Virtual particles do not necessarily have an invariant mass. That's why you can find examples of typically huge particles inside protons. That's why a beta decay of a neutron can involve the production of a virtual W- boson that has an invariant mass that's 86 times more massive than the neutron.
Also virtual particles don't make sense in a non-perturbative regime like room-temp protons, since they are an aid to understanding terms in the perturbation series expansion.
Not sure how they even apply in the case where Feynman diagrams aren't applicable. Hell, the calculations likely use lattice QCD which eschews them entirely!
Be sure to click through to the "What's a Proton" article, which contains the delightful line:
> In short, atoms are to protons as a pas de deux in a delicate ballet is to a dance floor crowded with drunk twenty-somethings bouncing and flailing to a DJ.
As I understand it, the reason Feynman diagrams in quantum electrodynamics (where the primary entities are electrons and photons) can be used to calculate properties very accurately is that the electromagnetic coupling constant (1/137) results in the higher-order terms in a series eventually vanishing away to nothing, while with the strong force the coupling constant is >= 1, so the higher-order terms have to be included, leading to things like infinities (or at the very least, ratios of very large quantities with correspondingly large uncertainties).
The strong force is a bit confusing, as it binds boths quarks with the proton and neutron, as well as binding the neutrons and protons into atomic nuclei, over short ranges (accounting for the upper size limit / stability limit of the largest nuclei). Mesons are the force-carrying entity that bind the neutrons and protons together, but gluons are the force-carrying entity that bind the quarks together, as per this wiki article:
Is it the case that theoretical strong-force calculations have just hit a dead-end and there's no way out in sight, due to the coupling constant issue?
Actually there's a bit more to it than that. Coupling constants change as a function of their energy, they're called 'running coupling constants'. As a result of this phenomenon, there are domains where alpha_s is small and therefore a perturbative expansion of terms is possible. This happens at very high energies, so at the LHC we can happily calculate the higher order terms that you talk about and each successive term is a smaller contribution than the last.
Unfortunately, alpha_s is large at low energies, and by low I mean at the atomic and nuclear scale. There you are well and truly in the domain that perturbative QCD is impossible. The only option at that point is something called lattice QCD at the quark/gluon level.
I have idly wondered whether or not there could be a completely different approach to QCD from the usual perturbative techniques. I remember reading in one of Zee's books that back 80s he pointed out to Feynman that the path integral formalism that QFT is based on has no natural way to treat something as simple as a particle in a box. And an object like a proton seems to be more like a particle in a box than a free particle undergoing an interaction.
How nucleons (neutrons and protons) are bound together is similar to a molecule. If they are close enough, they can 'share' their constituent quarks. You can calculate the interaction by a feynman diagram where the two nucleons exchange one quark in each direction. This is technically the same as one nucleon sending and the other absorbing a quark-antiquark pair, which is why physicists like to say that the nucleon attraction is transmitted by mesons (quark-antiquark pairs). Of course fundamentally the strong force still facilitates the whole interaction, as it's the one preventing nucleons from just falling apart into quarks.
That's the role the meson (a quark-antiquark pair particle) carries out, but I agree it's confusing. Here's a question from physics stack exchange (without any really clear answers, other than "go look up 'residual strong force'", not very helpful) that spells it out:
> "I just read somewhere that both gluons and mesons transmit the strong force, gluons between quarks inside hadrons, but mesons between nucleons. I thought that the strong force would have one field, and one associated particle, whether inside hadrons, or between nucleons"
no, you're just going wrong about it; nothing Feynman was doing was new. Except for the fact he had a nice semi-directed graph to make sense of the celestial equations and the quintuple of the time; the Dirac Sea, etc
Are we still wrongly talking about billiard balls?
I'm guessing the field interaction when a high-energy electron hits a proton is a lot more complicated than the kinetics implied by the description,
but "surprising" results are still stated in terms of features of the "particle" produced. It seems like the particle analysis is simply ignoring field interactions that are not (currently) mathematically tractable, so instead of a 3-5 quark zoo in proton, we are witnessing 3-5 types of field interactions (and don't actually know how "many" "types" there are). Is that the case?
Right? Intuitively it seems like there's some kind of vortex dynamic happening that would be better represented by something like fluid dynamics or harmonics, but we're trying to classify different kinds of ripples and eddies as "particles".
Hawking predicted low mass objects could form a black hole, and while the proton has less mass than the minimum bounds he calculated, it is extremely dense. Perhaps it's dense enough to where it's close to a micro black hole such that it "sticks together", but information can still be exchanged at its edges? If it's acting as some kind of interface between our spacetime and a gravitationally collapsed state, then this could possibly explain phenomenon like how quantum entanglement is possible, with information being exchanged across spacetime via these quasi black holes. Just my layman speculation!
That reminds me of a throwaway line in a YouTube video with Sir Roger Penrose. He insinuated that Lord Kelvin had been pushing an idea of vortices as an explanation for early evidence of atoms [1]. However, this had suffered a few blows including Rutherford's shell model of the atom alongside the lack of evidence for a suitable fluid-like substance (aether).
Now that we are more-or-less entrenched in the mathematical model of fields, I wonder if anyone is considering vortices within those fields as a possible explanation for observed behavior.
When two waves interact it's more like an elastic collision, isn't it?
From the article it wasn't clear to me if these extra high-energy particles they were seeing as fuzz in the data (which are heavier than a photon) are actually unexplained mass or a situation of conservation of energy meets special relativity (kinetic energy -> mass).
If you put enough energy into separating quarks, I'm told you get extra quarks. So an energetic system where the masses don't add up doesn't seem like an epoch defining mystery to me. So what are we missing?
Actually the basic particle created by the creation operator for a mode is totally delocalised. Applying the field operator to get a localised particle is really an integral over many particles
It's about 1 hour long (plus some questions) and it goes through some basic ideas of what it means for something to have mass and all the way to the Higgs mechanism.
I've never really understood the statement that "most of the mass of the proton comes from virtual particles inside it." That being the case, why isn't the mass density of space outside the proton almost as great as it is inside the proton? Is the density of virtual particles greater inside, and if so, why?
Just ignore the "virtual particles" part. Most of the mass comes from the binding energy. As in the rest masses of the individual quarks is small compared to total mass of proton.
Virtual particles themselves can always be ignored as they are not physical. They're purely a computational method in some approaches. They don't exist in others at all. And even when they are part of the method what kind they are depends. Looking at momentum space? Your virtual particles can have any position. Looking at position? Your virtual particles can have any momentum.
Alternatively: Virtual particle just means that if you have a certain kind of field, what kind of "particles" you need to sum up to get that kind of field. The field itself is the physical thing. Viewing it mathematically as sum of virtual particles is just a mathematical viewpoint.
The quarks that are bound in a way we call a proton are held together by the strong force at a certain distance from each other - that distance is what we consider the volume of the proton, with the quarks being "inside that volume". This system of 3 quarks has some amount of potential energy, and/or some amount of kinetic energy from the relative movement of the 3 quarks. The mass of this system is then given essentially by E=mc^2, with E being this kinetic energy.
