I just had a really stupid thought, after finishing reading the article.
So, the electron is an elementary particle, right? Compared to the proton, the electron is "simple", yes?
Despite this difference in complexity, an electron has a charge of -e and a proton has a charge of +e. They are exactly complementary regarding charge (if I am understanding right, I am not a smart person).
my question is... why? why must protons and electrons be perfectly complementary regarding charge? if the proton is this insanely complex thing, by what rule does it end up equaling exactly the opposite charge of an electron? why not a charge of +1.8e, or +3e, or 0.1666e, etc? Certainly it is convenient that a proton and electron complement each other, but what makes that the case? Does this question even make sense?
so, there's a concept of a "positron", which I can understand - of course it has charge +e, it is the "opposite" of an electron. it is an anti-electron. at least that makes some kind of sense. but a proton is made up of this complex soup of other elementary particles following all these crazy rules, and yet it also ends up being exactly +e.
No one who has replied to your question has got the right answer. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21753/why-do-ele... has the right answer. There are multiple aspects to this argument, but essentially, the symmetries of your system force the charges in the Standard Model (quarks and leptons) to be the way they are due to gauge anomaly cancellation. If you believe in quark confinement, which is extremely well motivated, computationally, theoretically and experimentally, then the fact that the proton has exactly charge +1 follows naturally.
I am reading this as "it has to be this way, or the model does not hold", but it does not explain why. What causes it? Consistency of a model cannot be the ultimate reason, right?
So, PBS Space Time did a video on this “fine tuned universe” theory and it, like all of their videos, is great. The concept seems to be that in an unbalanced universe, life couldn’t form, and we’d be incapable of having this conversation. So, either there are infinite universes and we exist as a result of being in the right one, or there’s one universe and we exist as a result of the one we’re in being right. Either way, we’re pretty lucky.
I can’t get behind all these fine tuning arguments. Who’s to say what life might form if the proton had a charge of 1.01e or if the fine structure constant was 1/138? Something about the line of reasoning that there is a multiverse and we just happen to live in favorable conditions reminds me of Pascal’s wager. It doesn’t do anything other than unfalsifiably assure the wagerer that they are important
There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that the defining constants of our universe are pulled from some uniform distribution though, which is the underlying assumption here. When you put it that way, that's a pretty strange and specific claim to make.
Isn't that concept of "luck" as strange as considering us "lucky" for currently being? Non-existent things aren't in a lobby waiting to win a lottery. There was no choice; we came to exist, then considered ourselves. Whatever conditions create, does not imply luck for what is created.
I strongly dislike PBS Space Time, but I find it hard to explain why. I might also be just too dumb to get it. It's just the feeling of the goal not being the "listener gaining understanding", but rather "expressing how confusing and complicated it is".
Imagine you have a bunch of fulcrums in the air and items droping down. If the things that land on the fulcrums don't balance each other out the fulcrum tips and the items keep dropping. Eventually all the fulcrums are balanced.
A lot of these things coalesce until they are stable enough they don't fall apart. If there is a stable form and you have enough of them, eventually you get a lot of stable forms.
It is not some magical thing that makes all this balance, it is more of a settling thing where things eventually drop to a stable state. There is lots of matter that is still unstable.
This is called "charge quantization", and it is not definitively explained by modern theories. There are some very good arguments for it, to be sure, but I don't think they're quite case-closed, of-course-it-must-be-that-way good. It is related to C symmetry, as a discrete symmetry, which ties in to Lorenz invariance and all that, so there's that angle too.
But also in some sense "it has to be that way," since without charge balance atoms wouldn't exist as we know them, and thus neither would all the chemistry that creates the macroscopic world we inhabit.
That's a variation on the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Maybe a kind of observer bias. If the universe weren't seemingly-perfectly balanced to allow emergent complexity in matter, we wouldn't be here to point out how seemingly-perfect it seems. (If you subscribe to a multiverse interpretation, perhaps most of the infinitely many other possible universes are dead and void.)
On the topic of the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’:
Imagine that physics is like Microsoft COM (or C++ pure virtual function tables), so there's a base IUnknown interface, hiding innumerably different possible concrete implementation classes, that can expose arbitrarily many other abstract interfaces, so you can call iUnknown->QueryInterface(uuid, &otherInterface) to ask for other interfaces like IAtom, IElectron, IProton, IQuark, IParticle, and IWave, and there are also many other obscure higher level dynamic and reflective interfaces like IDispatch, ITypeInfo, and IPersist, just waiting to be discovered and exploited, if only we knew the right uuid to ask for.
And then physics research boils down to QueryInterfacing objects with random uuids, and when that succeeds in finding new interfaces, calling their random functions with random arguments to see what happens. That's probably what the black hole supercomputer at the center of the galaxy is doing.
Disclaimer: I am not a theoretical physicist (but I am an experimental one...).
If the universe, at the time of the big bang, had no net charge to begin with, and charge is conserved, then it follows that we would have particles whose charge will on net cancel out, and therefore charge would be quantized in some reasonable way. Note that there are doubly charged particles (e.g Delta++) but they're not stable. Some theories do predict fractionally charged particles (millicharged is the term of art) but there is no experimental evidence.
Now, was the universe neutral to begin with? If it wasn't , then that would presumably leave a strong imprint on early universe cosmology. I believe that current measurements of galaxy structure formation, cosmic microwave background and big bang nucleosynthesis probably place extremely strong constraints on early universe neutrality, though there may be caveats I'm not aware of.
There's also a anti-proton which has a negative charge. I think this is probably the smallest charge there is.
A neutron can decay into a proton, electron, and anti-neutrino. So maybe one way to think of it is that a proton is a neutron that is missing an electron, that's why it has the opposite charge of the electron.
The quarks that make up a proton (or neutron, etc) have charges that are multiples of 1/3 the electron charge. So in one sense that is the real unit charge. But because as far as we know quarks can never exist in isolation we can only ever see particles with multiples of the electronic charge.
Charge is quantized. You cannot have just any amount of electric charge. An electron has three elementary units of negative charge, quarks have -1 and 2. Whether it's a coincidence that proton and electron charge are of the same magnitude (and the neutron is neutral) is another question, but at the elementary level you don't have that much choice for what the charge of a particle is.
In the Standard Model properties are defined as relationships within/between symmetry groups. There are only so many things you can do to/with/in a symmetry group, and that's where the quantisation comes from.
But... that's a mathematical metaphor applied to observations. It's a good fit, but it doesn't explain why it's those symmetry groups and not others, or why symmetry groups are a good fit at all.
There's likely some kind of fundamental mechanism that generates these symmetries, and no one knows what that is.
It’s even more complicated. The charge on the electron is partially screened by virtual positive charges emerging briefly from the vacuum, so what we measure is less than the actual charge.
I don't know the actual answer, but from my understanding of QFT the answer is going to be roughly this shape:
Charge is not actually a quantity on the real number line; it's more of a "count" of something. Not sure what exactly. The "topological defect" model of charges in 2d is a decent analogy though, in which a charge can be e.g. a count of how many vortices there are in a field which are oriented in a certain direction (picture a bathtub with a bunch of drains, and ask, how many tornado-like vortices, if we count clockwise vortices as +1 and counterclockwise as -1, are there? The number can vary but obviously it has to be an integer because what would half a vortex even mean?)
But that model is too simple for charge, since quarks have +-1/3 or 2/3 but the result always adds up to an integer in a hadron. Maybe it's something like a type of winding number or linking number? I don't know. Whatever it is, when the "correct" explanation is found, it will be obvious why it is always an integer and why its constituents are always 1/3 or 2/3, and it will no longer seem interesting to ask why it can't be any old fraction, because that misunderstands the "type" of object that it is counting.
The fact that the proton has the same charge in absolute value as the electron is just a consequence of the fact that the 8 elementary particles at the lowest energy level, i.e. electron and its neutrino, the 3 up quarks and the 3 down quarks have charges that sum to zero in a 3-dimensional charge space.
These 8 particles and their 8 antiparticles are located in the corners of 2 cubes of unit edge in that 3-dimensional charge space. One cube is in the first octant of the coordinates, with 1 corner in the origin, while the other cube is in the opposite octant, also with 1 corner in the origin.
The neutrino and the antineutrino are in the origin, while the electron and the positron are in the opposite corners of the cubes, in the points (-1,-1,-1) and (1,1,1), and the quarks and the antiquarks are in the 12 off-diagonal corners of the 2 cubes.
As functions of the position vector of a particle in this 3-dimensional charge space, the electric charge is the component of the position vector that is parallel to the cube diagonal that passes through origin and the corners of the electron and positron, while the corresponding component that is orthogonal to the diagonal is the so-called color charge (hence chromodynamics; while the electric forces attempt to make null the 1-dimensional electric charge, the strong forces attempt to make null the 2-dimensional color charge), which is non-null only for the quarks and antiquarks, which are off-diagonal, and it is null for electron, neutrino and their antiparticles.
The projections of the off-diagonal corners of the cubes on the diagonal are at one third and two thirds distances from origin, which is why the electric charges of the quarks are 1/3 and 2/3 in absolute value (where the unit of electric charge is the electron charge, i.e. the diagonal of one unit cube), even if in the charge space all the particles have coordinates that are either 1 or 0 in absolute value.
While this symmetry of the charges is interesting, it is not known why it is so.
In any case, if this symmetry had not existed, the Universe as we know it could not exist, because this symmetry ensures that in the nucleons the total color charge of the quarks is null, so they no longer interact through strong forces (except at very short distances, where the residual forces bind the nucleons into nuclei) and at the next level the total electric charge of the atoms is null, so they no longer interact through electric forces (except at very short distances, where the residual forces bind the atoms into molecules).
The same symmetry exists for the other 2 groups of 8 particles and 2 groups of 8 antiparticles, where the muon and the tauon correspond to the electron, because those particles have greater masses but identical charges with the first groups.
In the initial state of the Big Bang, this symmetry of the charges ensures that even if there were only particles in equal numbers and without any antiparticles, the total electric charge and the total color charge of all matter was null.
While the neutrinos do not contribute to any of the charges, their presence ensures that the total spin, i.e. the total angular momentum, was also null.
We know that the electric charge is not fundamental, but a projection of the weak isospin and hypercharge after the Higgs field symmetry breaking. How are weak isospin and hypercharge related to the 2 cubes?
> why must protons and electrons be perfectly complementary regarding charge?
According to QED's spin origin of charge, it's because charge comes from spin. What values a particle's spin can take are restricted to certain integer or half-integer values.
> According to QED's spin origin of charge, it's because charge comes from spin.
Children have the remarkable ability to see the world as it truly is, and so are able to ask the most profound questions. As adults, we learn to obfuscate our, ah, knowledge deficiencies in various ways, and so lose that ability over time. I'm of the opinion that great physicists are like children in being able to see through to the heart of the matter, and ask -- and answer -- questions that matter. This is certainly a theme you can see with Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, and others.
Why do I say this? Because GP's question was profound, and saying "it's because charge comes from spin" is the sort of obfuscatory answer I see most physicists give very, very often when they're faced with such questions.
That's completely aside from the fact that "it's because charge comes from spin" is entirely incorrect. All charged particles have spin, but not all particles with the same spin and other similar properties are charged.
Don’t take things described by physical models (proton, electron, the idea of “charge”, etc.) at too much of a face value.
All it is is a web of predictions: we do A then B seems to happen, reliably. We then transform it into a story of sorts, to categorize and classify, find patterns and correlations—that’s just how our minds work—and those models are useful, as they create shortcuts for more useful predictions—but it’s all too easy to start thinking of entities these models describe as if they were real, concrete things (that’s also how our minds work).
I recommend to maintain a sort of Schrödinger’s treatment (they exist if convenient, but otherwise they don’t really) for things described in physical models, because none of the above-mentioned categorization and classification is set in stone. None of it can be proven to be objectively true, unless you have some sort of exclusive access to the fabric of underlying reality that bypasses your consciousness.
With that in mind, you would see that the weird coincidences are not that problematic. It just means there is a better model out there, and that will always be the case.
In the same vein, a neutron can decay into a proton, an electron and a neutrino (Beta decay), so in some sense the neutral neutron is the combination of an electron and proton. (A connection is there?)
In a simplistic way, I see a neutron star as just being a lump of regular (atomic) matter where the high pressure has forced all the electrons into the protons.
Question for someone who might know: Was pressure so high in the early universe that matter originally formed as neutrons, then as pressure reduced electrons and protons were able to separate? Sort of like the formation of a neutron star in reverse?
There is no reason to prefer any of the possible particles, but as all of them are unstable - minus the proton - they eventually decay to that state. (neutrons are not unstable in nuclei and such).
NB: this is quite simplistic and I skipped many details
First, I am not a physicist. That said, he's my attempt at an answer that satisfies me:
Part of the reason is charge quantization. Neither could be some fractional charge. We also observe charge conservation and electromagnetic force laws as described by quantum electrodynamics (QED). These necessitate that the electron and proton charges be precisely balanced for the universe to function as it does.
Not a physicist at all but I'd offer the following thoughts on the question of "why":
- Take a neutron, pull out an electron (and an antineutrino), and you're left with a proton.
