[HN Gopher] Inside the proton, the 'most complicated thing you c...
___________________________________________________________________
Inside the proton, the 'most complicated thing you could possibly
imagine'
Author : MetallicCloud
Score : 154 points
Date : 2024-02-14 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| standardUser wrote:
| And neutrons, well, they have a great sense of humor.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Had to re-read the Title for a sec. I thought it was referring to
| Proton, the compatibility layer software.
| tux3 wrote:
| Well, the natural proton not only was first, but means first
| (from Greek protos)
|
| So I think we can give it _prior_ ity on that one :)
| nomel wrote:
| To be fair, all known implementations of Proton's execution are
| entirely dependent on protons.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| And here I was thinking it was about Proton, the
| Mail/Calendar/VPN/Cloud Storage/PM/etc.
| avmich wrote:
| Here's another pretty complex Proton -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket)
| Tagbert wrote:
| 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)
| drdeca wrote:
| 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)
| Tagbert wrote:
| I've heard neutrons described as a union of a proton and an
| electron based on masses. The reality is probably much more
| complex.
| marsissippi wrote:
| Certainly when a free neutron decays it releases a proton
| and an electron, but also (probably, hypothetically) an
| antineutrino.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_neutron_decay
| exmadscientist wrote:
| The neutron and the proton are pretty similar. Of course,
| there's that tiny little bit of extra mass, but other than
| that:
|
| Strong-force-wise, they are very hard to tell apart.
|
| Weak-force-wise, you have the obvious changes in allowed
| interactions, but it's all stuff that's plain once you
| understand the theory of the weak force. No surprises.
|
| Electromagnetism is actually the interesting one: just how
| neutral is this neutral garbage can? There are some
| interesting measurements to be made here. ILL in particular
| has done a lot with neutrons.
|
| And the there's gravity. Gravity, you ask? Really? Yeah! If
| neutrons are really neutral, they don't interact
| electromagnetically, it's hard to get the strong force to
| come out and play, and the weak force only really does its
| thing here on the predictable* timescales of neutron
| decay... so all that's left is gravity. And thus, neutrons
| get used (or, I guess, more commonly just proposed...) as
| probes for gravitational effects! Fun, huh?
|
| (* Mostly. See neutron lifetime controversy....)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _neutrons described as a union of a proton and an
| electron based on masses_
|
| If you squish an electron and proton really hard, you'll
| get a neutron [1].
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_degeneracy_pressure
| bigbillheck wrote:
| And a neutrino:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_capture
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| If I understand correctly, which I probably don't, this
| is what releases the final wave of neutrinos in a
| supernova.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Wat?
|
| Neutrons are (primarily) UDD while protons are (primarily) UUD.
| Although I do wonder if this charm+anticharm ghost exists in
| other hadrons
| gweinberg wrote:
| 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.
| saalweachter wrote:
| It makes me so angry that a neutron isn't a proton and an
| electron stuck together.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| 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.
| pdonis wrote:
| No, it's not surprising theoretically, but experimentally it's
| still quite an achievement to be able to spot even these rare
| events.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| 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.
| missingET wrote:
| 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.
| SaberTail wrote:
| 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.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| (2022)
| indigoabstract wrote:
| > "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..
| erikaww wrote:
| Just needs a little abstraction- and not the leaky variety
| Smoosh wrote:
| 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?
| gumby wrote:
| > 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()?
| ForIveSyntax wrote:
| Why do you ask? Are you hoping to ROWHAMMER a parallel
| universe?
|
| Genuinely curious if there's any scientifically useful
| direction to this question
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I'd watch a movie with that premise.
| wwilim wrote:
| It's all WebAssembly
| andy_xor_andrew wrote:
| 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.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| 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.
| retrac wrote:
| 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.)
| buildbot wrote:
| This made me think - is a concept like most even defined
| for infinity?
| ccozan wrote:
| An interesting point.