There is a very good video of a lecture by Leonard Susskind that explains why energy and mass are interchangeable in this way if you want a more in-depth explanation:
Fundamentally, "mass" is nothing other than "confined energy". Whenever you have a mechanism for confining energy (Higgs mechanism; or a force which binds and creates a bound state) the combined package has inertial "mass"; This means: It cannot move at speed of light (c), it can change its speed and it takes energy to change its speed (a "massless" particles does none of this).
The famous thought-experiment in the regard is Einstein's "photons-box": If you could confine a bunch of massless photons (which only have kinetic energy and momentum) inside a (massless) box made out of mirrors, (he argues) the combined package would have "mass", even though the constituents do not (and the emergent "mass" equals E=m c^2 !). In other words, "mass" is an emergent property of the confined ensemble. All of the forces (especially the strong force), create bound-states which are massive and are the exact analogues of this "photon-box".
So the mass of a proton (mostly) comes from the kinetic energy of its confined (by the strong force) constituents (the quarks and gluons).
>Many quarks and antiquarks seethe in a roiling particle “sea.”
What do physicists mean when they "antiquark"? I had it explained to me that it spins the opposite way. Which confused me more, what does it matter that it spins the opposite way? You means it has constructive or destructive interference? If it has destructive interference, why don't particles explode?
In a similar vein, chemistry says that chemistry bonds and antibonds [1]. I can kind get it. But not really.
The equations governing quarks admit negative energy solutions, which we interpret as antiquarks. Chemistry typically uses non-relativistic quantum mechanics which only have positive energy solutions (like classical mechanics).
The solutions in chemistry are wavefunctions. Wavefunctions give a complex number to each point in space so they may interfere constructively or destructively to give complex numbers of greater and smaller magnitude respectively. The Schrödinger equation can be solved for each atom independently to get one electron wavefunctions named atomic orbitals, and, in molecular orbital theory, these atomic combined to give molecular orbitals which are one electron wavefunctions for the molecule. When the atomic orbitals add up constructively to give a molecular orbital with a higher electron density between the atoms it's a bonding molecular orbital, otherwise it's anti-bonding.
Both quarks and anti-quarks can spin in two ways (even though this spin is not a conventional spin but something special to quantum). When a quark and an antiquark are produced, spin must be conserved, so in pair production each must have opposite spin so the total is zero.
It's interesting that the article and the animations still lean on the concept of the proton having an "inside" with some kind of boundary. It makes for interesting animations, but that's not really a good way to understand anything at the quantum level. The particles and forces that make up a proton have probabilities of having certain features like momentum and velocity, and they are more likely to be within a certain area, but there's no "inside" for a charm quark to pop out of. The measurement that finds a charm quark/antiquark pair is just showing a certain state of the system that under standard conditions has a state we call a proton.
Sort of off topic, but sometimes pondering these low-level physics questions forces me into a philosophical state of mind. It seems like asking questions about basic particles is representative of a mode of thinking that drills down ever further, trying to find some kind of conceptual bedrock. But it always seems possible to ask again, "What lies underneath this? What is the cause of this thing's existence?" In any case, it seems either that you have found the one thing that underpins everything else or you have found the collection of things that all endlessly perpetuate each other. Both of those possibilities seem somehow unsatisfactory or impossible. There must always be something else. Could it be that this conceptual craving is somehow just a side effect of how our minds are built? Or is it fundamental to reality in some way?
I don't know, but let me point the obvious: it feels very weird that fundamental things are so complicated.
Somehow I want to think that there's a much simpler layer underneath and all this imperfection comes as a second order side effect.
Plato's cave seems the relevant meme. But is it really complexity a side effect or, as you suggest, is simplicity a side effect of our minds' pattern matching preferences?
I can sympathize with this. I love discovering some generalization that subsumes all the complexity. But what if we follow this to its extreme? Suppose we find the one perfect symbol that precipitates all other concepts? What then does that symbol even do but just reflect or perturb its environment? Isn't that just like moving the goalposts? Makes me think of the concept of Kolmogorov complexity. That's the idea that the informational content of some signal is equivalent to the length of the shortest computer program that can produce it. But what interprets the program? And how complex is that thing? It's all circular. And I'm not sure there's really a way out of that. It's just an inherent feature of looking at the universe conceptually.
> is simplicity a side effect of our minds' pattern matching preferences?
That's a good point and I tend to think so. Think about this: pretty much everything (any object or property we observe) is an abstraction. People talk about people who are bad at abstracting and we know what they mean, but actually everyone is abstracting everything. Our actual experience without abstraction is just a bunch of unassociated colors and sensations and whatnot.
The thing that really matters when breaking thing apart into ever smaller things is not really if we are accessing ever deeper level of reality.
What matters is: can we use this newly discovered sub-structure to do something we couldn't before.
The answer to this was a clear and resounding "yes" when we reached the level of molecules (chemistry, which allows us to do a great many useful things), still "yes" at the level of the atom (atomic energy, transistors, etc...).
It is however unclear that QCD, quarks and inner proton structure reality level have yet produced anything usable to implement our will upon the world.
It may yet happen, but to answer your questions: once the depth we dig at stops producing anything usable by an engineer (string theory, quarks both currently fall into that bucket I think), not entirely sure the digging is philosophically valuable in any way.
I think you may have some hindsight bias here. I do not think that when chemical and atomic structures were discovered/understood that knowledge was immediately put to use. Nuclear physics dates back to the late 1800s, it wasn't until the 1940's where that knowledge was put to practical use. I wouldn't expect anything different with QCD. In fact, I would expect it to take significantly longer to develop practical applications of the theory given how much more complex it is.
I think your reply gets at the answer to my own question that I tend to lean towards. And that is that craving further concepts is an inherent problem that follows from being a thinking being. What you say seems like part of the answer, which is that one needs to make a conscious decision not to be bothered by the fundamental lack of a justification for reality. Just focus on what your knowledge enables you to do. But it still seems sad on some level that we're "condemned" to coast through this world that is so rich in detail but seemingly lacking in purpose.
There are books on the topic e.g.,
"The End Of Physics" by D.Lindley.
There are two questions:
- whether there are laws that describe everything there is to know (e.g., the answer is yes for chess—there are rules that describe it). It is the "fundamental" dimension (particle physics at the moment)
- whether there is something to do once we know all the laws. The answer is yes ("knowing rules do not make you a grandmaster") e.g., we likely know all of the fundamental physics required for turbulence or brains but it doesn't solve these fields (there are interesting unresolved problems). It is the "applications" dimension.
The never-ending chain has bothered me too. I realized that if there is a theory of everything, it needs to prove itself. As far as I know, that’s a logical contradiction. Maybe resolving that contradiction is the door to moving forward. Is the concept of a “theory of everything” invalid? Is modern logic insufficient to find it?