- Asking why protons and electrons are so different is a little bit like asking why hydrogen and iodine have exactly opposite charges even though iodine is so much more complex: they're made of different things
That video really annoys me. He's right at one level but totally wrong at another. Yes, you have to explain everything in terms of things people can understand and if they don't know much you can't give a correct explanation... but also, if you actually try, people can understand a lot more than he's pretending they can. Not at a technical level, yeah, but intuitively, it is possible to get general understandings way beyond his attempts at answering that question.
For instance fundamental charges are a lot like positive and negatively-oriented vortices in a fluid, which when they touch cancel each other out and radiate energy away. They're not _exactly_ like that, but they're a lot like it, and that's a model people can understand without knowing the first thing about quantum field theory. Sure, you won't understand from that why like-charges repel each other, not really, but if you play with the analogy for a while it starts to seem why that might be true as well.
Magnetism is quite a bit trickier to explain in this model but it can done with some work. In particular: a charge radiates little linear packets of energy just by existing; when one of these packets hits another charged particle it moves a tick closer or further away (based on +/-). A current/moving charge/magnetic dipole radiates away little spiraling packets of energy which are aligned in the plane orthogonal to the conventional magnetic field; when these hit another charged particle they get rotated a tick.
At the end of the day loads of these types of questions boil down to the anthropic principle. If it didn’t work out so that things could be stable, nothing would be asking the question.
That’s not a satisfying answer but we don’t have a better one in the realm of science. All we have left is either randomness/serendipity or spirituality/religion.
One issue I have with anthropic filter is that for some reason fundamental parameters fit into a tiny neat table. So out of the vastness of incredibly complex universes that boggle the minds of their creatures we ended up here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model_of_Element...
First-principles question from an ignorant thinker: why couldn't it be that the presence of +/-e in one of them is due to the subtraction of +/-e in the other? Do we know anything about the finer details of quarks and electrons beyond what we currently can resolve?
Maybe think of it more simply, one precedes the other, this much positive charge in one place attracts negative charge of equal magnitude around it: if you send more electrons (and to be honest, talking of positive charge for a proton is a bit wrong: a positive charge being the absence of electrons... and electrons giving the "negative" charge as they add up), they'll detach and push away those that were already there.
There is nothing convenient, it's as logical as saying that you were tshirts when you go out: there is nothing extraordinary that one torso = one tshirt, as having two or zero tshirts wouldn't help: 0 would make you want one more tshirt, 2 would make you want to remove one.
In a "grand unified theory" (which does not include gravity) the strong, electromagnetic and weak forces are unified into one gague theory. SU(5) is one choice. In these theories, the electron, quark and neurtinos fit together as if they were different versions of the same particle, just as in the standard model the up quark has three "colors". In these theories there is a well defined relation between the charges. You can lookup the SU(5) unified theory to see more. I would say these theories are widely believed, but we have not managed to put them all together yet.
There’s a few good “particle zoo” videos out there for the building blocks.
I took some advanced courses and from my understanding it comes down to the pieces that make up protons and electrons. In the quantum realm it adds some fuzziness to the answer by introducing quarks. The net charge may be one thing but I would defer to a physics paper for a deeper understanding.
Maybe it's so difficult because it's not a constant, but a magic number used in the code. (yeah, I'm dealing with lots of magic numbers in some code currently being worked on)
So first off: charge is quantized. Glossing over some weird particles (like quarks) which can't exist by themselves an integer multiple of e as their charge.
It's been a while since I finished undergrad so my knowledge is rusty, but I don't recall any isolatable particles whose charge wasn't -1e, 0, or 1e. If that's the case, the easiest explanation for why they have the same charge is that if they didn't have opposite charges there wouldn't be anything holding them together in an atom.
clearly related to measure (in the abstract sense) and harmonics of natural numbers. what has fascinated me for years has been the sense that we need to rebuild number up using complex numbers and harmonic measures. what we get are still numbers but no longer this monotonic sequence which is a ‘lazy’ or ‘simple minded’ way of ordering N. when ordered by harmonic measures of primes, N itself has structure (beyond a simple incrementing list) but the order is strictly limited to measures provided (rational) with the prime roots of the measure. (an example is the ‘primorial’ harmonic measure of {2, 3, 5} - think rings).
in these harmonic measures, ‘gaps’ between various levels naturally would arise from simple (x) op. For non-relative prime members, the mapping n x n is all over the place but for relative prime members, n x n always results in another relative prime in the ring, so, naturally those ‘lines’ are ‘stable’ and ‘in phase’ so ‘manifested’.
in other words, there is stuff in the R realm — in between ‘quanta’ — but we’re not allowed, capable, ever, of seeing or measureing it.[edit: as in they ‘exist’ in the same realm that (sqrt -1) i exists in — an unseen realm we call ‘imaginary’..]
Oops, missed the edit window. That was supposed to be "Glossing over some weird particles (like quarks) which can't exist by themselves, all particles have a charge which is an integer multiple of e"
I believe the end of my physics textbook in college just said “be grateful that the charge on the electron is what it is because without it our universe wouldn’t exist if it was even slightly different” or something to that effect.
Our universe may be the trillionth trillionth one created and we are in an anthropomorphic universe just like we are on an anthropomorphic planet. It always makes me grateful.
>The charge on a proton is +1.602 x 10-19 C, and the charge on an electron is -1.602 x 10-19 C.
>why must protons and electrons be perfectly complementary regarding charge? if the proton is this insanely complex thing, by what rule does it end up equaling exactly the opposite charge of an electron?
Perhaps "complexity" and "anti-complexity" are the forces that attract. Order and chaos. To have one you must have the other. Without both nothing about this universe would work.
One thing to note is that up and down quarks are separated by exactly one unit of charge (2/3 is 1 more than -1/3).
The charge coincidence is one of the reasons that scientists are looking for a grand unified theory -- part of which would ultimately mean that in some sense quarks and electrons are _the same thing_, and the electroweak and strong forces would be unified.
I'll take a shot at this. The "answer," such as it is, is symmetry. The electron belongs to a group called the leptons, which is to say they are lightweight. Leptons obey certain sorts of statistics and consist of the electron, the muon, the tau lepton, the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino, the tau neutrino, and their antiparticles. That's twelve in total.
The mirror of the leptons would be quarks. Up, down, charm, beauty, top, and bottom ... and their antiparticles. Twelve again! Their charges are 2/3e, -1/3e, 2/3e, -1/3e, 2/3e, -1/3e, and the reverse for the antiquarks. One bundle of three quarks is the proton, and it happens to be 2/3e + 2/3e + -1/3e. But so what? There's all kinds of other bundles. Three-quark bundles are typically hadrons (heavyweight) and two-quark bundles are mesons (medium weight). So you have a lot of choices on the other side!
The choices are caused by something called color confinement, which states that you will not get quarks alone. Indeed, you can take a pair of quarks in the aforementioned meson, and if you stretched them further and further apart, when the bond between them (mediated by gluons) snapped, you would have put so much energy into the stretching and snapping to create two new quarks, one at each end of your broken rubber band. Just as you cannot cut a piece of string such that it only has one end, so you have it with color confinement. I don't want to get too far away from the main point but because of this, quarks are found (normally, outside of Big-Bang quark-gluon plasmas) in combination ... and so eventually one of the combinations has a charge number resembling that of the electron.
Also, positrons aren't really the opposite of electrons. They're opposite on the matter/antimatter axis, which automatically flips the charge, q. They are not opposite along the lepton-quark axis, nor are they opposite along the electron-neutrino axis. Instead of one mirror, imagine many mirrors at angles to one another, and "opposite" becomes a less useful term.
One problem with your explanation is that the muon and the tau (and the pion as a decay product of the tau) all decay into electrons, neutrinos and photons, which would suggest that neither muon or tau are fundamental.
This would put the fundamental leptons being only the electron (and its antiparticle) with the neutrino and the photon.
I think we simply observe the most stable states of existence which preclude asymmetry and all other states of matter have either gone extinct, or are so fickle that we can only observe them momentarily. So the deep truth behind why and what exists and what cannot is pretty straightforward.
A simple answer could be that there is an elementary charge. No free particle can have less than this charge and charges are quantized in terms of this elementary charge.
This is in opposition to e.g. mass. There is no elementary mass, and so no particles need to have the same mass.
Huh. It would make a lot more sense if the "complicated" proton was +3 and always paired with three "simple" -1 electrons. Maybe someday we'll find the electron is really three of some even more fundamental particle.
Electrons balance the nuclear charge by their distance from the nucleus. They’re not perfectly equal; the electrons move closer or farther to maintain balance with the nucleus. I think it’s called effective nuclear charge.
Why does light decay quadratically and not linearly? Why are the laws of physics algebraic at all? Why did the Big Bang happen? Ask enough why's and get to: we just don't know. Turtles all the way down.
Maybe the proton is not complex but the process to probe it is. Proton is an aggregate of emergent phenomena like mass and its resultant properties. For a simplistic model assume that proton is a tetrahedron with energy wave generators at the vertices and how those waves interact with each other creates the emergent phenomena like mass, charge etc. It will be difficult to probe such a tetrahedron by just studying the properties of the waves and the peaks in those waves/interference which are perceived as particles by the probes.
The typical model of superconductivity says that electrons in the material pair up to form a quasiparticle -- the "cooper pair" -- with new properties, namely not experiencing resistance. The original quantized charge of the electrons still adds up to the same amount.
Unlike protons an neutrons, electrons are considered elementary particles that can't be broken down any further, so their charge can not be "divided" into something less than 1.
Because if it were any other way then you wouldn’t exist to sit there and ponder the question. That’s the unsatisfying answer.
I think it makes sense to draw an analogy to evolution—stable arrangements of elementary particles that (somehow) reinforce similar arrangements around them will come to dominate the observable universe.
In a CRT monitor, you have a ray of electrons that travel in vaccum and it is electricity outside wires. With a similar device, you can create a ray of protons and have also electricity with protons instead of electrons.
Another posibility is to use a water solution with acid. A part of the electricity is made of H+ that are just protons. (Actually, each proton is atached to a water molecule, so it's more like H2O+ than a plain H+.)
I'm triying to imagine a wire where protons can move. I don't think it's theoreticaly impossible, but they are mmuch heavier and bigger than electrons, so they it looks very difficult to find a material where they can move freely.
In solids (like metals and semiconductors) the atomic nuclei form stable structures (often crystals). Protons are bound to their nuclei, and the nuclei don’t move, so neither do the protons.
Electrons, on the other hand, can move between atoms, which allows them to form an electrical current.
There are special cases, but that’s the basic answer.
I mean it's not that complicated to understand. e is just a physical constant. It's been measured as such, with varying degrees of precision. The creator is as lazy a programmer as we are. To make the math work, + and - are used.
friendly suggestion, avoid describing yourself as "not a smart person". Research definitely shows that self-talk can have significant effects. I know this from my own life and experiences, but for the sake of writing this response I asked ChatGPT to look up some research to back me up:
"Sure, positive and negative self-talk can have significant effects on various aspects of mental health, performance, and well-being. Here are some scientific research findings on this topic:
Impact on Stress and Coping Mechanisms:
Research suggests that positive self-talk can help individuals cope with stress more effectively by promoting adaptive coping strategies and reducing negative emotional responses. Conversely, negative self-talk is associated with increased levels of stress and maladaptive coping behaviors such as avoidance (Hanssen, M., Vancleef, L., Vlaeyen, J., & Peters, M., 2013).
Influence on Performance:
Studies have shown that positive self-talk can enhance performance in various domains such as sports, academics, and professional settings. Positive self-talk is associated with increased confidence, motivation, and persistence, leading to improved performance outcomes. Conversely, negative self-talk can undermine performance by inducing self-doubt, anxiety, and distraction (Hardy, J., Hall, C., & Hardy, L., 2004).
Effects on Mental Health:
Positive self-talk is linked to better mental health outcomes, including higher levels of self-esteem, resilience, and subjective well-being. On the other hand, negative self-talk is associated with symptoms of depression, anxiety, and lower overall psychological functioning (Marshall, S., Parker, P., Ciarrochi, J., Sahdra, B., Jackson, C., & Heaven, P., 2015).
Physiological Responses:
Research suggests that self-talk can influence physiological responses such as heart rate, cortisol levels, and immune function. Positive self-talk is associated with reduced physiological arousal and stress reactivity, whereas negative self-talk can trigger a stress response and impair immune function (Penley, J., Tomaka, J., & Wiebe, J., 2002).
Neurological Correlates:
Neuroimaging studies have identified neural correlates of self-talk, showing that positive self-talk activates regions of the brain associated with reward processing, cognitive control, and emotional regulation. In contrast, negative self-talk is linked to increased activity in brain regions involved in threat perception and emotional reactivity (Morin, A., & Uttl, B., 2013)."
Anyway, I'm sure you're not beating yourself up all the time about being a dummy, but like I said in the beginning of this response, just a friendly suggestion about mindset and word-choice :)
> I have no doubt quantum physicists know what they are talking about but...I always think it is the kind of excuse a schoolkid would give their teachers for their calculations being wrong.
Just to emphasize how extreme this dichotomy is, not only is quantum mechanics correct (in that it's a predictive model), it's the most correct physical theory humans have ever devised in that the measurements there have more significant figures than anything else.
It's interesting that semiconductor engineers have to directly wrestle with the magic that's quantum tunneling. This theory is really not just a theory.
