[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 : 558 points
Date : 2024-02-14 19:26 UTC (1 days 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 :)
| Koshkin wrote:
| Incidentally, proton, too, is a word in Ancient Greek.
| nomel wrote:
| To be fair, all known implementations of Proton's execution are
| entirely dependent on protons.
| FredPret wrote:
| Dependency hell
| 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)
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| 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.
| 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....)
| floxy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleon_magnetic_moment
| 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
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _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.)
| 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.
| gus_massa wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Isn't it weird how one elementary particle can become
| completely different elementary particle by "absorbing" (?)
| yet another elementary particle? How exactly does that
| happen?
|
| Doesn't each particle species have it's own separate
| quantum field? How does one convert into another?
|
| Electromagnetic field can convert into quantum electron
| field by spawning electron-positron pair from a single
| photon. But all those exchanges are just weird. It's really
| shocking that people managed to figure out the math that
| rules over this.
| 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.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Wait, what? I read the article as saying that it's an open
| question whether there's a charm 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()?
| emmelaich wrote:
| > _every electron is identical_
|
| That's an illusion; there is only one electron.
| ForIveSyntax wrote:
| _buddhism intensifies_
| gumby wrote:
| That's how the kernel implements it anyway; every time
| you do a syscall to look at it you get a different
| pointer to the same 'struct lepton'.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Universe is a quantum computer, forking every Planck
| interval.
| 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.
| tomoyoirl wrote:
| I believe they tried an experiment that was similar to
| that at the start of Schild's Ladder -- and for their
| troubles they were rewarded with a vacuum decay expanding
| through space at about 0.5c.
| skirmish wrote:
| "According to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien
| superpower - maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three
| galaxy-spanning civilizations - is running a timing channel
| attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time
| itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath."
| in Accelerando
| wwilim wrote:
| It's all WebAssembly
| syrusakbary wrote:
| hahaha as a founder working on the Wasm space, this made me
| giggle!
| antipaul wrote:
| We run on GPUs. The real question is, what does the AI that
| runs us, run on?
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| 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?
| tim333 wrote:
| This has always seemed to me one of the best arguments against
| the simulation hypothesis.
| cantrevealname wrote:
| >> _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?
| tim333 wrote:
| My thinking is more that if it was a simulation they
| wouldn't make it so a single proton was so complex as to be
| almost impossible to simulate accurately. I mean is a
| simulation you might expect if to look like pixels or
| minecraft or something close up. Or maybe simple point
| particles. But I don't thing the equations describing a
| proton are exactly soluble and also the results very
| complex so the best you can do is a very approximate
| simulation.
| 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?
| wruza wrote:
| Not a mathematician, but if there's a computable limit,
| then why not? E.g. most integers aren't powers of 2,
| cause lim(n to inf: n / 2^n) = 0
| kjeetgill wrote:
| Probably a cheeky response but certainly!
|
| We can say most positive integers are greater than 5. Or
| most real numbers are irrational. Half of all integers
| are even -- even though there's just as many of both!
| 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?
| wruza wrote:
| How about the universe that quantum-emerges in a truly
| random sequence of quasistates which disintegrate
| immediately, and once in a while it happens to be the
| state that includes "your" "memory" of the previous ones.
| I mean chronologically from your perspective, they don't
| even have to appear in order.
|
| By an amazing coincidence, this particular "frameset" is
| logically consistent and pretty boring, so you have no
| intergalactic empires, no magic, and no job.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Essentially dust theory from Permutation City. I've
| thought about this a lot.
| p1mrx wrote:
| If perception emerged directly from chaos like that,
| wouldn't you expect to _perceive_ chaos, rather than a
| rich world built upon billions of years of evolutionary
| history?
| wruza wrote:
| I don't think there's "rather than" in this idea. You
| surely will perceive every state that is perceivable at
| all, but time and continuity have no meaning here.