There seems to be an unspoken assumption that all protons (as in: a set things that seem to have similar external properties and behaviors) are actually identical "inside" or - to put it another way - all "built" the same way.
Other than Occam's razor, why is that assumption considered valid?
Have we verified this experimentally?
Or does some complex piece of math show that only one possible internal structure can lead to similar externally observable behaviors?
The energy levels of individual atoms have been compared at the level of a few parts in 1E18 in optical atomic clocks. If properties of the protons making up the nuclei of these atoms (mass, charge,...) were different at that level, it would have shown up.
My main takeaway from Quantum Field theory in grad school was that the proton (and electron, etc really all subatomic particles) is just a useful fiction; much like a spherical, frictionless cow. It's just that in particle accelerators where it breaks down so it's a quite useful fiction. Renormalization[1] in field theory is really trippy...
We call a particular configuration of 3 particular kinds of quark "a proton", and another one "a neutron" (there are also anti-protons). In general, combinations of an odd number of quarks (3, 5, 7, ...) are called baryons (only combinations of 3 and 5 have been proven to exist, any more are only speculation). There are also some unstable but observable combinations of equal numbers of quarks, which are collectively called mesons (combinations of 2 and 4 quarks have been proven to exist, others are only speculated).
Now, why are the combinations of 3 quarks the only ones (that we know of, at least) that are stable is a much more complicated question related to properties of the strong force.
I'm not smart enough to answer this, but it seems to me that the question is along the lines of, "Why do all verbs describe action?" Because if they were different, they'd be something else.
I don’t think this is necessarily new. On the level of fields the universe is not nice little particles or waves in neat groups in a vacuum. It’s a roaring, swirling turbulent ocean. Yes what we call a proton is still a particular configuration, but it’s not existing in a vacuum, it can entangle with other stuff. When we do some experiment it’s like trying to pick a particular wave out of the ocean. Seeing a charm anti charm pair popping up sometimes shouldn’t really be a surprise.
There’s nothing wrong with the 3 quark description of a proton, it’s a model, it’s useful up to a certain level of accuracy.
I don't think it is, I think this is just a popsci article on that well-known (in the field) fact.
I don't want to make it sound easy, because as the article says, our math lacks the ability to handle the way our current best theories describe it, but it certainly isn't any easier trying to understand QCD through the lens of particles as the fundamental objects. It's really a mess of field fluctuations, and in those field fluctuations we have certain patterns we call "particles", but those patterns can shift and ebb and flow in any number of ways, including in ways we have no intuitions for since our macroscopic intuition keeps wanting to sneak particles in the backdoor despite everything being waves.
Directly understanding what's going on isn't easy, but it's probably still easier than trying to hold on to particle-based ideas.
Or, you know, since none of this matters on a day-by-day basis to hardly anyone, I think just looking at it from the particle point of view and calling it a day is a perfectly viable option. In which case, a proton is three quarks, full stop. It's not 100% correct, but hey, QCD isn't either (still waiting on that Grand Unified Theory), so there's no real harm in stopping at the 3-quark model.
> but hey, QCD isn't either (still waiting on that Grand Unified Theory)
Note that there may well not exist any GUT. However, QCD can't be correct until it also accounts for gravitational effect, so what we're waiting for is a theory of Quantum Gravity that is consistent with both QCD and General Relativity.
Actually the concepts are perfectly explained by plenty of people who, you know, actually know. Read the other links in this thread. But please downvote me some more. It's obvious you're not arguing reasonably because you're clearly leaving out the fact that the terms in all these relevant equations are associated with physical components that we talk about WITH WORDS
Like mass
and charge
and energy
and probability
If you know the math you can share it here and say what the terms mean
If you dont know the math then your comment contains the lie that you know what you're talking about and that people should listen to you
They are bringing more and more energetic electrons into the proton and of course it supplies the energy budget to show them more exotic virtual particles inside the proton and more gluons. Hit something in the proton, get a shower of sparks.
"What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” — Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1958)
That's usually how history works. An abstract definition of progress is the accumulation of cultural knowledge that informs the next generation of past mistakes and errors. I don't know much about Aristotle but I'd guess he was probably wrong about a lot of things given his historical time period.
In the last couple years I've dropped our node_modules directory size down by half, and I'm still disgusted both with the state of it and how much work I put into accomplishing that.
The moral of too many of my stories is if something is bothering you, track it first before trying to fix it. Because it's easier to get other people to help police a graph than a series of unix commands. And for everyone else you'll get regressions when you're focused on some other priority. Data points like "sometime in the last month" are pretty hard to nail down on a large codebase, especially if it's not a monolith. Last Tuesday around noon is pretty specific.
Is the "charm quark is heavier than proton" thing the usual situation where the author conflates the mass of the particle with the mass of the particle plus the mass of the field associated with a free particle? Every system is lighter than its constituent particles in this sense, but sometimes people make a big deal about it, usually when the binding energy is high (i.e. the mass difference is large).
Personally I think it's because we're "looking" at it from the wrong angle. A bit like in programming when you're stuck and you need to take a step back and approach the problem differently. IMHO the fundamental construct is probably something way more abstract, i.e. "information", with some laws that we aren't even aware of yet that will probably challenge the principle of locality.
This. It’s bad philosophy. Non local, non physical, these are the concepts to get comfortable with before attempting to understand the quantum in a coherent way, unless understanding the nature of physicality and locality isn’t your goal. Looking at the quantum world as a bunch of tiny objects will only lead to an infinite regression, where new even smaller objects are continuously discovered.
than most of our brains represent, perhaps ... but clearly there are people who see things others don't ... give them the ability to see at these scales, and enough explanatory skills, and perhaps it will become something even a child can understand.
I don’t believe that would be referred to as “the proton” unless it was being called “the proton compatibility layer”. It’s important not to forget the colloquial meanings of words :)
people make grammatical mistakes often enough when typing that you kind of need to parse sentences in the way that makes the most sense. this sometimes means parsing correct grammar as a mistake because the fixed version makes perfect sense. then you read the article and laugh at yourself because yep, both kinds of proton are quite complicated.
I agree. I believe that the infinite engineering prowess observed in the proton and so many other aspects of creation (Like the eye! Wow!) point directly to the existence of God.
But then again, I've never met anyone who became a believer through observing creation. Just as my confirmation bias leads me to see God in these stories, I imagine unbelievers tend to receive confirmation of the absence of God.
> imagine unbelievers tend to receive confirmation of the absence of God
Another interesting question to ponder though: Who's fault is this? Is it God for not jumping out of the shadows screaming "I am he, worship me!"? Or is it an unbeliever who makes assumptions about how a God would act, and finds there is no God because he doesn't fit the unbeliever's assumptions? In which case, what is the unbeliever but a God himself?