So many significant digits includes a level of self-consistency of the model, since we are assuming the model to some degree in order to measure it. Though in this case, it's not the calculations that are wrong, but the model, we hope is wrong. That is, a new perspective and a new way of thinking about things may reveal more. Of course, we are always fighting against the irreducible complexity camp. However, the fundamental lack of cohesion between quantum and relativistic theories demonstrates there is at least one big thing we are still doing wrong.
I totally back the scientists and wish I could understand it better but I always like to have a chuckle that the crazy sounding parts are just the scientists making up stuff
Just because it’s quantitatively accurate doesn’t mean it’s “true”. Like a fun fact I like is the geocentrism was extremely accurate in terms of astronomical predictions when heliocentricism came about (it was actually more accurate for a while).
Popular science writers on this stuff tend to be in a similar position to the teachers. The real physics is described in complex mathematics and doesn't translate to simple English very well.
It's definitely not wrong, but maybe more akin to the earth-centric view of the universe and the insane patterns that planets would trace in the sky. Just in this case we don't have another object like the sun to use to pivot our models. Maybe there are superstructures hidden that we could access if we could look into objects outside space-time, but until then space-time reduction is what we have right now other than guesswork (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron)
Quantum mechanics is a religion with mathematics instead of just holy texts.
Several studies have been done into whether practicing theoretical physicists using QM in their everyday work agree on the most basic tenets of the field.
Spoiler: they disagree on every aspect while simultaneously assuming that their opinions are correct and that everyone else agrees with them.
That’s how religions work, not how science does. Factions instead of consensus. Branches splitting off all the time and never supplanting the majority. Orthodoxy (Copenhagen). Shunning anyone that steps out of line (Everett). Refusing to question the holy texts, etc…
Another key symptom is requiring members to prove their devotion by saying and doing things that are obvious nonsense. Bending their common sense to the will of the group. In Christianity this is the trinity: one God that is three. In QM it’s the wave-particle duality, which is just nonsense. You can’t have a point with a kilometre long wavelength!! Yet, we are to believe (on faith!) that radio waves are made of photons.
Turns out that magical thinking and religiosity is the essential nature of humans, especially in large groups.
Whenever there is insufficient evidence to bring everyone into line, the line splinters into warring factions where the best argument each tribe has is: “my tribal leader said so!”
All of the disagreements in QM are metaphysical: what is measurement, how does a wavefunction collapse, what is reality, etc. Everyone agrees on the math that leads to predictions (which have been matched by observation to an almost perfect degree). And I'd imagine that just about everyone also agrees that it's incredibly unintuitive. But the math works.
I want whatever you're smoking, because it's the best predictive theory we have, and is constantly tested and proven. Only the why is in question, but the math absolutely works.
I mean semiconductor engineers have to deal with quantum effects when designing chips. Its not like it doesn't effect the real world, we do interact with parts of it when things get really small.
When I read articles like this I can't help but think that if they were probing apples with a hammer, using stronger and stronger hammer blows, they would conclude that apples are flat and mushy. With stronger hammer blows they'd find the apples are paper thin and hot. How do they know when doing these collision experiments that some of the resulting particles are not popping out of the CMB and aren't actually in the things being collided at all?
They're basically plunking the underlying fields with a lot of energy in a small space, causing waves, which are then measured as particles. In a sense, they're not really finding particles that were already there, but they're measuring the behavior of fields at high energies and small scales.
I literally was just having a foggy version of this exact same thought whilst reading the article. Especially
> "Researchers recently discovered that the proton sometimes includes a charm quark and charm antiquark, colossal particles that are each heavier than the proton itself."
You articulated my feeling better than I could. Surely this is something the researchers have accounted for and there's a good explanation (whether I can actually understand it is another story)
Well, not from CMB (because it's too weak) but from the energy delivered by hitting it, through pair creation.
Another weird thing are virtual particles that can popup without energy. They are similar to real energetic particles in a sense that they are manifestation of the same quantum field (for example charm quark field) but they are different from real particles because they don't carry energy and thus can't live long.
World is very weird. Math works though.
Proton is just a weird ball of bubbling energy that stays in one place because up quark and down quark quantum fields got "stuck" together there through complicated colored strong force. But there's so much energy there that wants to get free but can't that there are constantly things popping in and out of existence.
“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’m getting really tired of hazy probability distributions and waves that only collapse and materialize when observed. I 100% accept that QM is a useful tool to model our current understanding based on increasingly sophisticated observations, but I fundamentally don’t believe that a proton is some shape shifting quantum soup of energy that doesn't form until someone comes around and thinks about it. That is unless reality is approximated and expensive compute is directed only toward what’s being observed to better enhance the simulation.
I probably need to add that I am also tired of simulation theory.
I really suspect we just aren't good enough at observing things or don’t exist in enough dimensions to understand what we’re observing. And so the cross sections we are able to pin down end up looking like they are part of some probabilistic system.
I still have bets on this all being a massive game of life.
In the opposite direction, I feel mildly annoyed when people expect a precise/clear answer to questions which can be answered mostly/better with probability distributions.
Considering how you can test statistics in real life (ex: Buffon's Needle) there must be something very "statistical" embedded in reality itself (it is true that quantum mechanics pushes everything very far so can seem to complex).
Statistics and probability don’t bother me and we should use them more. Describing the very nature of the world as a soup of probability out of which observations arise and events take place, however, is getting tired. Superposition is a worn out teaching tool not an actual description of reality.
For my personal purposes I resolved the issue by looking at elementary particles as if they are only the "probability" waves. Never anything else. Measurement is just an interaction and it reshapes the waves making them narrower. But they never become pointlike particles with specified location or momentum. They are always more or less fuzzy.
If they are all bound into macroscopic object they are sharper and as a result they can make other elementary particles they "measure" (interact with) also sharper.
If particles interact with fuzzier part of macroscopic object, like an edge of a slit, they can become fuzzier, more wavy.
So the proton really is that shapeshifting soup. Never anything else. If you hit it with something hard enough it becomes momentarily disturbed into a bit sharper state that can tell us something but it immediately goes back to soup because of chaotic microscopic interactions inside.
The matter looks sharp only on macroscopic level. At the level of particles it's always fuzzy, but we have trouble of ditching the concept of little balls bouncing of each other because the math describing exchange of energy and momentum between those fuzzy "waves" looks like there were some small balls bouncing. But this comes, I believe accidentally only from the fact that all forces have sort of spherical symmetry.
QFT is the most well-tested physics theory mankind has developed and certainly is not a "haze" as the pop-sci articles write.
What they mean by the "haze of probabilities" is that you need to iterate over all possible configurations of the gluons and quarks in the proton to produce experimental predictions.
It is for sure computationally ludicrous, but conceptually it's really not better or worse than to say that particles are billiard balls moving around by Newton's Equations. You're just more used to the latter, but spend some time working with for example Lattice QCD and you get completely used to the former being the "actual" underlying physics rules.
As you said, it's implies that we're not failing to measure some "hidden variable" that would explain probabilities away, but that the vary nature of these objects is probabilistic.
In my understanding a wave function doesn't collapse just when someone observes it; it collapses when it participates in any physical event.
"I fundamentally don’t believe that a proton is some shape shifting quantum soup of energy that doesn't form until someone comes around and thinks about it." is the way quantum mechanics is often portrayed in pop sci, but it simply can't be true. Quantum mechanics existed just fine before there was anyone to observe it and think about it.
It reflects the fact that the measurement apparatus, environment in general and the observer in particular are all also part of the "wave function". Until these are linked to the system to be observed (like the proton), the system has to be analyzed as the full set of possible configurations of its constituents.
After you link it up with the apparatus, it is pulled into the system as a new part of it, and so on. The more stuff you pull into the system, the less number of different configurations you sum over, eventually you end up with a single configuration with an observer that has a clear measurement result in her mind. This process is what is called "wavefunction collapse" in old physics texts (and a lot of modern pop-sci accounts).
What sets this apart from other purely probabilistic theories is that it's non-local, the entire linked system from the proton to the measurement apparatus to the observer has to be taken into account in the calculations if you are to be thorough. In local theories you can separate the parts of the system and handle them separately, like you could say "there is a 1% probability that a charm quark pops out in the upper left part of the proton every second" etc. You can't really do this in QM/QFT, and this is what in essence leads to all of the counter-intuitive results and confusion..
Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but wouldn’t a “massive game of life” also be a simulation? I guess there’s a difference between a mechanistic simulation with emergent intelligence vs a Matrix-like one designed to accommodate (an) intelligence. It’s an important distinction but they’re both simulations.
> I fundamentally don’t believe that a proton is some shape shifting quantum soup of energy that doesn't form until someone comes around and thinks about it
This is a pop-sci analogy. I find it tiring as well.
The many worlds interpretation doesn't paint the picture this way. It paints it as a recursive for-each loop iterating over all solutions to the next step of the physics function.
> I still have bets on this all being a massive game of life.
...on the back of a giant turtle, amiright?
How bout placing your bets on this instead: it's the evaluation of an algorithm ("physics") on a data structure ("the universe"), and like all algorithms, exists eternally and independent of any substrate.
I had a professor who was fond of saying "the proton is a garbage can".
This is why the LHC (and other hadron colliders) has to run at such a high luminosity (collision rate). Most of the time, when it collides two protons, the parts that interact are only carrying a tiny fraction of the energy, so you don't get the interesting high energy physics you want to probe.
> “In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.”
Well, maybe someone could imagine it, otherwise, all that complexity would have led to a gargantuan number of bugs and the universe would have crashed..
I’ve never understood the anthropic principle. It’s a very big maybe for seemingly no reason. Existence of a single universe is a pretty hard thing to contemplate, why should we consider multiples of it?
>> all that complexity would have led to a gargantuan number of bugs and the universe would have crashed
> This has always seemed to me one of the best arguments against the simulation hypothesis.
Can you expand on that? Are you saying that if we were in a simulation, the observed complexity of the universe (or the complexity of particle physics) would have caused the simulation to crash? Ergo, we are not in a simulation?
Definitely not. For one thing, gravity isn't just mass. The gravity of a moving baseball is higher than a nonmoving baseball. The gravity of a charged battery is higher than a discharged battery. Same protons, neutrons, and electrons, but if you change their velocity or how they are arranged then they have more gravity. It's the stress-energy tensor, not just the mass (by which you mean matter?).
> Could gravity be the effect of mass in an indefinite form?
A very clear way to see this is not true is to compare stars and black holes to quarks. The space between quarks acts like they are different, larger or smaller quarks depending on how the real quarks happen to be arranged at that moment.
So, if we apply the same idea to a very large star, it would sometimes act like a black hole or a supernova or a star depending on where it was and how it happened to be doing and also maybe just sometimes spontaneously?
But mostly, if it was really far away you would expect it to act like a black hole, because from a far distance it seems like its all in one small point, and a black hole is an irreversible phase transition. But that doesn't happen, and stars look like stars no matter how far away you are. If reality worked like this, we'd expect nearby galaxies to have almost no dark matter and faraway galaxies to have lots and be very small. But instead galaxies and dark matter are pretty much the same no matter how far away they are from us.
This is a pretty ill-posed question though. I'm cramming it into a box that has an interesting answer just for fun, and I don't think it answers much of what you are asking.
We see gravity whenever we see large "clumps" of matter. We keep looking for a physical property of matter than explains gravity, but perhaps it's the lack of something. So when matter appears to attract other matter, maybe they are both "falling towards something".
I always think 'an experiment' could be said better, because the thing doing the measuring is also a haze of probabilities and the measurement is how these two probabilities interact and change each other.
Is it possible the universe is infinitely complex? i.e, "turtles all the way down?".
I find the concept of duality and replication in physics very interesting. Everything seems to have an opposite, with properties such that when these opposites come together, they form a bigger unit, which itself has an opposite.
I don't "believe" too many things that can't be evidentiarily substantiated, but as silly of a thing to reference for this kind of discussion, I personally have the irrational, unscientific belief that this Simpsons opening is unironically the most accurate model of the Universe that we have:
I’m going to entertain this literally because it’s fun: so we need to zoom out enough to find those big galaxy surrounding atoms which are actually universes, or conversely to zoom in more to find galaxies and a universe within atoms. But it seems that there’s either missing understanding how to cross that zoom in/out threshold or it’s impossible by the laws of physics to zoom so far to make a full circle, like it’s forbidden for the snake to bite its tail. I imagine people have discussed this stuff a lot, and came up with better analogies and more nuanced models
There is a fractal-like nature to the universe due to certain math thingies working out on all levels (e.g. scale free networks/power laws being all over the place).
When I was a curious kid, I asked my father the opposite: what if there is one fundamental physical rule that forbids us to know everything about the universe?
Something that we will continuously bump against without being able to resolve further, by definition.
Is there such a thing as Gödel's incompleteness theorems in physics?
Reductionist philosophy is very common in science. It's essentially the idea that you can break things down into simpler parts to better understand how everything works.
It's kind of "common sense", if you understand how all the components on a circuit board function individually, then you can piece together how the entire board will function. In computer science, you can reduce everything to operations comparing 1s and 0s, then use that to deterministically recreate higher-level abstractions like strings, floats, and colors on a monitor.
Then there's quantum physics, which turns reductionism on its head. Things are supposed to get less complicated as you get smaller, not more complicated! It's like the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know.
