Comment by w10-1
3 years ago
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?
> So an energetic system where the masses don't add up doesn't seem like an epoch defining mystery to me.
Bound states aren't really made of their constituents in a classical sense. A proton is a particular configuration of the quark fields (really it's more complicated than this), but not a simple sum of quark particle states. And in particular, its mass doesn't have to be the sum of the masses of particle states.
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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
For a free field, yes. But the entities we actually interact with are ... interacting. Mode expansion doesn't work here. Electrons, photons, etc. aren't really "particles" in the sense of ordinary quantum mechanics at all.