Well you believe in the absence of Zeus, don't you? Then why doesn't that make you an atheist? (Hint: it does, since you're atheistic about a hell of a lot more Gods than any you might choose to believe in. So you're at least 99.99% atheist, or 100% atheist as the number of Gods goes to infinity.)
This is to be expected, though. Given that there is an infinite number of possible things that could have existed, it is natural that they all had very low to infinitesimal probabilities to begin with.
You don't need an "external cause". You would still have the same trouble of explaining that. You only need many attempts, same as with evolution. Life in space can be explained with Anthropic principle
This fits the pattern of discussion I often see about the anthropic principle. Someone (I'll label them the "Creationist", though it could just as well be an advocate of intelligent design) asserts that the probability of things "just happening" is vanishingly small. Sometimes the Creationist cites some generally-accepted science, and sometimes does a probability calculation, resulting in a very small probability that things happened by purely naturalistic means.
Someone else (call them the "Evolutionist") responds with the anthropic principle - that, if no intelligent life had arisen in this universe, there would be nobody here to observe that there was no intelligent life. And this is completely logically correct. It is also irrelevant. The Creationist never asserted that it was improbable that life arose in this universe, but rather that it was improbable that it arose purely by naturalistic means. The question isn't whether we're here; the question is how or why.
The Creationist was saying, either we're here by purely naturalistic, evolutionary means, with some probability (call that Pe), or by being created, with some probability (call that Pc). As far as I can see, Pc is unknowable, even in principle. But the Creationist argument is that Pe is so low that it seems reasonable that Pc is higher. That is, it seems reasonable to suppose that we are here due to creation, not just evolution.
The anthropic principle doesn't answer that argument at all. It gives an argument about "whether", not about "how".
Or to put it in different terms: The anthropic principle says something like, if there are a billion universes, and life only arose in a thousand of them, we have to be in one of those thousand to be having this conversation. (Note that I don't actually believe in multiple universes; this is just to make the probability discussion clearer.) But the Creationist never denied that. The Creationist says: Of those thousand universes, if life arose by creation in 998 of them and by evolution in only 2 of them, it seems reasonable to suppose that we're in a universe where life originated by creation, not evolution. The anthropic principle, which asserts that we're in one of the thousand, doesn't address the Creationist's argument at all.
Unless.
It seems to me that everyone who pulls out the anthropic principle in this situation implicitly assumes that Pc is precisely zero. They never explicitly state this assumption, but I think it's there in their thinking. So for the Evolutionist in this conversation, Pe and the probability of life at all are exactly the same, and the anthropic principle does address the actual claim.
But, instead of being irrelevant, in this case the anthropic principle is begging the question. The Evolutionist starts with the conclusion that they are arguing for. That's invalid logic. That's so invalid that, to the degree that the Evolutionist relies on the anthropic principle to support their position, to that degree they should doubt their position.
(I think the Evolutionist pulls out the anthropic principle for an additional reason - it's easy. It lets them "win" the discussion without having to disprove the Creationist's big scary probability number.)
I distinctly remember being 6 or 7 drifting to sleep one night and suddenly visualising what it would be like if there existed nothing at all, not even empty space but nothing, no Universe and nothing ever happening ever or anywhere. It was terrifying.
It was about the same time that a family member had died so I was coming to terms with the fear of dying for the first time, so I guess that's what triggered this.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
A proton contains an entire universe on its own, and our universe itself is a proton. You will never reach the end of its depth as it will reveal just another nesting level, until you hit the level where one would require more than all of the universe's energy in existence to reveal it.
Hence, reality cannot be understood, by design. Reality is chaos, meaning and stability mere perception.
> The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form
I don't necessarily subscribe to the 'simulation' viewpoint, but that sounds exactly how some lazy evaluation/procedural generation system would work. Don't need to compute values until they are needed. Just like atomic orbitals.
Add that to all the quantization we have discovered in nature, the speed of light limit (which is also the speed at which information can be transmitted), the time dilation effects with speed... and that provides plenty of food for thought.
This should be required reading for this article:
https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/09/09/protons-and-charm-q...
Virtual particles do not necessarily have an invariant mass. That's why you can find examples of typically huge particles inside protons. That's why a beta decay of a neutron can involve the production of a virtual W- boson that has an invariant mass that's 86 times more massive than the neutron.
And also https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
“A virtual particle is not a particle at all. It refers precisely to a disturbance in a field that is not a particle.”
Also virtual particles don't make sense in a non-perturbative regime like room-temp protons, since they are an aid to understanding terms in the perturbation series expansion.
Not sure how they even apply in the case where Feynman diagrams aren't applicable. Hell, the calculations likely use lattice QCD which eschews them entirely!
9 replies →
this is the most important TIL article I've read in years. Thanks!
Basically, it's like a playing around virtual machine on a physical PC.
4 replies →
Be sure to click through to the "What's a Proton" article, which contains the delightful line:
> In short, atoms are to protons as a pas de deux in a delicate ballet is to a dance floor crowded with drunk twenty-somethings bouncing and flailing to a DJ.
This is the direct link https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/largehadron...
Also check out the comments and comment answers there. Very interesting too!
Thank you for this.
Science communication, even between scientists, is filled with lies and half truths that shroud the truth in mystery.
Virtual particles are a good example.
Quarks are fundamental is another example.
A proton is made of three quarks is yet another.
But there are countless others I've come across in studying quantum mechanics and relativity.
> But there are countless others I've come across in studying quantum mechanics and relativity.
Could you share a bit more on this?
Noob question: doesn't that imply particles with negative mass to cancel out to the "expected" mass? Is that allowed?
Thank you for this link! This site is amazing!
As I understand it, the reason Feynman diagrams in quantum electrodynamics (where the primary entities are electrons and photons) can be used to calculate properties very accurately is that the electromagnetic coupling constant (1/137) results in the higher-order terms in a series eventually vanishing away to nothing, while with the strong force the coupling constant is >= 1, so the higher-order terms have to be included, leading to things like infinities (or at the very least, ratios of very large quantities with correspondingly large uncertainties).
The strong force is a bit confusing, as it binds boths quarks with the proton and neutron, as well as binding the neutrons and protons into atomic nuclei, over short ranges (accounting for the upper size limit / stability limit of the largest nuclei). Mesons are the force-carrying entity that bind the neutrons and protons together, but gluons are the force-carrying entity that bind the quarks together, as per this wiki article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_interaction
Is it the case that theoretical strong-force calculations have just hit a dead-end and there's no way out in sight, due to the coupling constant issue?
Actually there's a bit more to it than that. Coupling constants change as a function of their energy, they're called 'running coupling constants'. As a result of this phenomenon, there are domains where alpha_s is small and therefore a perturbative expansion of terms is possible. This happens at very high energies, so at the LHC we can happily calculate the higher order terms that you talk about and each successive term is a smaller contribution than the last.
Unfortunately, alpha_s is large at low energies, and by low I mean at the atomic and nuclear scale. There you are well and truly in the domain that perturbative QCD is impossible. The only option at that point is something called lattice QCD at the quark/gluon level.