> Things are supposed to get less complicated as you get smaller, not more complicated!
They're not. In general, once you take a lot of little things to make a big thing, you may notice a bunch of emergent properties, but one of the major emergent property is that... all the variability cancels out, or averages to a simple quantity. See e.g. all the complex dancing of great many particles making up everyday objects, that all average to a simple scalar number we call "temperature".
I think there's a difference though. The examples you cite relate to artificial things, where reductionism makes sense. Quantum physics describes natural things, where I don't think it does, even at a macro level.
A natural thing's behaviour can't be reduced to the sum of its parts. Example: an organ, taken out of an organism, stops being an organ and becomes a lump of rotting flesh. Its behaviour fundamentally and completely changes. So an organ can only be considered an organ insofar as it's a part of an organism. Similarly, an oxygen atom within a water molecule displays vastly different properties from those it would display when a free radical (or as part of an O2 molecule). Examples could be multiplied. So I don't think quantum physics is any different from the 'macro' world in this regard.
So I think the difference is natural-artificial, not quantum-macro.
> the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know
This is why the "god of the gaps" critique is so short-sighted. It relies on the assumption that as science progresses it will "close the gaps". In reality the opposite happens. Another example is the cell -- in Darwin's day it was thought to be a simple thing, but then we learned more about it and it turned out to be monstrously complex and the mystery intensifies.
We have kind of an opposite problem to the god of the gaps as well, in which a phenomenon can be determined to "just be the way it is", such as objects with mass exerting gravitational forces on each other. We can say "God made them do that" or we can give up and say "We'll never know why, it's just a constant" and both are equally problematic because either way, we assume we can't eventually discover the "why".
Nope, the "god of the gaps" critique has nothing to do scientific discovery being a route to omniscience, something only some religious figures have ever claimed to have even the possibility of access to. It's the set of things religions claim the only explanation/evidence for repeatedly shrinking, as we found explanations for weather that have more predictive power than "the wrath/favour of the gods", found cures for the stuff that was supposed to be divine or karmic punishment and found explanations for differences between animals that we can use to make different animals (in increasingly specific ways), until eventually there was nothing left of the original religious explanations of how things came to be except a determination to posit the divine as the cause of anything scientists weren't confident on.
A shift in the position of the faithful from "this an accurate account of how the world was created direct from the creator" to "well actually that stuff was all metaphorical but the Big Bang must have been God's moment because you can't explain anything that happened before then" is not a trend in favour of the explanatory power of religion.
In the case of protons (or for that matter cells), religion never had anything to say about them in the first place never mind an explanation that's more compatible with quantum phenomena than early 20th century physics, and it's quantum physicists not priests that are the people busy making them do weird things in particle accelerators and saying 'told you this might happen'.
(Also, someone should let the theists know that it's the quirkiness of quarks that proves God's design so they stop writing about how it's the perfect orderliness of atomic structure that's God's design)
Smallest parts are less complicated. Even some mammals that have zero intuitions about that scale managed to develop math to describe it pretty much perfectly. Which is impossible with larger scale systems such as cells or organisms where the best we can do is some statistics that accurately predicts some thing sometimes.
There is normal heat death which is when maximum entropy is achieved. Even after that, the universe still goes on complexifying till it reaches maximum complexity at which point there is no other complex states to jump to. - Leonard Susskind.
In fairness, the title probably matches. You go off and write a DirectX translation layer and make it work properly in an entirely different operating environment while matching DX quirks. Absurdly complex.
For a second there I thought I'd missed a breakthrough or 10 and they'd actually manage to record a video of 3 quarks going about their business. Alas, it's only a "data-driven animation", but due to the noise it looks quite convincingly like an experimental recording.
The take home and "easy to digest" conclusion is that the proton is a linear superposition of states. The most likely of these states (the ones with highest amplitude) have 3 quarks. The second most likely have 5 quarks. When you make an observation you may see 3 or 5 quarks.
In quantum mechanics, indistinguishable particles (also called identical or indiscernible particles) are particles that cannot be distinguished from one another, even in principle. Species of identical particles include, but are not limited to, elementary particles (such as electrons), composite subatomic particles (such as atomic nuclei), as well as atoms and molecules. [0]
No. you can'tput an elelctron inside a proton to get a neutron. If you make them colide and you are lucky, one of the up quarks of the proton changes to a down quark, and now you get a neutron. Both up and down quarks are elelmentary particles as far as we know.
Huh? With a little bit more what? Complexity? I expected that they would be pretty much the same except with a different mix of the different quarks and such (and also, unstable without having a nucleus to be a part of, and with a neutral charge)
A question that came to me as I was reading the article was - what makes us think that all protons are the same ? Can it be that instead of every proton having a superposition of 3 quarks, or 5 quarks or more, we have some protons with 3 and others with 5 ? How did they verify that this is not a case ? I am assuming they never managed to isolate 1 proton and test it twice.
Sounds like it's just a Haskell thunk but as a probability wave
Lazily evaluated until there's a probability it has to interact with something. Since you can never really see the value of the actual function, but only see what it looks like when it's forced to evaluate a computation in some context, an interaction, you can never get a precise definition of the function
> The positively charged particle at the heart of the atom is an object of unspeakable complexity
It's not an object at all. The reason quantum physics is so weird, is that our conceptual model of things existed ng as discrete objects no longer works. An "object" is like a conceptual convenience method on some region of spacetime.
Is it surprising there are signs of the heavy quarks? The diagrams that include them have tiny but nonzero values. Hearken back to Hitchhiker's - it is not impossible, just highly improbable.
What’s interesting is that there’s a net charm content: there are more charm quarks to be found than anti-charms.
Given that charm quarks are heavier than the proton, you’d expect to only find them in deep inelastic collisions when they are produced in pairs with an anti-quark, so it is surprising that there’s an asymmetry.
From the article's description it sounds like they tortured the data until it told them what they wanted. If the charm did show up, how long did it exist? In conventional spectroscopy, the broader the line, the shorter the lifetime (and v.v.) It smells like a sub-attosecond lifetime, if that.
It was a bit of an open question what would happen with the heavy charm quarks, given that they each mass more than the entire proton, but yeah... anything else would have been a major surprise.
I’m of the opinion that particles are like galaxies, the more we zoom in the more we’re going to find, there won’t be an end only another achievement of zoom level.
Reading this I couldn't help thinking of the epicycle theory of planetary motion. Under the holy assumption that planets had to move in perfect circles, people invented increasingly complicated circles-on-top-of-circles models in order to explain all observed trajectories. Then Kepler came along and said "hey, it's an ellipse!"
You are objectively wrong. It requires no faith. There is simply no evidence for an intelligent being at the root of creation, no data that cannot be explained with much simpler mechanisms than intelligence. The proton is complicated by human standards, but it still is nowhere near as complicated as intelligence. You can't have a conversation with a proton.
Technically it requires faith to assert that the universe did not have its origin from some intelligent supernatural being, just as it does to assert the opposite. The only thing we can truly say based on the data is "we don't know for certain at this time".
Your tone suggests you think this statement is provocative because religion attempts to justify itself with its insidious attempts to appropriate language.
You appear to think “intelligent being” and “faith” are inextricable, but the word faith exists perfectly fine without a need to believe in an “intelligent being”.
What if the rules of the universe are themselves a form of God-like intelligence?
They're omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Their true form exists somehow outside of reality and cannot be (currently) comprehended by us mortals. Their touch can be found wherever we look, but their intent and motivation remain mysterious.
But what is the intelligent being made of? Did they come from randomness or from yet another higher-level intelligent being? You're just scratching the surface of this rabbit-hole!
“The proton is an incredibly complex particle that physicists are still working to fully understand. Experiments over decades have revealed that the proton is not just three quarks, but contains a sea of transient gluons and quark-antiquark pairs. The HERA accelerator provided evidence of this "gluon dandelion" structure by detecting low-momentum quarks and antiquarks emerging from gluon splitting. Most recently, machine learning analysis of thousands of proton snapshots found traces of heavy charm quarks within the proton, suggesting its makeup is a quantum mixture of different quark states. Future experiments like the Electron-Ion Collider aim to map out the spins and 3D structure of quarks and gluons inside the proton.
One interesting finding highlighted is the recent discovery, through machine learning analysis of past proton data, that the proton contains traces of heavy charm quarks, implying its composition involves different quark combinations in a quantum superposition. This suggests the proton's makeup is more complex than previously understood.”
I just had a really stupid thought, after finishing reading the article.
So, the electron is an elementary particle, right? Compared to the proton, the electron is "simple", yes?
Despite this difference in complexity, an electron has a charge of -e and a proton has a charge of +e. They are exactly complementary regarding charge (if I am understanding right, I am not a smart person).
my question is... why? why must protons and electrons be perfectly complementary regarding charge? if the proton is this insanely complex thing, by what rule does it end up equaling exactly the opposite charge of an electron? why not a charge of +1.8e, or +3e, or 0.1666e, etc? Certainly it is convenient that a proton and electron complement each other, but what makes that the case? Does this question even make sense?
so, there's a concept of a "positron", which I can understand - of course it has charge +e, it is the "opposite" of an electron. it is an anti-electron. at least that makes some kind of sense. but a proton is made up of this complex soup of other elementary particles following all these crazy rules, and yet it also ends up being exactly +e.
No one who has replied to your question has got the right answer. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21753/why-do-ele... has the right answer. There are multiple aspects to this argument, but essentially, the symmetries of your system force the charges in the Standard Model (quarks and leptons) to be the way they are due to gauge anomaly cancellation. If you believe in quark confinement, which is extremely well motivated, computationally, theoretically and experimentally, then the fact that the proton has exactly charge +1 follows naturally.
I am reading this as "it has to be this way, or the model does not hold", but it does not explain why. What causes it? Consistency of a model cannot be the ultimate reason, right?
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Wait, proton decay was proven?
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Which answer on physicsexchange is the right one? The top scored ?
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So, PBS Space Time did a video on this “fine tuned universe” theory and it, like all of their videos, is great. The concept seems to be that in an unbalanced universe, life couldn’t form, and we’d be incapable of having this conversation. So, either there are infinite universes and we exist as a result of being in the right one, or there’s one universe and we exist as a result of the one we’re in being right. Either way, we’re pretty lucky.
https://youtu.be/YmOVoIpaPrc
I can’t get behind all these fine tuning arguments. Who’s to say what life might form if the proton had a charge of 1.01e or if the fine structure constant was 1/138? Something about the line of reasoning that there is a multiverse and we just happen to live in favorable conditions reminds me of Pascal’s wager. It doesn’t do anything other than unfalsifiably assure the wagerer that they are important
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AKA the "anthropic principle."
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There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that the defining constants of our universe are pulled from some uniform distribution though, which is the underlying assumption here. When you put it that way, that's a pretty strange and specific claim to make.
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Isn't that concept of "luck" as strange as considering us "lucky" for currently being? Non-existent things aren't in a lobby waiting to win a lottery. There was no choice; we came to exist, then considered ourselves. Whatever conditions create, does not imply luck for what is created.
I strongly dislike PBS Space Time, but I find it hard to explain why. I might also be just too dumb to get it. It's just the feeling of the goal not being the "listener gaining understanding", but rather "expressing how confusing and complicated it is".
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Imagine you have a bunch of fulcrums in the air and items droping down. If the things that land on the fulcrums don't balance each other out the fulcrum tips and the items keep dropping. Eventually all the fulcrums are balanced.
A lot of these things coalesce until they are stable enough they don't fall apart. If there is a stable form and you have enough of them, eventually you get a lot of stable forms.
It is not some magical thing that makes all this balance, it is more of a settling thing where things eventually drop to a stable state. There is lots of matter that is still unstable.
This explains why atoms have 0 charge, but not why protons, which are stable even without electrons, have a charge of 1.
Put in terms of elementary particles, why is it that the ratio of electric charge between a quark and an electron is either 1:3 or 2:3?
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I like your explanation.
> There is lots of matter that is still unstable.
What are you referring to with this?
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This is called "charge quantization", and it is not definitively explained by modern theories. There are some very good arguments for it, to be sure, but I don't think they're quite case-closed, of-course-it-must-be-that-way good. It is related to C symmetry, as a discrete symmetry, which ties in to Lorenz invariance and all that, so there's that angle too.
No one knows. That's part of the great mystery.
But also in some sense "it has to be that way," since without charge balance atoms wouldn't exist as we know them, and thus neither would all the chemistry that creates the macroscopic world we inhabit.
That's a variation on the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Maybe a kind of observer bias. If the universe weren't seemingly-perfectly balanced to allow emergent complexity in matter, we wouldn't be here to point out how seemingly-perfect it seems. (If you subscribe to a multiverse interpretation, perhaps most of the infinitely many other possible universes are dead and void.)
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On the topic of the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’:
Imagine that physics is like Microsoft COM (or C++ pure virtual function tables), so there's a base IUnknown interface, hiding innumerably different possible concrete implementation classes, that can expose arbitrarily many other abstract interfaces, so you can call iUnknown->QueryInterface(uuid, &otherInterface) to ask for other interfaces like IAtom, IElectron, IProton, IQuark, IParticle, and IWave, and there are also many other obscure higher level dynamic and reflective interfaces like IDispatch, ITypeInfo, and IPersist, just waiting to be discovered and exploited, if only we knew the right uuid to ask for.