| Specific history is just an image that always exists only
| for an instant. Eventually that universe might enumerate
| all states, so they'd form all sorts of sequences, but
| that's coincidental.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Sure, such a universe would create all states, but if
| perception from chaos were possible, then there would be
| overwhelmingly more chaotic states to perceive than
| sensible ones, so you would expect to find yourself
| perceiving chaos.
|
| I think perception cannot exist without a robust
| evolutionary history to build upon, which is why you
| perceive something sensible.
| wruza wrote:
| It depends on what we see as "perception". Imagine in our
| regular universe model, the "perceptor" quickly switched
| between all creatures just like a CPU core switches
| between all busy processes. That wouldn't invalidate any
| of the creatures/processes "experience" and wouldn't mix
| them (ignoring cache, processes aren't _that_ isolated
| really). All these processes are transient states of the
| same physical CPU core.
|
| Back to the chaotic universe, the "perceptor" switches
| between the states, every state is a complete picture.
| Yes it does see more chaotic states, but they don't leak
| into each other, including through expectations. There's
| no memory outside of a state that it could accumulate and
| experience continuously. Eons of state changes pass
| between two attoseconds, but there's no way to remember.
|
| That's what I mean by perception. In-frameset perception
| obviously has to be continuous to make (or not make)
| sense.
| p1mrx wrote:
| That would still make the human brain an exceptionally
| rare state, compared to all the other chaotic states the
| perceptor perceives.
|
| This particular human brain refuses to believe that the
| perceptor perceives anything when selecting a chaotic
| state. If you'd like to hear chaos' opinion on the
| matter, please pound on your keyboard for a while.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Sssshhhh, you'll summon all the simulation people out of
| the woodwork!
| 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".
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I'm not very sympathetic to the view that we're very lucky
| to be in this universe. That said, there is an interesting
| response to the anthropic principle response, which I'll
| mention here just because I think it's interesting to think
| about what's wrong with this objection:
|
| Suppose you and I were living in a totalitarian state. The
| state decides that you and I are to be put to death. They
| drag us into a field, and a shooting squad of several
| marksmen surrounds us. They all fire - but miraculously,
| every single one of them misses us.
|
| I then turn to you and say, "Wow, the odds that all of
| those bullets missed us by sheer chance are so incredibly
| low. Clearly, it wasn't by chance - they must have
| coordinated to ensure they missed us, intentionally."
|
| You then turn to me and say, "No, that's silly. It's simply
| that if any of the bullets had hit us, we wouldn't be
| around to talk about it."
|
| Your line of reasoning here doesn't seem to be very
| compelling. Why?
| lagadu wrote:
| A small note: the anthropic principle doesn't make us
| "lucky" to exist in a universe that supports life, quite
| the opposite. The probability of life coming to existence
| in a place (universe, celestial body, whatever) that
| doesn't support it is zero. The fact that we exist in a
| place that supports life is simply due to the probability
| of it happening here is >0, therefore we're here only
| because statistics determines that we can't be anywhere
| else. It's not luck, it's simply a statistic outcome.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Yes, right. Maybe you misread me, I meant to say that I'm
| skeptical that we're lucky because I'm sympathetic to the
| anthropic principle response. I then go on to play
| devil's advocate.
| lagadu wrote:
| Ah, I misinterpreted that.
| colordrops wrote:
| Yes, could be the anthropic principal.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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=12975257
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593432
| 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?
| Gravityloss wrote:
| There exist "stable" exotic particles of that have non
| ordinary amounts of lower level quarks.
| https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/lhcb-discovers-
| long...
|
| Maybe they might have non integer charge.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| In QCD, they cannot. All Feynman diagram vertices
| involved in producing these things (in fact all QCD
| vertices period) only deal in integer charge units and
| never leave fractional charges floating around.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Ok, I see. Also pentaquarks all have integer charge.
| rainbowzootsuit wrote:
| I think this is more of a historical artifact rather than a
| fundamental measurement. In the Millikan oil drop
| experiment he was able to measure quantized units of charge
| by stripping a single electron from a drop [1], so much
| later when quarks are figured out they are proportional to
| the base unit of charge.