Edit: Typo
I have idly wondered whether or not there could be a completely different approach to QCD from the usual perturbative techniques. I remember reading in one of Zee's books that back 80s he pointed out to Feynman that the path integral formalism that QFT is based on has no natural way to treat something as simple as a particle in a box. And an object like a proton seems to be more like a particle in a box than a free particle undergoing an interaction.
8 replies →
How does the strong force bind neutrons to protons? Is it connecting the quarks inside the proton with those of the neutron?
How nucleons (neutrons and protons) are bound together is similar to a molecule. If they are close enough, they can 'share' their constituent quarks. You can calculate the interaction by a feynman diagram where the two nucleons exchange one quark in each direction. This is technically the same as one nucleon sending and the other absorbing a quark-antiquark pair, which is why physicists like to say that the nucleon attraction is transmitted by mesons (quark-antiquark pairs). Of course fundamentally the strong force still facilitates the whole interaction, as it's the one preventing nucleons from just falling apart into quarks.
That's the role the meson (a quark-antiquark pair particle) carries out, but I agree it's confusing. Here's a question from physics stack exchange (without any really clear answers, other than "go look up 'residual strong force'", not very helpful) that spells it out:
> "I just read somewhere that both gluons and mesons transmit the strong force, gluons between quarks inside hadrons, but mesons between nucleons. I thought that the strong force would have one field, and one associated particle, whether inside hadrons, or between nucleons"
1 reply →
no, you're just going wrong about it; nothing Feynman was doing was new. Except for the fact he had a nice semi-directed graph to make sense of the celestial equations and the quintuple of the time; the Dirac Sea, etc
We've taken the bit out of the title that was sapping people's ability not to make obvious jokes. Let's discuss the interesting bits now please!
I had a professor that was fond of saying "the proton is a garbage can" when talking about its composition.
From "we are made of stardust" to "we are made of garbage cans."
"we are but stardust and garbage cans, Maximus".
Sagan was trying to be poetic but it's not like you take a cheese grater to a star to make 'dust'. The dust is star litter.
If it's good enough to plug up wounds, it's good enough to make the universe
trash within, trash without. very zen.
Are we still wrongly talking about billiard balls?
I'm guessing the field interaction when a high-energy electron hits a proton is a lot more complicated than the kinetics implied by the description, but "surprising" results are still stated in terms of features of the "particle" produced. It seems like the particle analysis is simply ignoring field interactions that are not (currently) mathematically tractable, so instead of a 3-5 quark zoo in proton, we are witnessing 3-5 types of field interactions (and don't actually know how "many" "types" there are). Is that the case?
Right? Intuitively it seems like there's some kind of vortex dynamic happening that would be better represented by something like fluid dynamics or harmonics, but we're trying to classify different kinds of ripples and eddies as "particles".
Hawking predicted low mass objects could form a black hole, and while the proton has less mass than the minimum bounds he calculated, it is extremely dense. Perhaps it's dense enough to where it's close to a micro black hole such that it "sticks together", but information can still be exchanged at its edges? If it's acting as some kind of interface between our spacetime and a gravitationally collapsed state, then this could possibly explain phenomenon like how quantum entanglement is possible, with information being exchanged across spacetime via these quasi black holes. Just my layman speculation!
That reminds me of a throwaway line in a YouTube video with Sir Roger Penrose. He insinuated that Lord Kelvin had been pushing an idea of vortices as an explanation for early evidence of atoms [1]. However, this had suffered a few blows including Rutherford's shell model of the atom alongside the lack of evidence for a suitable fluid-like substance (aether).
Now that we are more-or-less entrenched in the mathematical model of fields, I wonder if anyone is considering vortices within those fields as a possible explanation for observed behavior.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_theory_of_the_atom
> Are we still wrongly talking about billiard balls?
No. Particles are (approximately-)localized excitations in the corresponding field. Think waves, not water balloons.
When two waves interact it's more like an elastic collision, isn't it?
From the article it wasn't clear to me if these extra high-energy particles they were seeing as fuzz in the data (which are heavier than a photon) are actually unexplained mass or a situation of conservation of energy meets special relativity (kinetic energy -> mass).
If you put enough energy into separating quarks, I'm told you get extra quarks. So an energetic system where the masses don't add up doesn't seem like an epoch defining mystery to me. So what are we missing?
5 replies →
Actually the basic particle created by the creation operator for a mode is totally delocalised. Applying the field operator to get a localised particle is really an integral over many particles
1 reply →
These posts always take me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Currently on the "Higgs mechanism", throwing words at my brain in hopes something sticks.
If you're interested in the Higgs mechanism as a layman, I highly highly recommend this talk by Leonard Susskind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqNg819PiZY
It's about 1 hour long (plus some questions) and it goes through some basic ideas of what it means for something to have mass and all the way to the Higgs mechanism.
Wait until our particle accelerators suddenly start saying "you are but bugs"...
I've never really understood the statement that "most of the mass of the proton comes from virtual particles inside it." That being the case, why isn't the mass density of space outside the proton almost as great as it is inside the proton? Is the density of virtual particles greater inside, and if so, why?
Just ignore the "virtual particles" part. Most of the mass comes from the binding energy. As in the rest masses of the individual quarks is small compared to total mass of proton.
Virtual particles themselves can always be ignored as they are not physical. They're purely a computational method in some approaches. They don't exist in others at all. And even when they are part of the method what kind they are depends. Looking at momentum space? Your virtual particles can have any position. Looking at position? Your virtual particles can have any momentum.
Alternatively: Virtual particle just means that if you have a certain kind of field, what kind of "particles" you need to sum up to get that kind of field. The field itself is the physical thing. Viewing it mathematically as sum of virtual particles is just a mathematical viewpoint.
Is the binding energy made up of gluons?
8 replies →
“A virtual particle is not a particle at all. It refers precisely to a disturbance in a field that is not a particle.”
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
The quarks that are bound in a way we call a proton are held together by the strong force at a certain distance from each other - that distance is what we consider the volume of the proton, with the quarks being "inside that volume". This system of 3 quarks has some amount of potential energy, and/or some amount of kinetic energy from the relative movement of the 3 quarks. The mass of this system is then given essentially by E=mc^2, with E being this kinetic energy.
There is a very good video of a lecture by Leonard Susskind that explains why energy and mass are interchangeable in this way if you want a more in-depth explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqNg819PiZY
Fundamentally, "mass" is nothing other than "confined energy". Whenever you have a mechanism for confining energy (Higgs mechanism; or a force which binds and creates a bound state) the combined package has inertial "mass"; This means: It cannot move at speed of light (c), it can change its speed and it takes energy to change its speed (a "massless" particles does none of this).