And then physics research boils down to QueryInterfacing objects with random uuids, and when that succeeds in finding new interfaces, calling their random functions with random arguments to see what happens. That's probably what the black hole supercomputer at the center of the galaxy is doing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593432
Yes, could be the anthropic principal.
Disclaimer: I am not a theoretical physicist (but I am an experimental one...).
If the universe, at the time of the big bang, had no net charge to begin with, and charge is conserved, then it follows that we would have particles whose charge will on net cancel out, and therefore charge would be quantized in some reasonable way. Note that there are doubly charged particles (e.g Delta++) but they're not stable. Some theories do predict fractionally charged particles (millicharged is the term of art) but there is no experimental evidence.
Now, was the universe neutral to begin with? If it wasn't , then that would presumably leave a strong imprint on early universe cosmology. I believe that current measurements of galaxy structure formation, cosmic microwave background and big bang nucleosynthesis probably place extremely strong constraints on early universe neutrality, though there may be caveats I'm not aware of.
There's also a anti-proton which has a negative charge. I think this is probably the smallest charge there is.
A neutron can decay into a proton, electron, and anti-neutrino. So maybe one way to think of it is that a proton is a neutron that is missing an electron, that's why it has the opposite charge of the electron.
The quarks that make up a proton (or neutron, etc) have charges that are multiples of 1/3 the electron charge. So in one sense that is the real unit charge. But because as far as we know quarks can never exist in isolation we can only ever see particles with multiples of the electronic charge.
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Charge is quantized. You cannot have just any amount of electric charge. An electron has three elementary units of negative charge, quarks have -1 and 2. Whether it's a coincidence that proton and electron charge are of the same magnitude (and the neutron is neutral) is another question, but at the elementary level you don't have that much choice for what the charge of a particle is.
But why is charge quantised?
In the Standard Model properties are defined as relationships within/between symmetry groups. There are only so many things you can do to/with/in a symmetry group, and that's where the quantisation comes from.
But... that's a mathematical metaphor applied to observations. It's a good fit, but it doesn't explain why it's those symmetry groups and not others, or why symmetry groups are a good fit at all.
There's likely some kind of fundamental mechanism that generates these symmetries, and no one knows what that is.
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> quarks have -1 and 2.
Wikipedia suggests the quarks that make up the proton have charge ⅔e and -⅓e
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_quark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_quark
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Of course, the quarks had to go and be 1/3 or 2/3 of an e in charge. But they can never be observed isolated, so nature allows it.
It’s even more complicated. The charge on the electron is partially screened by virtual positive charges emerging briefly from the vacuum, so what we measure is less than the actual charge.
But isn't the same thing going on for the proton?
(Of course, absent some good reason, one wouldn't expect the two screenings to exactly balance...)
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I don't know the actual answer, but from my understanding of QFT the answer is going to be roughly this shape:
Charge is not actually a quantity on the real number line; it's more of a "count" of something. Not sure what exactly. The "topological defect" model of charges in 2d is a decent analogy though, in which a charge can be e.g. a count of how many vortices there are in a field which are oriented in a certain direction (picture a bathtub with a bunch of drains, and ask, how many tornado-like vortices, if we count clockwise vortices as +1 and counterclockwise as -1, are there? The number can vary but obviously it has to be an integer because what would half a vortex even mean?)
But that model is too simple for charge, since quarks have +-1/3 or 2/3 but the result always adds up to an integer in a hadron. Maybe it's something like a type of winding number or linking number? I don't know. Whatever it is, when the "correct" explanation is found, it will be obvious why it is always an integer and why its constituents are always 1/3 or 2/3, and it will no longer seem interesting to ask why it can't be any old fraction, because that misunderstands the "type" of object that it is counting.
Is there a reason why we say quarks have fractional charge instead of having just +-1 or +-2? And Then electron and proton would have -3 and +3?
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The fact that the proton has the same charge in absolute value as the electron is just a consequence of the fact that the 8 elementary particles at the lowest energy level, i.e. electron and its neutrino, the 3 up quarks and the 3 down quarks have charges that sum to zero in a 3-dimensional charge space.
These 8 particles and their 8 antiparticles are located in the corners of 2 cubes of unit edge in that 3-dimensional charge space. One cube is in the first octant of the coordinates, with 1 corner in the origin, while the other cube is in the opposite octant, also with 1 corner in the origin.
The neutrino and the antineutrino are in the origin, while the electron and the positron are in the opposite corners of the cubes, in the points (-1,-1,-1) and (1,1,1), and the quarks and the antiquarks are in the 12 off-diagonal corners of the 2 cubes.
As functions of the position vector of a particle in this 3-dimensional charge space, the electric charge is the component of the position vector that is parallel to the cube diagonal that passes through origin and the corners of the electron and positron, while the corresponding component that is orthogonal to the diagonal is the so-called color charge (hence chromodynamics; while the electric forces attempt to make null the 1-dimensional electric charge, the strong forces attempt to make null the 2-dimensional color charge), which is non-null only for the quarks and antiquarks, which are off-diagonal, and it is null for electron, neutrino and their antiparticles.
The projections of the off-diagonal corners of the cubes on the diagonal are at one third and two thirds distances from origin, which is why the electric charges of the quarks are 1/3 and 2/3 in absolute value (where the unit of electric charge is the electron charge, i.e. the diagonal of one unit cube), even if in the charge space all the particles have coordinates that are either 1 or 0 in absolute value.
While this symmetry of the charges is interesting, it is not known why it is so.
In any case, if this symmetry had not existed, the Universe as we know it could not exist, because this symmetry ensures that in the nucleons the total color charge of the quarks is null, so they no longer interact through strong forces (except at very short distances, where the residual forces bind the nucleons into nuclei) and at the next level the total electric charge of the atoms is null, so they no longer interact through electric forces (except at very short distances, where the residual forces bind the atoms into molecules).
The same symmetry exists for the other 2 groups of 8 particles and 2 groups of 8 antiparticles, where the muon and the tauon correspond to the electron, because those particles have greater masses but identical charges with the first groups.
In the initial state of the Big Bang, this symmetry of the charges ensures that even if there were only particles in equal numbers and without any antiparticles, the total electric charge and the total color charge of all matter was null.
While the neutrinos do not contribute to any of the charges, their presence ensures that the total spin, i.e. the total angular momentum, was also null.
Can you please link to a picture of the 2 cubes?
Is this image another visualization of the same thing?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model.svg
We know that the electric charge is not fundamental, but a projection of the weak isospin and hypercharge after the Higgs field symmetry breaking. How are weak isospin and hypercharge related to the 2 cubes?
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Thanks!
> why must protons and electrons be perfectly complementary regarding charge?
According to QED's spin origin of charge, it's because charge comes from spin. What values a particle's spin can take are restricted to certain integer or half-integer values.
> According to QED's spin origin of charge, it's because charge comes from spin.
Children have the remarkable ability to see the world as it truly is, and so are able to ask the most profound questions. As adults, we learn to obfuscate our, ah, knowledge deficiencies in various ways, and so lose that ability over time. I'm of the opinion that great physicists are like children in being able to see through to the heart of the matter, and ask -- and answer -- questions that matter. This is certainly a theme you can see with Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, and others.
Why do I say this? Because GP's question was profound, and saying "it's because charge comes from spin" is the sort of obfuscatory answer I see most physicists give very, very often when they're faced with such questions.
That's completely aside from the fact that "it's because charge comes from spin" is entirely incorrect. All charged particles have spin, but not all particles with the same spin and other similar properties are charged.
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That just deflects the question one level down without explaining anything.
"Because it is" is not a helpful answer to "why?"
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I never heard this. I'm almost sure it's wrong. Do you have a link?
Don’t take things described by physical models (proton, electron, the idea of “charge”, etc.) at too much of a face value.
All it is is a web of predictions: we do A then B seems to happen, reliably. We then transform it into a story of sorts, to categorize and classify, find patterns and correlations—that’s just how our minds work—and those models are useful, as they create shortcuts for more useful predictions—but it’s all too easy to start thinking of entities these models describe as if they were real, concrete things (that’s also how our minds work).
I recommend to maintain a sort of Schrödinger’s treatment (they exist if convenient, but otherwise they don’t really) for things described in physical models, because none of the above-mentioned categorization and classification is set in stone. None of it can be proven to be objectively true, unless you have some sort of exclusive access to the fabric of underlying reality that bypasses your consciousness.
With that in mind, you would see that the weird coincidences are not that problematic. It just means there is a better model out there, and that will always be the case.
I don’t think this is a stupid thought at all. It’s a very good question and appreciate all the answers, it’s something I’ve wondered myself
In the same vein, a neutron can decay into a proton, an electron and a neutrino (Beta decay), so in some sense the neutral neutron is the combination of an electron and proton. (A connection is there?)
In a simplistic way, I see a neutron star as just being a lump of regular (atomic) matter where the high pressure has forced all the electrons into the protons.
Question for someone who might know: Was pressure so high in the early universe that matter originally formed as neutrons, then as pressure reduced electrons and protons were able to separate? Sort of like the formation of a neutron star in reverse?
It was a plasma of quarks and gluons first (these particles make up protons and neutrons and other unstable particles) which did cool down and become these particles. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe]
There is no reason to prefer any of the possible particles, but as all of them are unstable - minus the proton - they eventually decay to that state. (neutrons are not unstable in nuclei and such).
NB: this is quite simplistic and I skipped many details
Makes me wonder if the universe as a whole is electrically neutral. Someone should check!
I also have a question. Why should any theoretical predictions be regarded as Science if there is no feasible way to test them?
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First, I am not a physicist. That said, he's my attempt at an answer that satisfies me: Part of the reason is charge quantization. Neither could be some fractional charge. We also observe charge conservation and electromagnetic force laws as described by quantum electrodynamics (QED). These necessitate that the electron and proton charges be precisely balanced for the universe to function as it does.
But in fact, quarks are fractionally charged: +2/3 and -1/3.
For this to work, there have to be as many quarks in the proton as the denominator of the quark charge fraction. (And what mechanism forces that?)
And why should the charges on quarks be some nice low-number fraction of the charge on the electron? Why not sqrt(3) or something?
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Not a physicist at all but I'd offer the following thoughts on the question of "why":
- Take a neutron, pull out an electron (and an antineutrino), and you're left with a proton.
- Asking why protons and electrons are so different is a little bit like asking why hydrogen and iodine have exactly opposite charges even though iodine is so much more complex: they're made of different things
https://youtu.be/36GT2zI8lVA
Richard Feynman on why questions
That video really annoys me. He's right at one level but totally wrong at another. Yes, you have to explain everything in terms of things people can understand and if they don't know much you can't give a correct explanation... but also, if you actually try, people can understand a lot more than he's pretending they can. Not at a technical level, yeah, but intuitively, it is possible to get general understandings way beyond his attempts at answering that question.
For instance fundamental charges are a lot like positive and negatively-oriented vortices in a fluid, which when they touch cancel each other out and radiate energy away. They're not _exactly_ like that, but they're a lot like it, and that's a model people can understand without knowing the first thing about quantum field theory. Sure, you won't understand from that why like-charges repel each other, not really, but if you play with the analogy for a while it starts to seem why that might be true as well.
(See https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/09/24/samuel-becketts-guide-... for some pictures of this... I wish I had better though.)
Magnetism is quite a bit trickier to explain in this model but it can done with some work. In particular: a charge radiates little linear packets of energy just by existing; when one of these packets hits another charged particle it moves a tick closer or further away (based on +/-). A current/moving charge/magnetic dipole radiates away little spiraling packets of energy which are aligned in the plane orthogonal to the conventional magnetic field; when these hit another charged particle they get rotated a tick.
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At the end of the day loads of these types of questions boil down to the anthropic principle. If it didn’t work out so that things could be stable, nothing would be asking the question.
That’s not a satisfying answer but we don’t have a better one in the realm of science. All we have left is either randomness/serendipity or spirituality/religion.
One issue I have with anthropic filter is that for some reason fundamental parameters fit into a tiny neat table. So out of the vastness of incredibly complex universes that boggle the minds of their creatures we ended up here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model_of_Element...
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First-principles question from an ignorant thinker: why couldn't it be that the presence of +/-e in one of them is due to the subtraction of +/-e in the other? Do we know anything about the finer details of quarks and electrons beyond what we currently can resolve?
Maybe think of it more simply, one precedes the other, this much positive charge in one place attracts negative charge of equal magnitude around it: if you send more electrons (and to be honest, talking of positive charge for a proton is a bit wrong: a positive charge being the absence of electrons... and electrons giving the "negative" charge as they add up), they'll detach and push away those that were already there.
There is nothing convenient, it's as logical as saying that you were tshirts when you go out: there is nothing extraordinary that one torso = one tshirt, as having two or zero tshirts wouldn't help: 0 would make you want one more tshirt, 2 would make you want to remove one.
In a "grand unified theory" (which does not include gravity) the strong, electromagnetic and weak forces are unified into one gague theory. SU(5) is one choice. In these theories, the electron, quark and neurtinos fit together as if they were different versions of the same particle, just as in the standard model the up quark has three "colors". In these theories there is a well defined relation between the charges. You can lookup the SU(5) unified theory to see more. I would say these theories are widely believed, but we have not managed to put them all together yet.