|
| This is similar to how Ben Franklin, having no knowledge of
| elementary particles, defined the positive and negative
| polarity of electricity, so we have "electron holes"
| flowing from the positive end of a battery to the negative
| end in "conventional current." [2]
|
| Edit to add: the electron's non-even charge numbers comes
| into light when you see that the charge is
| 1.602176634x10-19 Coulombs, where 1C/second= 1 ampere. If
| we were trying to come up with the definition of an ampere
| with nice base 10 numbers of electrons this would be much
| different.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment
|
| [2] https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engin
| eerin...
| 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
| lnauta wrote:
| Quarks can not be alone, because of this confinement.
| What we see experimentally is that when we add energy to
| particles at some point they split into new particles and
| we never see a naked quarks.
|
| We explain this by saying the quarks have a color charge
| and it must always be neutral. A single quark would be
| lets say red, but that's for some reason not possible. If
| we try to rip the quark out, it takes so much energy that
| this energy can be used to create another quark that
| results in a color neutral particle (red, antired)=meson,
| (red,green,blue)=baryon.
|
| NB: this is a bit simplistic and other comments explain
| this quite in detail NB2: this color charge is just a
| name, its not an actual color
| 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.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Resonance seems a candidate.
| photon_lines wrote:
| Information compression (edit sorry you said no one knows
| why the need to symmetry groups and I provided the answer).
| exe34 wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| calamari4065 wrote:
| No matter what arbitrary value you assign to the electric
| charge, quarks will _always_ be 1 /3 of that. That's the
| problem in question, not the absolute value.
| twic wrote:
| So quarks have a charge of 2 or -1, and a two of the
| former and one of the latter make a proton, which
| therefore has charge 3. An electron is elementary, but
| also has charge 3. The question is: that seems like a
| weird coincidence, how come it's like that?
| 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'..]
| rimunroe wrote:
| 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_ "
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| We see naked protons and mismatches between nuclei and
| electrons all the time, so I don't see why half-charge
| protons would be "_always_" paired off.
| lazide wrote:
| Sure. Some interesting thoughts in sibling comments too.
|
| Personally, I find the taste of hot chocolate just as
| nice regardless of the exact mix of quarks composing its
| constituent elements.
| lagadu wrote:
| If that were to be the case, we'd have to change the
| values of the other forces that these charged particles
| interact with, such as the strong force.
|
| Not that it wouldn't necessarily be possible, but it
| would require everything we know about physics to be
| remodeled because the consequences are vast, fundamental
| even. So yes, with an entirely different model of the
| universe that would likely be possible.
| rolph wrote:
| a proton, in the simplist version, is made of 3 quarks. two
| up quarks one down quark.
|
| down qwark is -1/3 e ; up quark is +2/3 e.
|
| they sum up to +1 e.
|
| neutrons are the opposite made of 3 quarks. two down quarks
| one up quark. and sum to 0e
|
| the unitary quantity is a conveinience.
|
| 1 e = 1.602176634x10-19 coulombs,
| Balgair wrote:
| Yes, yes, I also understand this.
|
| But _why_ are they in units of 1 /3(e).
|
| Why are down quarks not -0.398390847895...(e) and up
| quarks not +0.6234098129034809234...(e). Why do they add
| up so damn neatly?
| edgyquant wrote:
| Because they are mathematical models built to describe a
| thing and thus their entire purpose as a concept is to
| add up "neatly"
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I'm getting very strong "angels on a pinhead" vibes from
| this
| jacquesm wrote:
| With the minute difference that we do not have
| experimental validation for Angels dancing on a pinhead
| whereas there is a massive amount of experimental
| validation for the standard model.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I thought he meant "angles on a pinhead".
|
| Now you're talkin' tri-angular!
|
| https://cidu.info/2022/05/06/thats-a-cute-angle/
|
| Right angles are wrong angles! Death to th' T-square!