|
| How about the universe kept starting and
| collapsing/crashing in an infinite loop until by chance the
| electron and the proton had the exact charge and the
| universe as it is now could go beyong the initial stage and
| could continue?
|
| ( Ok this feels like a trial an error of somebody playing
| universe ).
| p1mrx wrote:
| I could see why a charge imbalance prevents life from
| forming, but why would it also collapse the entire
| universe?
| XorNot wrote:
| It is however, not an unreasonable one. The main problem
| with the anthropic principle is if you use it to justify
| adding free parameters to models which don't otherwise have
| any physical meaning, and then tune them so they correct
| out the problems, wave your hands and say "it must be this
| way because if cannot be any other".
| colordrops wrote:
| Yes, could be the anthropic principal.
| mkw5053 wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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?
| aap_ wrote:
| 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.
| SECProto wrote:
| > quarks have -1 and 2.
|
| Wikipedia suggests the quarks that make up the proton have
| charge 2/3 e and - 1/3 e
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_quark
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_quark
| bradrn wrote:
| The post you're replying to seems to be taking 1/3 e as
| the basic unit of charge.
| opportune wrote:
| Is it true that the quarks themselves, in isolation, have
| that charge? Or is it that combining quarks into a baryon
| or meson gives the resultant particle a charge according to
| a fixed ratio of the constituent quarks?
|
| Gemini advanced says it's the latter, because of color
| confinement. But I'd defer to a human expert
| hazbot wrote:
| OP assigned -3 units of charge to the electron, so all
| works out.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| 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.
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| 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.
| wiml wrote:
| 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.
| a_gnostic wrote:
| The number assigned to charge is an arbitrary convention.
| You could assign quarks with full numbered charges, instead
| of fractions, but you'd have to rework and recalculate all
| of physics and chemistry to get the new values right, and
| that's just too much work.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| 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.
| SECProto wrote:
| 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
| rimunroe wrote:
| 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.
| metricspaces wrote:
| 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'..]
| mianos wrote:
| 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.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| 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?
| lazide wrote:
| If the universe is old, then how do you expect atoms to
| exist if this was not the case?
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| Couldn't there be a different physics where protons had a
| charge of 0.5 and, therefore, every atomic nucleus would
| have twice as many protons as electrons? Or pick any
| other ratio you like.
|
| Or course, I don't mean to hand-wave away the potential
| implications of this. Maybe there would _be_ no atomic
| nuclei in such a universe, for all I know. But if not,
| why not?
| yifanl wrote:
| How would we ever distinguish what half-a-proton is in a
| universe where all protons ever are _always_ paired off?
| derefr wrote:
| Presumably the same way we distinguish individual quarks:
| by smashing the atoms up.
|
| (The more interesting question would be the opposite:
| what if it was two electrons per proton? Then you could
| throw around some photons and end up with a half-proton
| negatively-ionized molecule. What would that look like?)
| selecsosi wrote:
| You are going down the path of theoretical particle
| physics! It is the ultimate question of that to answer
| what is the fundamental element that makes up matter and
| what should we "name" that has a useful property that can
| either be used or helps to explain how other things work.
|
| In reality, "protons" do not "exist" but are semi(very)
| stable collections of energy that interact in an
| interesting enough way in a group that it is useful for
| us to retain the name, rather than refer to it by its
| constituents.
|
| Electrons don't really glob up into things like atoms due
| to repulsion (no moderation by the stron/weak nuclear
| forces) so we don't have a really useful reason to keep
| going beyond the definition of the electron so we just
| stop trying to find additional constituent parts.
| rolph wrote:
| [delayed]
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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 _had_ rons (heavyweight) and two-quark
| bundles are _mes_ ons (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.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Then I'll ask why can't you use protons as electricity?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Who says you can't?
|
| Who says we don't always use it?
| femto wrote:
| 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?
| bugbuddy wrote:
| I also have a question. Why should any theoretical
| predictions be regarded as Science if there is no feasible
| way to test them?