There’s a few good “particle zoo” videos out there for the building blocks.
I took some advanced courses and from my understanding it comes down to the pieces that make up protons and electrons. In the quantum realm it adds some fuzziness to the answer by introducing quarks. The net charge may be one thing but I would defer to a physics paper for a deeper understanding.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21753/why-do-ele...
Something...something...gauge theory.
Or perhaps -- it's a constant in the simulator source code.
Maybe it's so difficult because it's not a constant, but a magic number used in the code. (yeah, I'm dealing with lots of magic numbers in some code currently being worked on)
So first off: charge is quantized. Glossing over some weird particles (like quarks) which can't exist by themselves an integer multiple of e as their charge.
It's been a while since I finished undergrad so my knowledge is rusty, but I don't recall any isolatable particles whose charge wasn't -1e, 0, or 1e. If that's the case, the easiest explanation for why they have the same charge is that if they didn't have opposite charges there wouldn't be anything holding them together in an atom.
clearly related to measure (in the abstract sense) and harmonics of natural numbers. what has fascinated me for years has been the sense that we need to rebuild number up using complex numbers and harmonic measures. what we get are still numbers but no longer this monotonic sequence which is a ‘lazy’ or ‘simple minded’ way of ordering N. when ordered by harmonic measures of primes, N itself has structure (beyond a simple incrementing list) but the order is strictly limited to measures provided (rational) with the prime roots of the measure. (an example is the ‘primorial’ harmonic measure of {2, 3, 5} - think rings).
in these harmonic measures, ‘gaps’ between various levels naturally would arise from simple (x) op. For non-relative prime members, the mapping n x n is all over the place but for relative prime members, n x n always results in another relative prime in the ring, so, naturally those ‘lines’ are ‘stable’ and ‘in phase’ so ‘manifested’.
in other words, there is stuff in the R realm — in between ‘quanta’ — but we’re not allowed, capable, ever, of seeing or measureing it.[edit: as in they ‘exist’ in the same realm that (sqrt -1) i exists in — an unseen realm we call ‘imaginary’..]
Oops, missed the edit window. That was supposed to be "Glossing over some weird particles (like quarks) which can't exist by themselves, all particles have a charge which is an integer multiple of e"
I believe the end of my physics textbook in college just said “be grateful that the charge on the electron is what it is because without it our universe wouldn’t exist if it was even slightly different” or something to that effect.
Our universe may be the trillionth trillionth one created and we are in an anthropomorphic universe just like we are on an anthropomorphic planet. It always makes me grateful.
>The charge on a proton is +1.602 x 10-19 C, and the charge on an electron is -1.602 x 10-19 C.
Sorry that should say anthropic and not anthropomorphic haha. Too much time has elapsed to edit it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
>why must protons and electrons be perfectly complementary regarding charge? if the proton is this insanely complex thing, by what rule does it end up equaling exactly the opposite charge of an electron?
Perhaps "complexity" and "anti-complexity" are the forces that attract. Order and chaos. To have one you must have the other. Without both nothing about this universe would work.
Sorry, I'm high.
One thing to note is that up and down quarks are separated by exactly one unit of charge (2/3 is 1 more than -1/3).
The charge coincidence is one of the reasons that scientists are looking for a grand unified theory -- part of which would ultimately mean that in some sense quarks and electrons are _the same thing_, and the electroweak and strong forces would be unified.
I'll take a shot at this. The "answer," such as it is, is symmetry. The electron belongs to a group called the leptons, which is to say they are lightweight. Leptons obey certain sorts of statistics and consist of the electron, the muon, the tau lepton, the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino, the tau neutrino, and their antiparticles. That's twelve in total.
The mirror of the leptons would be quarks. Up, down, charm, beauty, top, and bottom ... and their antiparticles. Twelve again! Their charges are 2/3e, -1/3e, 2/3e, -1/3e, 2/3e, -1/3e, and the reverse for the antiquarks. One bundle of three quarks is the proton, and it happens to be 2/3e + 2/3e + -1/3e. But so what? There's all kinds of other bundles. Three-quark bundles are typically hadrons (heavyweight) and two-quark bundles are mesons (medium weight). So you have a lot of choices on the other side!
The choices are caused by something called color confinement, which states that you will not get quarks alone. Indeed, you can take a pair of quarks in the aforementioned meson, and if you stretched them further and further apart, when the bond between them (mediated by gluons) snapped, you would have put so much energy into the stretching and snapping to create two new quarks, one at each end of your broken rubber band. Just as you cannot cut a piece of string such that it only has one end, so you have it with color confinement. I don't want to get too far away from the main point but because of this, quarks are found (normally, outside of Big-Bang quark-gluon plasmas) in combination ... and so eventually one of the combinations has a charge number resembling that of the electron.
Also, positrons aren't really the opposite of electrons. They're opposite on the matter/antimatter axis, which automatically flips the charge, q. They are not opposite along the lepton-quark axis, nor are they opposite along the electron-neutrino axis. Instead of one mirror, imagine many mirrors at angles to one another, and "opposite" becomes a less useful term.
One problem with your explanation is that the muon and the tau (and the pion as a decay product of the tau) all decay into electrons, neutrinos and photons, which would suggest that neither muon or tau are fundamental.
This would put the fundamental leptons being only the electron (and its antiparticle) with the neutrino and the photon.
Such an idea would upset the "symmetry" model.
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This is hard to wrap my brain around but thank you for the explanation!
I think we simply observe the most stable states of existence which preclude asymmetry and all other states of matter have either gone extinct, or are so fickle that we can only observe them momentarily. So the deep truth behind why and what exists and what cannot is pretty straightforward.
A simple answer could be that there is an elementary charge. No free particle can have less than this charge and charges are quantized in terms of this elementary charge.
This is in opposition to e.g. mass. There is no elementary mass, and so no particles need to have the same mass.
Huh. It would make a lot more sense if the "complicated" proton was +3 and always paired with three "simple" -1 electrons. Maybe someday we'll find the electron is really three of some even more fundamental particle.
Electrons balance the nuclear charge by their distance from the nucleus. They’re not perfectly equal; the electrons move closer or farther to maintain balance with the nucleus. I think it’s called effective nuclear charge.
Why does light decay quadratically and not linearly? Why are the laws of physics algebraic at all? Why did the Big Bang happen? Ask enough why's and get to: we just don't know. Turtles all the way down.
The first one is well known. It's because it's radiating in three dimensions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
They are algebraic because our minds today can see only algebraic relationships between events.
The big bang is a "scientific myth" - a story that describes the creation of the world in sciency terms.
Maybe the proton is not complex but the process to probe it is. Proton is an aggregate of emergent phenomena like mass and its resultant properties. For a simplistic model assume that proton is a tetrahedron with energy wave generators at the vertices and how those waves interact with each other creates the emergent phenomena like mass, charge etc. It will be difficult to probe such a tetrahedron by just studying the properties of the waves and the peaks in those waves/interference which are perceived as particles by the probes.
Are there intermediate [electron,] charge states between + and - in superfluids and/or superconductors?
Is there superposition with electron charge states?
The typical model of superconductivity says that electrons in the material pair up to form a quasiparticle -- the "cooper pair" -- with new properties, namely not experiencing resistance. The original quantized charge of the electrons still adds up to the same amount.
Unlike protons an neutrons, electrons are considered elementary particles that can't be broken down any further, so their charge can not be "divided" into something less than 1.
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Maybe that was a form of matter that was stable early in the history of time and matter, and so it survived, but others didn't?
Because if it were any other way then you wouldn’t exist to sit there and ponder the question. That’s the unsatisfying answer.
I think it makes sense to draw an analogy to evolution—stable arrangements of elementary particles that (somehow) reinforce similar arrangements around them will come to dominate the observable universe.
> give me a religious explanation that isn't a religious explanation
Then I’ll ask why can’t you use protons as electricity?
It is posible if you remove the wires.
In a CRT monitor, you have a ray of electrons that travel in vaccum and it is electricity outside wires. With a similar device, you can create a ray of protons and have also electricity with protons instead of electrons.
Another posibility is to use a water solution with acid. A part of the electricity is made of H+ that are just protons. (Actually, each proton is atached to a water molecule, so it's more like H2O+ than a plain H+.)
I'm triying to imagine a wire where protons can move. I don't think it's theoreticaly impossible, but they are mmuch heavier and bigger than electrons, so they it looks very difficult to find a material where they can move freely.
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In solids (like metals and semiconductors) the atomic nuclei form stable structures (often crystals). Protons are bound to their nuclei, and the nuclei don’t move, so neither do the protons.
Electrons, on the other hand, can move between atoms, which allows them to form an electrical current.
There are special cases, but that’s the basic answer.
Protons are electricity. But slow. All acid/base reactions. Proton gradients and pumps in the biological cells all work on slow proton electricity.
Who says you can't?
Who says we don't always use it?
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the proton motive force powers us all
Checkmate, atheists
You would think that with my username, I should know the answer. But I have no clue
I mean it's not that complicated to understand. e is just a physical constant. It's been measured as such, with varying degrees of precision. The creator is as lazy a programmer as we are. To make the math work, + and - are used.
friendly suggestion, avoid describing yourself as "not a smart person". Research definitely shows that self-talk can have significant effects. I know this from my own life and experiences, but for the sake of writing this response I asked ChatGPT to look up some research to back me up:
"Sure, positive and negative self-talk can have significant effects on various aspects of mental health, performance, and well-being. Here are some scientific research findings on this topic:
Impact on Stress and Coping Mechanisms:
Research suggests that positive self-talk can help individuals cope with stress more effectively by promoting adaptive coping strategies and reducing negative emotional responses. Conversely, negative self-talk is associated with increased levels of stress and maladaptive coping behaviors such as avoidance (Hanssen, M., Vancleef, L., Vlaeyen, J., & Peters, M., 2013).
Influence on Performance:
Studies have shown that positive self-talk can enhance performance in various domains such as sports, academics, and professional settings. Positive self-talk is associated with increased confidence, motivation, and persistence, leading to improved performance outcomes. Conversely, negative self-talk can undermine performance by inducing self-doubt, anxiety, and distraction (Hardy, J., Hall, C., & Hardy, L., 2004).
Effects on Mental Health:
Positive self-talk is linked to better mental health outcomes, including higher levels of self-esteem, resilience, and subjective well-being. On the other hand, negative self-talk is associated with symptoms of depression, anxiety, and lower overall psychological functioning (Marshall, S., Parker, P., Ciarrochi, J., Sahdra, B., Jackson, C., & Heaven, P., 2015).
Physiological Responses:
Research suggests that self-talk can influence physiological responses such as heart rate, cortisol levels, and immune function. Positive self-talk is associated with reduced physiological arousal and stress reactivity, whereas negative self-talk can trigger a stress response and impair immune function (Penley, J., Tomaka, J., & Wiebe, J., 2002).
Neurological Correlates:
Neuroimaging studies have identified neural correlates of self-talk, showing that positive self-talk activates regions of the brain associated with reward processing, cognitive control, and emotional regulation. In contrast, negative self-talk is linked to increased activity in brain regions involved in threat perception and emotional reactivity (Morin, A., & Uttl, B., 2013)."
Anyway, I'm sure you're not beating yourself up all the time about being a dummy, but like I said in the beginning of this response, just a friendly suggestion about mindset and word-choice :)
How can you ask that and also claim to not be a smart person lmao
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I'm not an expert, but e is the smallest possible charge, so you can't have a fraction of it, probably related to to Plank constant.
Edit: after verification, the smallest possible charge is e/3 (the quantum charge), e is the elementary charge.
A relevant link to for the question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_charge?useskin=vect...
I have no doubt quantum physicists know what they are talking about but when I read stuff like:
“changes its appearance depending on how it is probed"
"you can’t even imagine how complicated it is"
"the proton contains traces of particles called charm quarks that are heavier than the proton itself"
I always think it is the kind of excuse a schoolkid would give their teachers for their calculations being wrong
> I have no doubt quantum physicists know what they are talking about but...I always think it is the kind of excuse a schoolkid would give their teachers for their calculations being wrong.
Just to emphasize how extreme this dichotomy is, not only is quantum mechanics correct (in that it's a predictive model), it's the most correct physical theory humans have ever devised in that the measurements there have more significant figures than anything else.
It's interesting that semiconductor engineers have to directly wrestle with the magic that's quantum tunneling. This theory is really not just a theory.
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So many significant digits includes a level of self-consistency of the model, since we are assuming the model to some degree in order to measure it. Though in this case, it's not the calculations that are wrong, but the model, we hope is wrong. That is, a new perspective and a new way of thinking about things may reveal more. Of course, we are always fighting against the irreducible complexity camp. However, the fundamental lack of cohesion between quantum and relativistic theories demonstrates there is at least one big thing we are still doing wrong.
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That’s awesome to hear.
I totally back the scientists and wish I could understand it better but I always like to have a chuckle that the crazy sounding parts are just the scientists making up stuff
Just because it’s quantitatively accurate doesn’t mean it’s “true”. Like a fun fact I like is the geocentrism was extremely accurate in terms of astronomical predictions when heliocentricism came about (it was actually more accurate for a while).
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Popular science writers on this stuff tend to be in a similar position to the teachers. The real physics is described in complex mathematics and doesn't translate to simple English very well.