|
| https://comicskingdom.com/zippy-the-pinhead/2023-07-02
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Thank you for your contribution, my fellow Pynchon
| Enjoyer
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| So you're saying that all we need to do is experimentally
| validate the number of angels dancing on a pinhead?
| wombatpm wrote:
| Measure the area of a pinhead, divide by cross-sectional
| area of an angel. Easy peasy.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Division by zero error.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| No, these are models with simple, testable properties.
| You can't wave away the fundamental charges as something
| somebody made up to make the models nice, conspiracy
| theories don't work when there is a simply observable
| truth.
| feoren wrote:
| No. These are not numbers physicists just pulled out of
| their asses. You act like the mathematical model could
| have been anything else. That's not just wrong, but
| decidedly anti-science.
|
| We can test your theory: if the entire purpose of the
| mathematical model was to "add up neatly", and that's the
| reason why charge(proton) / charge(electron) is a nice
| round -1, then that should be true for other properties,
| right? What is mass(proton) / mass(electron)? It's
| 1836.1526734... Is that nice and neat? No, it's not. And
| yet physicists didn't decide to adjust their theory
| because that number offended them, as you suggest. Turns
| out you're spreading anti-science disinformation for
| absolutely no reason.
|
| The purpose of the theory is to describe reality. In the
| case of charge, it is reality that adds up "neatly".
| delecti wrote:
| Could be a bit of anthropic principle at play. Universes
| where things don't work out with some stability might not
| support chemistry, and biology is especially finicky
| chemistry.
| yummypaint wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_formulation_
| of_...
|
| Mathematically it works out that way because the standard
| model is build up from symmetry groups. The hand wavy
| explanation is that the symmetries observed in nature
| wouldn't be reproduced if the charges differed by random
| irrational numbers.
|
| The same is also generally true of other conserved
| quantities in the SM. Noether's theorem unifies
| symmetries and conservation laws as the same thing.
|
| As far as a more fundamental explanation as to WHY the
| universe is this way, ask your god i guess.
| blueprint wrote:
| when you understand quantum theory correctly, you will
| realize that particles don't exist by themselves. They
| are a temporary localization. this means that the number
| of quarks inside a proton is not actually fixed. when a
| particle becomes disentangled with the system, that
| localized it, there's no longer a particle
|
| I mentioned this recently, in the context of the laziness
| in language, leading to the miseducation of those who
| don't know better, and was heavily downvoted and
| ridiculed
|
| keep it up, hn, you'll see idiocracy soon enough and then
| no one will trigger you
| rolph wrote:
| thanks, i want to stress the model of the proton i had
| posited up thread is very simplified, for the purpose of
| explanation.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| HN is a great training ground for learning how to present
| arguments in a compelling, engaging manner.
| blueprint wrote:
| that may be true, but I'm already highly trained at that.
| But hey, what if you just ratchet up the difficulty to
| infinity. Then it will train people even better. Either
| that or it'll destroy the community because you dont have
| any criterion of right and wrong in your claim.
|
| It doesnt matter how correct people are. The more correct
| people are the worse they're treated. The better we get
| at presenting true arguments the more you will resent us
| and the more you have no choice but to react with
| violence (being unable to admit your lie), as HNers do
| now with trap counterarguments and gaslighting. No wonder
| suicide is on the rise.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| What's the lie that needs to be admitted?
| blueprint wrote:
| the lie i meant is if people claim to want to know what
| they dont yet. it usually happens without their
| realization.
|
| look in the history of the greater philosophers
|
| you see it in the mechanism of narcissistic abuse as well
|
| you might also read up on the girardian scapegoat. the
| point is people like the comfort of falsehood so it tends
| to propagate more easily. few who were around masters
| wanted the actual teaching rather than some life quality
| improvements and basic answers. One of the merits certain
| people can get by hanging out around a real teacher is
| that those people can pretend that they were one of the
| people who wanted to know in front of those who don't
| know any better.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I feel what you're saying, but it's incumbent on people
| who understand stuff to explain it to people who don't in
| a way that they can comprehend
|
| The reality is that we're all ignorant about most things,
| so having an attitude with someone around something you
| know - irrespective of how you know it - is a losing
| strategy and as you said leads to poor interactions
|
| Try to give people more grace and you'll find people are
| more capable than you might know
| blueprint wrote:
| I'll try to keep it in mind. thanks for your kindness.
