Comment by cwillu
3 years ago
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.”
3 years ago
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!
Protons are non-perturbative, indeed, but this does not mean that there are no virtual particles exchanged inside a proton. It seems like your comment implies that, sorry if I misunderstood.
On the contrary, this means that there are too many virtual particles (gluons) being exchanged inside a proton, so many that perturbation theory is not applicable.
Virtual particles are part of an indexing scheme for perturbation series - saying that you leave the perturbative regime when you have "too many" of them is like saying that crystalline solids melt when they have too many normal modes.
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Are gluons virtual? (Or are they virtual inside a proton?)
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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.
There are also tons of articles that state the opposite; that virtual particles are in fact actual particles. I don't see how either interpretation is particularly relevant. Physics uses math to model reality. Every part of that model is virtual and has some correspondence with what we experience and observe and that's all that matters at the end of the day.
The physical dress is blue and black, in spite of all the articles showing how to see it as white and gold, the articles demonstrating how in theory you could have a white and gold dress look like that given the correct lighting, and the articles saying that the distinction isn't real and that all black and blue dresses are equivalent to white and gold dresses.
> that virtual particles are in fact actual particles
I assume that means those "virtual particles" behave almost like actual particles. e.g. have a rest mass or not.
This helps lay person understand physics better.
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