Comment by rapjr9
2 years ago
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.