The famous thought-experiment in the regard is Einstein's "photons-box": If you could confine a bunch of massless photons (which only have kinetic energy and momentum) inside a (massless) box made out of mirrors, (he argues) the combined package would have "mass", even though the constituents do not (and the emergent "mass" equals E=m c^2 !). In other words, "mass" is an emergent property of the confined ensemble. All of the forces (especially the strong force), create bound-states which are massive and are the exact analogues of this "photon-box".
So the mass of a proton (mostly) comes from the kinetic energy of its confined (by the strong force) constituents (the quarks and gluons).
>Many quarks and antiquarks seethe in a roiling particle “sea.”
What do physicists mean when they "antiquark"? I had it explained to me that it spins the opposite way. Which confused me more, what does it matter that it spins the opposite way? You means it has constructive or destructive interference? If it has destructive interference, why don't particles explode?
In a similar vein, chemistry says that chemistry bonds and antibonds [1]. I can kind get it. But not really.
[1] https://chem.libretexts.org/Courses/SUNY_Potsdam/Book%3A_Org...
The equations governing quarks admit negative energy solutions, which we interpret as antiquarks. Chemistry typically uses non-relativistic quantum mechanics which only have positive energy solutions (like classical mechanics).
The solutions in chemistry are wavefunctions. Wavefunctions give a complex number to each point in space so they may interfere constructively or destructively to give complex numbers of greater and smaller magnitude respectively. The Schrödinger equation can be solved for each atom independently to get one electron wavefunctions named atomic orbitals, and, in molecular orbital theory, these atomic combined to give molecular orbitals which are one electron wavefunctions for the molecule. When the atomic orbitals add up constructively to give a molecular orbital with a higher electron density between the atoms it's a bonding molecular orbital, otherwise it's anti-bonding.
Both quarks and anti-quarks can spin in two ways (even though this spin is not a conventional spin but something special to quantum). When a quark and an antiquark are produced, spin must be conserved, so in pair production each must have opposite spin so the total is zero.
Antiparticles are the conjugates of the negative energy solutions for normal matter. The negative energy solutions themselves are still not physical.
1 reply →
It's interesting that the article and the animations still lean on the concept of the proton having an "inside" with some kind of boundary. It makes for interesting animations, but that's not really a good way to understand anything at the quantum level. The particles and forces that make up a proton have probabilities of having certain features like momentum and velocity, and they are more likely to be within a certain area, but there's no "inside" for a charm quark to pop out of. The measurement that finds a charm quark/antiquark pair is just showing a certain state of the system that under standard conditions has a state we call a proton.
Sort of off topic, but sometimes pondering these low-level physics questions forces me into a philosophical state of mind. It seems like asking questions about basic particles is representative of a mode of thinking that drills down ever further, trying to find some kind of conceptual bedrock. But it always seems possible to ask again, "What lies underneath this? What is the cause of this thing's existence?" In any case, it seems either that you have found the one thing that underpins everything else or you have found the collection of things that all endlessly perpetuate each other. Both of those possibilities seem somehow unsatisfactory or impossible. There must always be something else. Could it be that this conceptual craving is somehow just a side effect of how our minds are built? Or is it fundamental to reality in some way?
I don't know, but let me point the obvious: it feels very weird that fundamental things are so complicated.
Somehow I want to think that there's a much simpler layer underneath and all this imperfection comes as a second order side effect.
Plato's cave seems the relevant meme. But is it really complexity a side effect or, as you suggest, is simplicity a side effect of our minds' pattern matching preferences?
I can sympathize with this. I love discovering some generalization that subsumes all the complexity. But what if we follow this to its extreme? Suppose we find the one perfect symbol that precipitates all other concepts? What then does that symbol even do but just reflect or perturb its environment? Isn't that just like moving the goalposts? Makes me think of the concept of Kolmogorov complexity. That's the idea that the informational content of some signal is equivalent to the length of the shortest computer program that can produce it. But what interprets the program? And how complex is that thing? It's all circular. And I'm not sure there's really a way out of that. It's just an inherent feature of looking at the universe conceptually.
1 reply →
> is simplicity a side effect of our minds' pattern matching preferences?
That's a good point and I tend to think so. Think about this: pretty much everything (any object or property we observe) is an abstraction. People talk about people who are bad at abstracting and we know what they mean, but actually everyone is abstracting everything. Our actual experience without abstraction is just a bunch of unassociated colors and sensations and whatnot.
The thing that really matters when breaking thing apart into ever smaller things is not really if we are accessing ever deeper level of reality.
What matters is: can we use this newly discovered sub-structure to do something we couldn't before.
The answer to this was a clear and resounding "yes" when we reached the level of molecules (chemistry, which allows us to do a great many useful things), still "yes" at the level of the atom (atomic energy, transistors, etc...).
It is however unclear that QCD, quarks and inner proton structure reality level have yet produced anything usable to implement our will upon the world.
It may yet happen, but to answer your questions: once the depth we dig at stops producing anything usable by an engineer (string theory, quarks both currently fall into that bucket I think), not entirely sure the digging is philosophically valuable in any way.
I think you may have some hindsight bias here. I do not think that when chemical and atomic structures were discovered/understood that knowledge was immediately put to use. Nuclear physics dates back to the late 1800s, it wasn't until the 1940's where that knowledge was put to practical use. I wouldn't expect anything different with QCD. In fact, I would expect it to take significantly longer to develop practical applications of the theory given how much more complex it is.
1 reply →
I think your reply gets at the answer to my own question that I tend to lean towards. And that is that craving further concepts is an inherent problem that follows from being a thinking being. What you say seems like part of the answer, which is that one needs to make a conscious decision not to be bothered by the fundamental lack of a justification for reality. Just focus on what your knowledge enables you to do. But it still seems sad on some level that we're "condemned" to coast through this world that is so rich in detail but seemingly lacking in purpose.
LEDs and most modern microprocessors make no sense without quantum mechanics, for one.
3 replies →
Very limiting to couple the pursuit of knowledge to application, commercial exploitation, or laying our "will" on the world.
1 reply →
There are books on the topic e.g., "The End Of Physics" by D.Lindley.
There are two questions:
- whether there are laws that describe everything there is to know (e.g., the answer is yes for chess—there are rules that describe it). It is the "fundamental" dimension (particle physics at the moment)
- whether there is something to do once we know all the laws. The answer is yes ("knowing rules do not make you a grandmaster") e.g., we likely know all of the fundamental physics required for turbulence or brains but it doesn't solve these fields (there are interesting unresolved problems). It is the "applications" dimension.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/contemplating-the-end-of-phys...
The never-ending chain has bothered me too. I realized that if there is a theory of everything, it needs to prove itself. As far as I know, that’s a logical contradiction. Maybe resolving that contradiction is the door to moving forward. Is the concept of a “theory of everything” invalid? Is modern logic insufficient to find it?
There seems to be an unspoken assumption that all protons (as in: a set things that seem to have similar external properties and behaviors) are actually identical "inside" or - to put it another way - all "built" the same way.
Other than Occam's razor, why is that assumption considered valid?
