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What Is a Particle? (2020)
91–100 of 196 posts
Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)
#92I'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 not a physicist, but as an arrogant philosopher of science: isn’t it just field excitation? Like, every particle looks like a circle bouncing around a 2D piece of paper, but if you look reeaaaaally closely it’s just a localized 3D spike of energy in a usually 2D field of energy? So it’s made of the field/paper itself. I must be under-thinking this, but that’s what’s worked pretty convincingly for me.
So what is a field?
Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't detect without affecting. My idea for resolving this is that electron is never a point-like particle. It's always a cloud, just larger or smaller. When it's detected it gets reshaped to be narrower. Mass, energy, momentum and such are a quantities ascribed to the whole cloud and exchanged only on the moment of interaction. Think about diffraction. Photon or electron that passes through a small hole had it's…
> You can't detect without affecting. "These detectors are distant enough that what they do cannot affect the electron, i.e., the electron does not know about the detectors." We detect gravitational waves without "affecting". The electron mass and charge send out signals. Have the detectors sufficiently far away that they can't affect the particle yet. Get the detection and then know where the particle was and its ma…
> The electron mass and charge send out signals.
This affects them.
Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)
#94Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)
#95I'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…
A metaphor with another physical object will always fall short. Why not just state the number of bits a particle represents? It's much easier to describe going through each dimension (colloqiual, I hate string theory for the same reason of unnecessarily using a physical analogy) and describing how it interacts with other particles. Sure you'll lose a lot of your audience but those that remain will have a much clearer picture than via a comparison to a billiard ball. This also makes the more advanced topics like singularities, entanglement, teleportation, the lack of true vacuum, etc much easier to manage.
(I'm aware we don't have an understanding of how quantum physics interacts with singularities, but the whole billiard ball metaphor certainly is incoherent with it)
Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)
#96Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)
#97I'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…
It's a useful fiction, but the map is not the territory. This sounds blithe but ... it is as close as you will get to the truth. I only got the bachelors' version of physics, though I did take some grad classes, so here is what I will tell you: The human mind learns from experience and it thinks of things in terms of the past experiences it has had. We are big assemblages which exist in a narrow range of temperatures…
this
Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not a physicist, but as an arrogant philosopher of science: isn’t it just field excitation? Like, every particle looks like a circle bouncing around a 2D piece of paper, but if you look reeaaaaally closely it’s just a localized 3D spike of energy in a usually 2D field of energy? So it’s made of the field/paper itself. I must be under-thinking this, but that’s what’s worked pretty convincingly for me.
So what is a field?
a thing that can have particle-like excitations
Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)
#99That's why calling Higgs Boson the God particle is not quite right. It's the Higgs field that gives mass to the other particles, not the Boson. A Higgs Boson is just an excitation of the Higgs field; it doesn't give mass to other particles. In fact it's the Higgs field modifying the other fields causing their excitations (particles) to slow down when passing each other, thus gaining masses.
So, its all gravity, if you turn the sock inside out? Just taking different colors and shapes?
best way to reveal a TOE
Re: What Is a Particle? (2020)
#100A 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.
So basically a tree doesn't fall in the forest if there's no one around to see it? There's no forest and there are not trees. It's all spawned as needed when we go for a hike? Kinda arrogant don't you think?