It's definitely not wrong, but maybe more akin to the earth-centric view of the universe and the insane patterns that planets would trace in the sky. Just in this case we don't have another object like the sun to use to pivot our models. Maybe there are superstructures hidden that we could access if we could look into objects outside space-time, but until then space-time reduction is what we have right now other than guesswork (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron)
Quantum mechanics is a religion with mathematics instead of just holy texts.
Several studies have been done into whether practicing theoretical physicists using QM in their everyday work agree on the most basic tenets of the field.
Spoiler: they disagree on every aspect while simultaneously assuming that their opinions are correct and that everyone else agrees with them.
That’s how religions work, not how science does. Factions instead of consensus. Branches splitting off all the time and never supplanting the majority. Orthodoxy (Copenhagen). Shunning anyone that steps out of line (Everett). Refusing to question the holy texts, etc…
Another key symptom is requiring members to prove their devotion by saying and doing things that are obvious nonsense. Bending their common sense to the will of the group. In Christianity this is the trinity: one God that is three. In QM it’s the wave-particle duality, which is just nonsense. You can’t have a point with a kilometre long wavelength!! Yet, we are to believe (on faith!) that radio waves are made of photons.
Turns out that magical thinking and religiosity is the essential nature of humans, especially in large groups.
Whenever there is insufficient evidence to bring everyone into line, the line splinters into warring factions where the best argument each tribe has is: “my tribal leader said so!”
All of the disagreements in QM are metaphysical: what is measurement, how does a wavefunction collapse, what is reality, etc. Everyone agrees on the math that leads to predictions (which have been matched by observation to an almost perfect degree). And I'd imagine that just about everyone also agrees that it's incredibly unintuitive. But the math works.
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I want whatever you're smoking, because it's the best predictive theory we have, and is constantly tested and proven. Only the why is in question, but the math absolutely works.
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I mean semiconductor engineers have to deal with quantum effects when designing chips. Its not like it doesn't effect the real world, we do interact with parts of it when things get really small.
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When I read articles like this I can't help but think that if they were probing apples with a hammer, using stronger and stronger hammer blows, they would conclude that apples are flat and mushy. With stronger hammer blows they'd find the apples are paper thin and hot. How do they know when doing these collision experiments that some of the resulting particles are not popping out of the CMB and aren't actually in the things being collided at all?
They're basically plunking the underlying fields with a lot of energy in a small space, causing waves, which are then measured as particles. In a sense, they're not really finding particles that were already there, but they're measuring the behavior of fields at high energies and small scales.
I literally was just having a foggy version of this exact same thought whilst reading the article. Especially
> "Researchers recently discovered that the proton sometimes includes a charm quark and charm antiquark, colossal particles that are each heavier than the proton itself."
You articulated my feeling better than I could. Surely this is something the researchers have accounted for and there's a good explanation (whether I can actually understand it is another story)
https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/09/09/protons-and-charm-q...
It's explained better here.
tl;dr; is that they are virtual particles and don't have the same mass as a "real" charm quark.
Well, not from CMB (because it's too weak) but from the energy delivered by hitting it, through pair creation.
Another weird thing are virtual particles that can popup without energy. They are similar to real energetic particles in a sense that they are manifestation of the same quantum field (for example charm quark field) but they are different from real particles because they don't carry energy and thus can't live long.
World is very weird. Math works though.
Proton is just a weird ball of bubbling energy that stays in one place because up quark and down quark quantum fields got "stuck" together there through complicated colored strong force. But there's so much energy there that wants to get free but can't that there are constantly things popping in and out of existence.
“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’m getting really tired of hazy probability distributions and waves that only collapse and materialize when observed. I 100% accept that QM is a useful tool to model our current understanding based on increasingly sophisticated observations, but I fundamentally don’t believe that a proton is some shape shifting quantum soup of energy that doesn't form until someone comes around and thinks about it. That is unless reality is approximated and expensive compute is directed only toward what’s being observed to better enhance the simulation.
I probably need to add that I am also tired of simulation theory.
I really suspect we just aren't good enough at observing things or don’t exist in enough dimensions to understand what we’re observing. And so the cross sections we are able to pin down end up looking like they are part of some probabilistic system.
I still have bets on this all being a massive game of life.
In the opposite direction, I feel mildly annoyed when people expect a precise/clear answer to questions which can be answered mostly/better with probability distributions.
Considering how you can test statistics in real life (ex: Buffon's Needle) there must be something very "statistical" embedded in reality itself (it is true that quantum mechanics pushes everything very far so can seem to complex).
Statistics and probability don’t bother me and we should use them more. Describing the very nature of the world as a soup of probability out of which observations arise and events take place, however, is getting tired. Superposition is a worn out teaching tool not an actual description of reality.
For my personal purposes I resolved the issue by looking at elementary particles as if they are only the "probability" waves. Never anything else. Measurement is just an interaction and it reshapes the waves making them narrower. But they never become pointlike particles with specified location or momentum. They are always more or less fuzzy.
If they are all bound into macroscopic object they are sharper and as a result they can make other elementary particles they "measure" (interact with) also sharper.
If particles interact with fuzzier part of macroscopic object, like an edge of a slit, they can become fuzzier, more wavy.
So the proton really is that shapeshifting soup. Never anything else. If you hit it with something hard enough it becomes momentarily disturbed into a bit sharper state that can tell us something but it immediately goes back to soup because of chaotic microscopic interactions inside.
The matter looks sharp only on macroscopic level. At the level of particles it's always fuzzy, but we have trouble of ditching the concept of little balls bouncing of each other because the math describing exchange of energy and momentum between those fuzzy "waves" looks like there were some small balls bouncing. But this comes, I believe accidentally only from the fact that all forces have sort of spherical symmetry.
QFT is the most well-tested physics theory mankind has developed and certainly is not a "haze" as the pop-sci articles write.
What they mean by the "haze of probabilities" is that you need to iterate over all possible configurations of the gluons and quarks in the proton to produce experimental predictions.
It is for sure computationally ludicrous, but conceptually it's really not better or worse than to say that particles are billiard balls moving around by Newton's Equations. You're just more used to the latter, but spend some time working with for example Lattice QCD and you get completely used to the former being the "actual" underlying physics rules.
QFT is not complete. It’s one lens through which we model our observations of micro systems. Being well tested just means it’s precise, not accurate.
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IIUC, that is just a hidden variables theory. Bells theorem tells us that it would at least be non-local which is just as weird/interesting IMO.
I really enjoyed this Minute Physics and 3Blue1Brown video describing hidden variables and Bell's theorem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs
As you said, it's implies that we're not failing to measure some "hidden variable" that would explain probabilities away, but that the vary nature of these objects is probabilistic.
In my understanding a wave function doesn't collapse just when someone observes it; it collapses when it participates in any physical event.
"I fundamentally don’t believe that a proton is some shape shifting quantum soup of energy that doesn't form until someone comes around and thinks about it." is the way quantum mechanics is often portrayed in pop sci, but it simply can't be true. Quantum mechanics existed just fine before there was anyone to observe it and think about it.
It reflects the fact that the measurement apparatus, environment in general and the observer in particular are all also part of the "wave function". Until these are linked to the system to be observed (like the proton), the system has to be analyzed as the full set of possible configurations of its constituents.
After you link it up with the apparatus, it is pulled into the system as a new part of it, and so on. The more stuff you pull into the system, the less number of different configurations you sum over, eventually you end up with a single configuration with an observer that has a clear measurement result in her mind. This process is what is called "wavefunction collapse" in old physics texts (and a lot of modern pop-sci accounts).
What sets this apart from other purely probabilistic theories is that it's non-local, the entire linked system from the proton to the measurement apparatus to the observer has to be taken into account in the calculations if you are to be thorough. In local theories you can separate the parts of the system and handle them separately, like you could say "there is a 1% probability that a charm quark pops out in the upper left part of the proton every second" etc. You can't really do this in QM/QFT, and this is what in essence leads to all of the counter-intuitive results and confusion..
I get what you mean, but still I'd rather accept probabilistic particles than the 11-dimensional bull that is string theory.
> I still have bets on this all being a massive game of life.
You might be right!
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but wouldn’t a “massive game of life” also be a simulation? I guess there’s a difference between a mechanistic simulation with emergent intelligence vs a Matrix-like one designed to accommodate (an) intelligence. It’s an important distinction but they’re both simulations.
Yes, the universe is a quantum computer that is continuously calculating itself.
“Simulation theory” suggests we’re part of some other being’s simulation.
> I fundamentally don’t believe that a proton is some shape shifting quantum soup of energy that doesn't form until someone comes around and thinks about it
This is a pop-sci analogy. I find it tiring as well.
The many worlds interpretation doesn't paint the picture this way. It paints it as a recursive for-each loop iterating over all solutions to the next step of the physics function.
> I still have bets on this all being a massive game of life.
...on the back of a giant turtle, amiright?
How bout placing your bets on this instead: it's the evaluation of an algorithm ("physics") on a data structure ("the universe"), and like all algorithms, exists eternally and independent of any substrate.
I had a professor who was fond of saying "the proton is a garbage can".
This is why the LHC (and other hadron colliders) has to run at such a high luminosity (collision rate). Most of the time, when it collides two protons, the parts that interact are only carrying a tiny fraction of the energy, so you don't get the interesting high energy physics you want to probe.
> “In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.”
Well, maybe someone could imagine it, otherwise, all that complexity would have led to a gargantuan number of bugs and the universe would have crashed..
Maybe all the other instances crashed, but we got lucky and get to apply the anthropic principle.
The real question is, are we running on bare metal, in a VM, or in a container?
> The real question is, are we running on bare metal, in a VM, or in a container?
We can't be running on the bare hardware; there is clearly an OS enforcing the hardware abstraction (e.g. every electron is identical).
But is each universe its own process? What happens if you fork()?
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Why do you ask? Are you hoping to ROWHAMMER a parallel universe?
Genuinely curious if there’s any scientifically useful direction to this question
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I’ve never understood the anthropic principle. It’s a very big maybe for seemingly no reason. Existence of a single universe is a pretty hard thing to contemplate, why should we consider multiples of it?
We run on GPUs. The real question is, what does the AI that runs us, run on?
It's all WebAssembly
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This has always seemed to me one of the best arguments against the simulation hypothesis.
>> all that complexity would have led to a gargantuan number of bugs and the universe would have crashed
> This has always seemed to me one of the best arguments against the simulation hypothesis.
Can you expand on that? Are you saying that if we were in a simulation, the observed complexity of the universe (or the complexity of particle physics) would have caused the simulation to crash? Ergo, we are not in a simulation?
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Just needs a little abstraction- and not the leaky variety
The headline image could make for a nice wallpaper, full size: https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2022/10/PROTON...
I enjoyed this sentence
“The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form.”
Could gravity be the effect of mass in an indefinite form? As sort of a vacuum in spacetime?
> As sort of a vacuum in spacetime?
Definitely not. For one thing, gravity isn't just mass. The gravity of a moving baseball is higher than a nonmoving baseball. The gravity of a charged battery is higher than a discharged battery. Same protons, neutrons, and electrons, but if you change their velocity or how they are arranged then they have more gravity. It's the stress-energy tensor, not just the mass (by which you mean matter?).
> Could gravity be the effect of mass in an indefinite form?
A very clear way to see this is not true is to compare stars and black holes to quarks. The space between quarks acts like they are different, larger or smaller quarks depending on how the real quarks happen to be arranged at that moment.
So, if we apply the same idea to a very large star, it would sometimes act like a black hole or a supernova or a star depending on where it was and how it happened to be doing and also maybe just sometimes spontaneously?
But mostly, if it was really far away you would expect it to act like a black hole, because from a far distance it seems like its all in one small point, and a black hole is an irreversible phase transition. But that doesn't happen, and stars look like stars no matter how far away you are. If reality worked like this, we'd expect nearby galaxies to have almost no dark matter and faraway galaxies to have lots and be very small. But instead galaxies and dark matter are pretty much the same no matter how far away they are from us.
This is a pretty ill-posed question though. I'm cramming it into a box that has an interesting answer just for fun, and I don't think it answers much of what you are asking.
We see gravity whenever we see large "clumps" of matter. We keep looking for a physical property of matter than explains gravity, but perhaps it's the lack of something. So when matter appears to attract other matter, maybe they are both "falling towards something".
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I always think 'an experiment' could be said better, because the thing doing the measuring is also a haze of probabilities and the measurement is how these two probabilities interact and change each other.
Nope.
Is it possible the universe is infinitely complex? i.e, "turtles all the way down?".
I find the concept of duality and replication in physics very interesting. Everything seems to have an opposite, with properties such that when these opposites come together, they form a bigger unit, which itself has an opposite.
I don't "believe" too many things that can't be evidentiarily substantiated, but as silly of a thing to reference for this kind of discussion, I personally have the irrational, unscientific belief that this Simpsons opening is unironically the most accurate model of the Universe that we have:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycvlJ9XMd94&ab_channel=cakta...
I’m going to entertain this literally because it’s fun: so we need to zoom out enough to find those big galaxy surrounding atoms which are actually universes, or conversely to zoom in more to find galaxies and a universe within atoms. But it seems that there’s either missing understanding how to cross that zoom in/out threshold or it’s impossible by the laws of physics to zoom so far to make a full circle, like it’s forbidden for the snake to bite its tail. I imagine people have discussed this stuff a lot, and came up with better analogies and more nuanced models
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There is a fractal-like nature to the universe due to certain math thingies working out on all levels (e.g. scale free networks/power laws being all over the place).