Have we verified this experimentally?
Or does some complex piece of math show that only one possible internal structure can lead to similar externally observable behaviors?
Not specific to the proton, but "why are all particles of type X seemingly identical" is a question that physicists have asked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles
Sometimes with not-so-serious results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
The energy levels of individual atoms have been compared at the level of a few parts in 1E18 in optical atomic clocks. If properties of the protons making up the nuclei of these atoms (mass, charge,...) were different at that level, it would have shown up.
Reminds me of the sophon from The Three Body Problem.
hopefully when we finally unfold them we don't get attacked by lower dimensional beings
My main takeaway from Quantum Field theory in grad school was that the proton (and electron, etc really all subatomic particles) is just a useful fiction; much like a spherical, frictionless cow. It's just that in particle accelerators where it breaks down so it's a quite useful fiction. Renormalization[1] in field theory is really trippy...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization
"My God, it's full of stars!"
How do protons all end up with the same/similar amounts of quarks?
We call a particular configuration of 3 particular kinds of quark "a proton", and another one "a neutron" (there are also anti-protons). In general, combinations of an odd number of quarks (3, 5, 7, ...) are called baryons (only combinations of 3 and 5 have been proven to exist, any more are only speculation). There are also some unstable but observable combinations of equal numbers of quarks, which are collectively called mesons (combinations of 2 and 4 quarks have been proven to exist, others are only speculated).
Now, why are the combinations of 3 quarks the only ones (that we know of, at least) that are stable is a much more complicated question related to properties of the strong force.
Equilibrium all the way down.
I'm not smart enough to answer this, but it seems to me that the question is along the lines of, "Why do all verbs describe action?" Because if they were different, they'd be something else.
This could be asked at a few different layers of abstraction but I'd start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_confinement
Higher numbers of quarks can get bound up together but aren't stable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraquark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentaquark
the most complicated model imaginable.
I don’t think this is necessarily new. On the level of fields the universe is not nice little particles or waves in neat groups in a vacuum. It’s a roaring, swirling turbulent ocean. Yes what we call a proton is still a particular configuration, but it’s not existing in a vacuum, it can entangle with other stuff. When we do some experiment it’s like trying to pick a particular wave out of the ocean. Seeing a charm anti charm pair popping up sometimes shouldn’t really be a surprise.
There’s nothing wrong with the 3 quark description of a proton, it’s a model, it’s useful up to a certain level of accuracy.
I don't think it is, I think this is just a popsci article on that well-known (in the field) fact.
I don't want to make it sound easy, because as the article says, our math lacks the ability to handle the way our current best theories describe it, but it certainly isn't any easier trying to understand QCD through the lens of particles as the fundamental objects. It's really a mess of field fluctuations, and in those field fluctuations we have certain patterns we call "particles", but those patterns can shift and ebb and flow in any number of ways, including in ways we have no intuitions for since our macroscopic intuition keeps wanting to sneak particles in the backdoor despite everything being waves.
Directly understanding what's going on isn't easy, but it's probably still easier than trying to hold on to particle-based ideas.
Or, you know, since none of this matters on a day-by-day basis to hardly anyone, I think just looking at it from the particle point of view and calling it a day is a perfectly viable option. In which case, a proton is three quarks, full stop. It's not 100% correct, but hey, QCD isn't either (still waiting on that Grand Unified Theory), so there's no real harm in stopping at the 3-quark model.
> but hey, QCD isn't either (still waiting on that Grand Unified Theory)
Note that there may well not exist any GUT. However, QCD can't be correct until it also accounts for gravitational effect, so what we're waiting for is a theory of Quantum Gravity that is consistent with both QCD and General Relativity.
2 replies →
Is the neutron similarly complicated?
Yes
Is there any information to be learned by the direction of the plumes?
"one that’s too bizarre to fully capture with words"
well i guess we'd better give up. what a ridiculous statement.
No, they're not wrong. Some of these concepts are hardly explainable without math.
Actually the concepts are perfectly explained by plenty of people who, you know, actually know. Read the other links in this thread. But please downvote me some more. It's obvious you're not arguing reasonably because you're clearly leaving out the fact that the terms in all these relevant equations are associated with physical components that we talk about WITH WORDS
Like mass and charge and energy and probability
If you know the math you can share it here and say what the terms mean
If you dont know the math then your comment contains the lie that you know what you're talking about and that people should listen to you
14 replies →
@ciechanow.ski
Please please nail that proton
They are bringing more and more energetic electrons into the proton and of course it supplies the energy budget to show them more exotic virtual particles inside the proton and more gluons. Hit something in the proton, get a shower of sparks.
"What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” — Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1958)
Aristotle was wrong then and he's still wrong now.
That's usually how history works. An abstract definition of progress is the accumulation of cultural knowledge that informs the next generation of past mistakes and errors. I don't know much about Aristotle but I'd guess he was probably wrong about a lot of things given his historical time period.
1 reply →
They have not seen our legacy code base.
Do you work on ProtonMail?
Or my npm dependencies
In the last couple years I've dropped our node_modules directory size down by half, and I'm still disgusted both with the state of it and how much work I put into accomplishing that.
The moral of too many of my stories is if something is bothering you, track it first before trying to fix it. Because it's easier to get other people to help police a graph than a series of unix commands. And for everyone else you'll get regressions when you're focused on some other priority. Data points like "sometime in the last month" are pretty hard to nail down on a large codebase, especially if it's not a monolith. Last Tuesday around noon is pretty specific.
Is the "charm quark is heavier than proton" thing the usual situation where the author conflates the mass of the particle with the mass of the particle plus the mass of the field associated with a free particle? Every system is lighter than its constituent particles in this sense, but sometimes people make a big deal about it, usually when the binding energy is high (i.e. the mass difference is large).
I don't think they will ever understand what this is all about. This is a different level than our brains represent.
Personally I think it's because we're "looking" at it from the wrong angle. A bit like in programming when you're stuck and you need to take a step back and approach the problem differently. IMHO the fundamental construct is probably something way more abstract, i.e. "information", with some laws that we aren't even aware of yet that will probably challenge the principle of locality.
This. It’s bad philosophy. Non local, non physical, these are the concepts to get comfortable with before attempting to understand the quantum in a coherent way, unless understanding the nature of physicality and locality isn’t your goal. Looking at the quantum world as a bunch of tiny objects will only lead to an infinite regression, where new even smaller objects are continuously discovered.
than most of our brains represent, perhaps ... but clearly there are people who see things others don't ... give them the ability to see at these scales, and enough explanatory skills, and perhaps it will become something even a child can understand.
A dog is never going to understand Fourier Transforms. I expect there are concepts that our brains will never understand as well.
3 replies →
I think we are still in the "universe orbits the Earth" stage of quantum physics.
I was thinking about the Linux Steam compability software.
Coincidentally, also the most complicated thing imaginable.
