[HN Gopher] Gravity Helps Show Strong Force Strength in the Proton
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       Gravity Helps Show Strong Force Strength in the Proton
        
       Author : thunderbong
       Score  : 58 points
       Date   : 2024-01-28 08:02 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.jlab.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.jlab.org)
        
       | evanb wrote:
       | I explained roughly speaking why this is _called_ gravitational
       | without actually involving an experimental use of background
       | gravity or gravitons in this comment some months ago:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35444056
        
       | rudolfwinestock wrote:
       | From the article: "At its peak, this is more than a four-ton
       | force that one would have to apply to a quark to pull it out of
       | the proton," Burkert explained.
        
       | blueprint wrote:
       | "Protons are built of three quarks that are bound together by the
       | strong force."
       | 
       | Except, not. The number of "quarks" isn't even a constant.
       | 
       | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04998-2
        
         | evanb wrote:
         | The number of valence quarks is 3. Or, put in a more rigorous
         | way, the baryon number of a proton is 1.
        
           | blueprint wrote:
           | so does that make the quote I included totally correct?
        
             | jerf wrote:
             | It makes your point hostile equivocation. If there is a
             | reasonable definition that makes a statement correct and
             | one that makes it incorrect, it is generally not advancing
             | a conversation to assert that the incorrect definition is
             | the one being used and then start berating people for using
             | the wrong one. There are still perfectly reasonable senses
             | in which one can say "protons are made of three quarks" and
             | where that statement is as accurate as could be asked for
             | at this level of detail.
        
               | blueprint wrote:
               | nice opinion but these materials can be used for teaching
               | children.
               | 
               | you might as well teach kids that particles actually
               | exist independently or that gravity is made by mass. oh
               | wait, we do!
               | 
               | while you're at it, hammer years of decontextualized
               | proofs into my kid's adolescent brain so he totally loses
               | his taste for math.
               | 
               | people deserve better, so, no, dude, it's not hostile
               | equivocation, and i suspect you're actually projecting. i
               | wonder what immediate reaction you have when people tell
               | you you're participating in harming people, mr debate
               | expert.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | I remember being a kid. I remember the other kids in
               | school looking a diagram of how a moon orbits a planet
               | that orbits a star and thinking it was a picture of a
               | mouse. This was about age 6.
               | 
               | In my teens I wanted to learn about computer graphics,
               | took me a while (years) to find out that would be
               | matrices and what they do to vectors. Fortunately, from
               | what my niece says, this seems to have become a thing
               | people can actually learn now in the UK during secondary
               | school.
               | 
               | The quantum wave functions necessary for it to even
               | matter that a proton or neutron isn't literally just
               | three quarks, involves maths I'm currently trying to
               | teach myself on Brilliant.org having not at any point
               | needed it despite having just turned 40.
               | 
               | Bluntly, the only time I ever bother with anything more
               | complex than the Bohr model is when I toy with ideas such
               | as "what would it take for a Casimir cavity's negative
               | energy effect to result in mass reduction exceeding the
               | natural mass of the material it is made from?"[0] -- to
               | which the answer at my level of comprehension is "not
               | only is this not possible if you replaced every electron
               | with a tauon, it still isn't going to work in a lasagna
               | phase neutronium[1]".
               | 
               | [0] AKA "can you use Casimir cavities to make a warp
               | drive? No, no you cannot"
               | https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/can-a-
               | casim... -- though note also that I was using an
               | extremely simplified version of the Casimir equation that
               | I assume stops being a good approximation when the
               | wavelengths being excluded imply energy sufficient for
               | pair production events.
               | 
               | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pasta
        
             | rolph wrote:
             | Evidence for intrinsic charm quarks in the proton
             | 
             | "Here we provide evidence for intrinsic charm by exploiting
             | a high-precision determination of the quark-gluon content
             | of the nucleon3 based on machine learning and a large
             | experimental dataset."
             | 
             | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04998-2
             | 
             | this is a tentative model of a Machine Learning "thought
             | experiment". physical observation of the phenomenon must be
             | confirmed before this is cannonized as scientific fact.
        
             | evanb wrote:
             | Stating the conserved quantity (baryon number = 1) makes it
             | correct in a precise, meaningful way, even if it's not the
             | whole story. Most people don't have the background to
             | understand the subtleties of interacting quantum field
             | theory.
        
         | whatshisface wrote:
         | The "number of quarks" has no possible interpretation as a
         | well-defined, knowable quantity except that it would be three.
        
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