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| I think you might need to define your terms more
| specifically/clearly to be able to get an answer to this.
|
| There's always the layman vs scientists definition of true.
| Like I think most people would say we know gravity exists,
| but in actuality we don't really know what gravity is, but
| we can measure how objects behave and make useful
| predictions about our world and universe because of that,
| with it lining up with other stuff we think we know.
|
| Sorta similarly there's the scientific definition of
| something like dark matter/dark energy where there useful
| for modeling stuff but unlike what the general public
| thinks nobody has actually been able to point to a physical
| object that is dark matter to my knowledge, it's dark
| because it's unseen, not because it's like chunks of black
| stuff we can't see.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Makes me wonder if the universe as a whole is electrically
| neutral. Someone should check!
| wrycoder wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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...)
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| 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?
| dario_od wrote:
| Thanks!
| y04nn wrote:
| 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...
| dboreham wrote:
| Something...something...gauge theory.
|
| Or perhaps -- it's a constant in the simulator source code.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| carabiner wrote:
| 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.
| calibas wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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".
| vacuity wrote:
| As I understand it, many "laws" in science, such as Ohm's
| law, also emerge from this sort of "neatness at scale".
| IshKebab wrote:
| That doesn't happen for everything. Biology is an obvious
| counterexample.
| jononomo wrote:
| > 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.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| 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".
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| still simpler than a k8s cluster
| bmartin13 wrote:
| In my opinion, it takes a whole lot of faith to believe that the
| building blocks of our universe came from a randomness vs an
| intelligent being.
| clutch89 wrote:
| 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!
| Crespyl wrote:
| It's Djinns all the way down, that's why you've got to turn
| to GOD (GOD over Djinns)...
| lisper wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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".
| lisper wrote:
| No, it doesn't (at least not if you are adhering to the
| scientific method). This is a very common bit of religious
| propaganda, and it is 100% wrong. Intelligence has some
| very specific and readily identifiable characteristics. In
| particular, it has high Kolmogorov complexity [1]. This is
| what distinguishes intelligence from other forms of
| complexity, like chaos or the decimal expansions of
| irrational numbers. And there is no evidence of high
| Kolmogorov complexity in the creation of the universe. To
| the contrary, all of the evidence points to extraordinarily
| low Kolmogorov complexity at the foundations of our
| reality, things that can be described in just a few pages
| -- maybe even just a few lines -- of math. So to posit an
| intelligence as the explanation is every bit as unjustified
| as positing that the Tooth fairy is responsible for the
| coin under your pillow.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
| ncneieixk5 wrote:
| where did all these building blocks come from then? you still
| know nothing
| oueewel wrote:
| 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".
| itishappy wrote:
| 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.
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| 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
| Rayhem wrote:
| > 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.
| mcmoor wrote:
| 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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!"
| ChrisClark wrote:
| 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Ah yes, the best predictive theory ever... of one thing
| specifically: the electron g-factor. Your god truly works
| miracles! I am converted!
|
| Can he heal my amputation too? No? Why not?
|
| Ask someone in the field what the same maths predicts for
| the muon g-factor.
|
| PS: No matter what faction a theists belong to, they all
| consistently hate atheists.
| thriftwy wrote:
| If you supply more energy budget, the proton will be able to
| throw together a more effective show. I guess that's it.
| poorman wrote:
| I'm surprised there isn't a gimmicky VisionPro app for it
| supportengineer wrote:
| 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?
| db48x wrote:
| Nope.
| bloopernova wrote:
| 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?
| db48x wrote:
| Same thing.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| I love the notion that staking out an impossible position, i.e.
| "this all came about randomly due to coincidence" is considered
| to be a more "intellectual" position than merely saying "yeah,
| God did that".
|
| Usually, when your position is nearly impossible by definition,
| it's a fairly weak position.
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