I don’t believe that would be referred to as “the proton” unless it was being called “the proton compatibility layer”. It’s important not to forget the colloquial meanings of words :)
people make grammatical mistakes often enough when typing that you kind of need to parse sentences in the way that makes the most sense. this sometimes means parsing correct grammar as a mistake because the fixed version makes perfect sense. then you read the article and laugh at yourself because yep, both kinds of proton are quite complicated.
The GP makes sense, your comment makes no sense.
They haven't seen Kubernetes.
But is Kubernetes imaginable?
Depends on your imagination.
1 reply →
They haven't seen Electron.
Or node_modules!
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6s0wov/hea...
Plot twist: protons are cosmic k8s!
Reminds me of this comic: https://abstrusegoose.com/235
It seems every day that the concept of us existing, without an external cause, is absolutely 0%. Or at least lim x→∞ ([odds of us existing]) = 0.
...Which makes the concept of an external cause existing, which must be vastly more complicated than us, absolutely less than 0%. ;)
It's an odd question either way. Does God need a cause? Does the Big Bang need a cause?
12 replies →
I agree. I believe that the infinite engineering prowess observed in the proton and so many other aspects of creation (Like the eye! Wow!) point directly to the existence of God.
But then again, I've never met anyone who became a believer through observing creation. Just as my confirmation bias leads me to see God in these stories, I imagine unbelievers tend to receive confirmation of the absence of God.
> imagine unbelievers tend to receive confirmation of the absence of God
Another interesting question to ponder though: Who's fault is this? Is it God for not jumping out of the shadows screaming "I am he, worship me!"? Or is it an unbeliever who makes assumptions about how a God would act, and finds there is no God because he doesn't fit the unbeliever's assumptions? In which case, what is the unbeliever but a God himself?
1 reply →
Well you believe in the absence of Zeus, don't you? Then why doesn't that make you an atheist? (Hint: it does, since you're atheistic about a hell of a lot more Gods than any you might choose to believe in. So you're at least 99.99% atheist, or 100% atheist as the number of Gods goes to infinity.)
3 replies →
This is to be expected, though. Given that there is an infinite number of possible things that could have existed, it is natural that they all had very low to infinitesimal probabilities to begin with.
You don't need an "external cause". You would still have the same trouble of explaining that. You only need many attempts, same as with evolution. Life in space can be explained with Anthropic principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
Nothing can be explained by the Anthropic Principle, it's an observation not an explanation.
"Why did you punch me in the face?"
"Because if I hadn't, you wouldn't have a broken nose"
That isn't an explanation why the punch happened, it is observing that the nose would not have been broken without a punch.
This fits the pattern of discussion I often see about the anthropic principle. Someone (I'll label them the "Creationist", though it could just as well be an advocate of intelligent design) asserts that the probability of things "just happening" is vanishingly small. Sometimes the Creationist cites some generally-accepted science, and sometimes does a probability calculation, resulting in a very small probability that things happened by purely naturalistic means.
Someone else (call them the "Evolutionist") responds with the anthropic principle - that, if no intelligent life had arisen in this universe, there would be nobody here to observe that there was no intelligent life. And this is completely logically correct. It is also irrelevant. The Creationist never asserted that it was improbable that life arose in this universe, but rather that it was improbable that it arose purely by naturalistic means. The question isn't whether we're here; the question is how or why.
The Creationist was saying, either we're here by purely naturalistic, evolutionary means, with some probability (call that Pe), or by being created, with some probability (call that Pc). As far as I can see, Pc is unknowable, even in principle. But the Creationist argument is that Pe is so low that it seems reasonable that Pc is higher. That is, it seems reasonable to suppose that we are here due to creation, not just evolution.
The anthropic principle doesn't answer that argument at all. It gives an argument about "whether", not about "how".
Or to put it in different terms: The anthropic principle says something like, if there are a billion universes, and life only arose in a thousand of them, we have to be in one of those thousand to be having this conversation. (Note that I don't actually believe in multiple universes; this is just to make the probability discussion clearer.) But the Creationist never denied that. The Creationist says: Of those thousand universes, if life arose by creation in 998 of them and by evolution in only 2 of them, it seems reasonable to suppose that we're in a universe where life originated by creation, not evolution. The anthropic principle, which asserts that we're in one of the thousand, doesn't address the Creationist's argument at all.
Unless.
It seems to me that everyone who pulls out the anthropic principle in this situation implicitly assumes that Pc is precisely zero. They never explicitly state this assumption, but I think it's there in their thinking. So for the Evolutionist in this conversation, Pe and the probability of life at all are exactly the same, and the anthropic principle does address the actual claim.
But, instead of being irrelevant, in this case the anthropic principle is begging the question. The Evolutionist starts with the conclusion that they are arguing for. That's invalid logic. That's so invalid that, to the degree that the Evolutionist relies on the anthropic principle to support their position, to that degree they should doubt their position.
(I think the Evolutionist pulls out the anthropic principle for an additional reason - it's easy. It lets them "win" the discussion without having to disprove the Creationist's big scary probability number.)
You say "us" existing, but I think the more interesting way to phrase it is "anything" existing. Why there is something instead of nothing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_there_is_anything_at_all
I distinctly remember being 6 or 7 drifting to sleep one night and suddenly visualising what it would be like if there existed nothing at all, not even empty space but nothing, no Universe and nothing ever happening ever or anywhere. It was terrifying.
It was about the same time that a family member had died so I was coming to terms with the fear of dying for the first time, so I guess that's what triggered this.
That page is strangely far in the Wikipedia game from getting to Philosophy. I expected it to get there much sooner.
1 reply →
Proton Saga
>Proton Saga
LOL.
Did you by chance live in Malaysia towards the end of the 80's ?
[EDIT]: never mind, I see they are still making them in 2022 . Who knew!
[dead]
what an obnoxious site. huge fixed cookie banner with only "agree" option and saying they care about your data.
reading the privacy policy they say:
> We currently do not honor “Do Not Track” signals.
I guess they mean "care" as in want.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A proton contains an entire universe on its own, and our universe itself is a proton. You will never reach the end of its depth as it will reveal just another nesting level, until you hit the level where one would require more than all of the universe's energy in existence to reveal it.
Hence, reality cannot be understood, by design. Reality is chaos, meaning and stability mere perception.
Source: it was revealed to me.
So you speculate that it is turtles all the way down?
Take less drugs.
I won't take offense. It's always the crazy ones challenging consensus, I expect my insights to be celebrated a few decades after my death.
> The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form
I don't necessarily subscribe to the 'simulation' viewpoint, but that sounds exactly how some lazy evaluation/procedural generation system would work. Don't need to compute values until they are needed. Just like atomic orbitals.
Add that to all the quantization we have discovered in nature, the speed of light limit (which is also the speed at which information can be transmitted), the time dilation effects with speed... and that provides plenty of food for thought.
Once you understand that to measure something is to interact with it quantum mechanics becomes less mystical.