) right now. I'd love to have a real physicist explain this, but: When we think of what a particle IS, we often think as though it were dirt, or a billiard ball, or something. As though there were some other substance of which it's made. At least I do. But the definition is as low as you can go. It's hard to wrap your head around that. Unless you're trained to do so, I guess…
Those behaviors are something like:
- it has momentum - it's state is uniquely defined by a position in space and a velocity
What's not a particle? A wave (well, until 1900 or so ...).
Sort of like asking "what is a number?"
A number is a thing that obeys certain rules. (You can add them; there's an `identity `, for every number there's a number which if you add together gives zero, etc).
That allows things like `(3 + 5i)` to be a number, for example.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At first I was impressed with that video. Then I felt he does not have an answer and unnecessarily gets edgy with it, because question is valid.
> he does not have an answer Well, yeah. That's the whole point.
I'm reading "The Big Picture" (Sean Carroll) right now. I'd love to have a real physicist explain this, but: When we think of what a particle IS, we often think as though it were dirt, or a billiard ball, or something. As though there were some other substance of which it's made. At least I do. But the definition is as low as you can go. It's hard to wrap your head around that. Unless you're trained to do so, I guess…
Particle spin explained: Imagine a ball that’s rotating, Except it’s not a ball, and It’s not rotating. (popular particle physics meme) From what I understand of QFT, the Universe is made of fields of different types, and a “fundamental particle” is just an excitation (wave) in the corresponding field. For example, a photon is a wave in the universal electromagnetic field, A charm quark is a wave in the universal cha…
It’s just the statement that the object spinning is attached to its surroundings in a smooth and continuous fashion. Less rigid object, more a patch of space-time fabric spinning.
There’s a video here: https://youtu.be/LLw3BaliDUQ?feature=shared
I feel a curious mix of excitement and disconcerted to discover humans don’t really understand what matter is. Reading the article, I understood so little of it. And I guess it’s because so much of the language is just words chosen through some sort of consensus to represent an abstract idea itself composed of such words-idea-representations which I’ve never encountered before.
There are about 16 particles in the standard model. We've only mastered the electron, proton, photon, and have dabbled in using neutrons and neutrinos. Imagine the possibilities if we some day are able to use all the remaining particles?
I'm reading "The Big Picture" (Sean Carroll) right now. I'd love to have a real physicist explain this, but: When we think of what a particle IS, we often think as though it were dirt, or a billiard ball, or something. As though there were some other substance of which it's made. At least I do. But the definition is as low as you can go. It's hard to wrap your head around that. Unless you're trained to do so, I guess…
> we often think as though it were dirt, or a billiard ball, or something The problem lies that it is hard to imagine something that does have zero dimensions. You can get the example of ant walking into 2D and it is unaware of third dimension to explain we are have something similar for space-time 4D (although not the same picture exactly as time is different from spatial dimensions). But we don't have an idea how t…
Topological defect. The unpictured thing the contour lines are swirling around. It's influence is only felt by seeing the effects on higher dimensional space, but you can never see the ghost itself.
I'm reading "The Big Picture" (Sean Carroll) right now. I'd love to have a real physicist explain this, but: When we think of what a particle IS, we often think as though it were dirt, or a billiard ball, or something. As though there were some other substance of which it's made. At least I do. But the definition is as low as you can go. It's hard to wrap your head around that. Unless you're trained to do so, I guess…
I'm reading "The Big Picture" (Sean Carroll) right now. I'd love to have a real physicist explain this, but: When we think of what a particle IS, we often think as though it were dirt, or a billiard ball, or something. As though there were some other substance of which it's made. At least I do. But the definition is as low as you can go. It's hard to wrap your head around that. Unless you're trained to do so, I guess…
If that gets around your head, you’ll throw the physicality and real world away and you’ll come to see everything as information interaction.
A concerning statement for a four year old article. Has anything in it been superseded?
A particle is a node in the universal interaction graph. “Space”, however, is a derivative attribute emerging as the “distance” between particles in the graph; there is no “space”, only metrics. Reality does not exist between measurements/interactions; the outcome is calculated on demand.