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When I was a curious kid, I asked my father the opposite: what if there is one fundamental physical rule that forbids us to know everything about the universe?
Something that we will continuously bump against without being able to resolve further, by definition.
Is there such a thing as Gödel's incompleteness theorems in physics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
The complexity of fundamental physics is vastly overrated, it's just unintuitive. The simplest cell is orders of magnitude more complex than a proton.
Reductionist philosophy is very common in science. It's essentially the idea that you can break things down into simpler parts to better understand how everything works.
It's kind of "common sense", if you understand how all the components on a circuit board function individually, then you can piece together how the entire board will function. In computer science, you can reduce everything to operations comparing 1s and 0s, then use that to deterministically recreate higher-level abstractions like strings, floats, and colors on a monitor.
Then there's quantum physics, which turns reductionism on its head. Things are supposed to get less complicated as you get smaller, not more complicated! It's like the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know.
> Things are supposed to get less complicated as you get smaller, not more complicated!
They're not. In general, once you take a lot of little things to make a big thing, you may notice a bunch of emergent properties, but one of the major emergent property is that... all the variability cancels out, or averages to a simple quantity. See e.g. all the complex dancing of great many particles making up everyday objects, that all average to a simple scalar number we call "temperature".
As I understand it, many "laws" in science, such as Ohm's law, also emerge from this sort of "neatness at scale".
That doesn't happen for everything. Biology is an obvious counterexample.
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I think there's a difference though. The examples you cite relate to artificial things, where reductionism makes sense. Quantum physics describes natural things, where I don't think it does, even at a macro level.
A natural thing's behaviour can't be reduced to the sum of its parts. Example: an organ, taken out of an organism, stops being an organ and becomes a lump of rotting flesh. Its behaviour fundamentally and completely changes. So an organ can only be considered an organ insofar as it's a part of an organism. Similarly, an oxygen atom within a water molecule displays vastly different properties from those it would display when a free radical (or as part of an O2 molecule). Examples could be multiplied. So I don't think quantum physics is any different from the 'macro' world in this regard.
So I think the difference is natural-artificial, not quantum-macro.
> the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know
This is why the "god of the gaps" critique is so short-sighted. It relies on the assumption that as science progresses it will "close the gaps". In reality the opposite happens. Another example is the cell -- in Darwin's day it was thought to be a simple thing, but then we learned more about it and it turned out to be monstrously complex and the mystery intensifies.
We have kind of an opposite problem to the god of the gaps as well, in which a phenomenon can be determined to "just be the way it is", such as objects with mass exerting gravitational forces on each other. We can say "God made them do that" or we can give up and say "We'll never know why, it's just a constant" and both are equally problematic because either way, we assume we can't eventually discover the "why".
Nope, the "god of the gaps" critique has nothing to do scientific discovery being a route to omniscience, something only some religious figures have ever claimed to have even the possibility of access to. It's the set of things religions claim the only explanation/evidence for repeatedly shrinking, as we found explanations for weather that have more predictive power than "the wrath/favour of the gods", found cures for the stuff that was supposed to be divine or karmic punishment and found explanations for differences between animals that we can use to make different animals (in increasingly specific ways), until eventually there was nothing left of the original religious explanations of how things came to be except a determination to posit the divine as the cause of anything scientists weren't confident on.
A shift in the position of the faithful from "this an accurate account of how the world was created direct from the creator" to "well actually that stuff was all metaphorical but the Big Bang must have been God's moment because you can't explain anything that happened before then" is not a trend in favour of the explanatory power of religion.
In the case of protons (or for that matter cells), religion never had anything to say about them in the first place never mind an explanation that's more compatible with quantum phenomena than early 20th century physics, and it's quantum physicists not priests that are the people busy making them do weird things in particle accelerators and saying 'told you this might happen'.
(Also, someone should let the theists know that it's the quirkiness of quarks that proves God's design so they stop writing about how it's the perfect orderliness of atomic structure that's God's design)
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And yet, biology has grown with the complexity of the cell as we know it, as opposed to the bronze/iron-age myths of near-east goat herders.
Smallest parts are less complicated. Even some mammals that have zero intuitions about that scale managed to develop math to describe it pretty much perfectly. Which is impossible with larger scale systems such as cells or organisms where the best we can do is some statistics that accurately predicts some thing sometimes.
There is normal heat death which is when maximum entropy is achieved. Even after that, the universe still goes on complexifying till it reaches maximum complexity at which point there is no other complex states to jump to. - Leonard Susskind.
Had to re-read the Title for a sec. I thought it was referring to Proton, the compatibility layer software.
To be fair, all known implementations of Proton's execution are entirely dependent on protons.
Dependency hell
In fairness, the title probably matches. You go off and write a DirectX translation layer and make it work properly in an entirely different operating environment while matching DX quirks. Absurdly complex.
Well, the natural proton not only was first, but means first (from Greek πρῶτος)
So I think we can give it priority on that one :)
Incidentally, πρῶτον, too, is a word in Ancient Greek.
And here I was thinking it was about Proton, the Mail/Calendar/VPN/Cloud Storage/PM/etc.
Here's another pretty complex Proton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket)
still simpler than a k8s cluster
Agree. I think if one bombard 100K Kubernetes cluster with softballs there still won't be a single repeatable observation.
For a second there I thought I'd missed a breakthrough or 10 and they'd actually manage to record a video of 3 quarks going about their business. Alas, it's only a "data-driven animation", but due to the noise it looks quite convincingly like an experimental recording.
The take home and "easy to digest" conclusion is that the proton is a linear superposition of states. The most likely of these states (the ones with highest amplitude) have 3 quarks. The second most likely have 5 quarks. When you make an observation you may see 3 or 5 quarks.
Is the proton population homogeneous or is each like a snowflake?
Physically can proton 1 behave differently to proton 2 modulo the usual quantum uncertainty around speed/position.
In quantum mechanics, indistinguishable particles (also called identical or indiscernible particles) are particles that cannot be distinguished from one another, even in principle. Species of identical particles include, but are not limited to, elementary particles (such as electrons), composite subatomic particles (such as atomic nuclei), as well as atoms and molecules. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indistinguishable_particles
Then there are neutrons that are like protons with just a little bit more. It's sort of like infinity + 1. Is it bigger or is it equal?
(I know, infinity is not a number, really)
Yes, just what I was thinking: a neutron is actually more complicated than a proton, it's like a proton with an electron stuck inside it.
It makes me so angry that a neutron isn't a proton and an electron stuck together.
No. you can'tput an elelctron inside a proton to get a neutron. If you make them colide and you are lucky, one of the up quarks of the proton changes to a down quark, and now you get a neutron. Both up and down quarks are elelmentary particles as far as we know.
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Huh? With a little bit more what? Complexity? I expected that they would be pretty much the same except with a different mix of the different quarks and such (and also, unstable without having a nucleus to be a part of, and with a neutral charge)
I've heard neutrons described as a union of a proton and an electron based on masses. The reality is probably much more complex.
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Wat?
Neutrons are (primarily) UDD while protons are (primarily) UUD. Although I do wonder if this charm+anticharm ghost exists in other hadrons
> Neutrons are (primarily) UDD while protons are (primarily) UUD.
Yes, this is correct.
> Although I do wonder if this charm+anticharm ghost exists in other hadrons
Yes, neutrons and all the other hadrons have virtual pairs of char-anticharm quarks. (And some of them have actual charm or anticharm quarks.)
A question that came to me as I was reading the article was - what makes us think that all protons are the same ? Can it be that instead of every proton having a superposition of 3 quarks, or 5 quarks or more, we have some protons with 3 and others with 5 ? How did they verify that this is not a case ? I am assuming they never managed to isolate 1 proton and test it twice.
Sounds like it's just a Haskell thunk but as a probability wave
Lazily evaluated until there's a probability it has to interact with something. Since you can never really see the value of the actual function, but only see what it looks like when it's forced to evaluate a computation in some context, an interaction, you can never get a precise definition of the function
The difference is that these thunks can interfere and get entangled with each other.
Control.Monad.Random
> The positively charged particle at the heart of the atom is an object of unspeakable complexity
It's not an object at all. The reason quantum physics is so weird, is that our conceptual model of things existed ng as discrete objects no longer works. An "object" is like a conceptual convenience method on some region of spacetime.
I'm starting to think the model of the atom I learned in school was just plain wrong
Is it surprising there are signs of the heavy quarks? The diagrams that include them have tiny but nonzero values. Hearken back to Hitchhiker's - it is not impossible, just highly improbable.
What’s interesting is that there’s a net charm content: there are more charm quarks to be found than anti-charms.
Given that charm quarks are heavier than the proton, you’d expect to only find them in deep inelastic collisions when they are produced in pairs with an anti-quark, so it is surprising that there’s an asymmetry.
Wait, what? I read the article as saying that it's an open question whether there's a charm asymmetry.
No, it's not surprising theoretically, but experimentally it's still quite an achievement to be able to spot even these rare events.
From the article's description it sounds like they tortured the data until it told them what they wanted. If the charm did show up, how long did it exist? In conventional spectroscopy, the broader the line, the shorter the lifetime (and v.v.) It smells like a sub-attosecond lifetime, if that.
It was a bit of an open question what would happen with the heavy charm quarks, given that they each mass more than the entire proton, but yeah... anything else would have been a major surprise.
I’m of the opinion that particles are like galaxies, the more we zoom in the more we’re going to find, there won’t be an end only another achievement of zoom level.
In the article, quarks and such are referred to as having momentum and angular momentum.
Is that the same thing that affects objects at our scale, or does it mean something different?
Same thing.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262637
Not a dupe (usually used for discussion from the same day or week), but a previous discussion (from two years ago).
The article didn't explain how the charm quark and antiquark hiding in there are heavier than the proton?
The video/animations were pretty nice though.
"mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form"
Sounds like your average codebase.
Is the state space of a single proton sufficiently complex for the complete range of first-person experience to fit within it?
If you supply more energy budget, the proton will be able to throw together a more effective show. I guess that's it.
Reading this I couldn't help thinking of the epicycle theory of planetary motion. Under the holy assumption that planets had to move in perfect circles, people invented increasingly complicated circles-on-top-of-circles models in order to explain all observed trajectories. Then Kepler came along and said "hey, it's an ellipse!"
That sea of quarks might be one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen!
The proton is the most complicated thing I could ever imagine? Pshhhh whatever. I can easily imagine two protons.
For all the simulation argument believers, note that we can't even accurately simulate a single nucleus.
See also: "Do protons really contain charm quarks?"
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/proton-contain-charm...
I'm surprised there isn't a gimmicky VisionPro app for it
(2022)
And neutrons, well, they have a great sense of humor.
Wait till you see the sophon.
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More or less the weak anthropic principle. Maybe once people get universal sequence predictors really going there would be a better argument.
Rather than waiting for god-machines, you could just believe in god.
Not specifically any religion, just god. Or god-entity. Or god-force. Basically, deus ex machina except for philosophy
It's a surprisingly strong position. Respects occams razor, low amount of moving parts, etc.
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You are objectively wrong. It requires no faith. There is simply no evidence for an intelligent being at the root of creation, no data that cannot be explained with much simpler mechanisms than intelligence. The proton is complicated by human standards, but it still is nowhere near as complicated as intelligence. You can't have a conversation with a proton.
Technically it requires faith to assert that the universe did not have its origin from some intelligent supernatural being, just as it does to assert the opposite. The only thing we can truly say based on the data is "we don't know for certain at this time".
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where did all these building blocks come from then? you still know nothing
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Your tone suggests you think this statement is provocative because religion attempts to justify itself with its insidious attempts to appropriate language.
You appear to think “intelligent being” and “faith” are inextricable, but the word faith exists perfectly fine without a need to believe in an “intelligent being”.
What if the rules of the universe are themselves a form of God-like intelligence?
They're omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Their true form exists somehow outside of reality and cannot be (currently) comprehended by us mortals. Their touch can be found wherever we look, but their intent and motivation remain mysterious.
I believe this idea is called Pantheism.
But what is the intelligent being made of? Did they come from randomness or from yet another higher-level intelligent being? You're just scratching the surface of this rabbit-hole!
It's Djinns all the way down, that's why you've got to turn to GOD (GOD over Djinns)...
Summary:
“The proton is an incredibly complex particle that physicists are still working to fully understand. Experiments over decades have revealed that the proton is not just three quarks, but contains a sea of transient gluons and quark-antiquark pairs. The HERA accelerator provided evidence of this "gluon dandelion" structure by detecting low-momentum quarks and antiquarks emerging from gluon splitting. Most recently, machine learning analysis of thousands of proton snapshots found traces of heavy charm quarks within the proton, suggesting its makeup is a quantum mixture of different quark states. Future experiments like the Electron-Ion Collider aim to map out the spins and 3D structure of quarks and gluons inside the proton.
One interesting finding highlighted is the recent discovery, through machine learning analysis of past proton data, that the proton contains traces of heavy charm quarks, implying its composition involves different quark combinations in a quantum superposition. This suggests the proton's makeup is more complex than previously understood.”