| rvba wrote:
| What do you mean by "temporary localization"? That
| protons move? That they can poof? They dont seem to self
| destruct.
|
| On a side note: are there any models that assume that
| there are fields/shapes that are constanly bombarbed by
| neutrinos and other stuff. Thks bombardment seems to be
| always ignored
| Avicebron wrote:
| by drawing a hypothetical box around your system with and
| measuring it, you've bounded it locally.
| blueprint wrote:
| no, we're talking about quarks
|
| or any isolated quantum systen
| blueprint wrote:
| without being localized, they remain a probability wave
| because the "universe" of information literally doesn't
| know enough about them anymore
| anon84873628 wrote:
| I was ready to up vote until the third paragraph.
|
| Reading your other comments down thread doesn't paint you
| in a good light. Maybe your argument about laziness in
| language wasn't as cogent as you thought. Maybe you
| aren't as good at presenting arguments as you thought.
|
| In other words, maybe you need some humility.
| blueprint wrote:
| yeah maybe
|
| but if you knew for sure you'd be able to be sure of that
| and also show the proof
|
| instead what you did is present the impression that you
| had which is a synthesis of what you encountered and what
| was in you from the past.
|
| If you study much philosophy, you'll have to admit the
| fact that a large number of people turn away from what is
| true. It's not pleasant to you, I know. nor is it
| pleasant for you to see the product of the system that
| you want to close your eyes to talking to you in an
| unpleasant manner.
| gjm11 wrote:
| So far as I can tell, the fact that
|
| _" particles" are just what we call particular kinds of
| excitations in quantum fields_
|
| doesn't in any way answer, or obviate, or otherwise
| demystify the question of
|
| _why the electric charge associated with one sort of
| "particle" should be exactly 3x the electric charge
| associated with another_.
|
| So your comment is not only gratuitously rude, it's also
| either (1) wrong or (2) missing some essential
| explanation.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Because that is the universe we live in. We don't know
| where the universal constants come from, if they are
| random, or selected. Science can't really answer the
| question of "why", it only does "how".
| snarfy wrote:
| My layman understanding is that charge is not
| fundamental. It derives from something called weak
| hypercharge.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_hypercharge
| nojvek wrote:
| It's essentially asking why is the speed of light
| 299,798,452 m/s or the gravitational constant 6.67x10-11
| Nm2/kg2
|
| I'm sure a universe could work with those constants
| varied but that's the one we have in our universe.
|
| There could be hypothetical universes with protons being
| half of electron and atoms would have twice the protons.
|
| However the fundamental constants are just that. A number
| that allows us to reason about how the universe works.
|
| As to why the number is that, gotta ask your God why they
| chose that specific value.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > It's essentially asking why is the speed of light
| 299,798,452 m/s or the gravitational constant 6.67x10-11
| Nm2/kg2
|
| No, because those constants are entirely arbitrary.
|
| The curiosity here is that you have multiple numbers
| _lining up_ , only separated by small integers.
| lostemptations5 wrote:
| They are arbitrary in the sense that we could just change
| them and the universe wouldn't fl appart -- or are they
| derived from aonething deeper.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| The obvious way in which those constants are arbitrary is
| that the meter is just a random length we compare other
| lengths to (and the gram is an arbitrary mass we use).
| So, the precise numbers are only meaningful as part of a
| system built on these units
| lostemptations5 wrote:
| "Since 2019 the metre has been defined as the length of
| the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time
| interval of 1/299792458 of a second, where the second is
| defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium."
|
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre)
|
| I wouldn't call it totally random, no. It's really
| derived from somethings real in this universe.
|
| > So, the precise numbers are only meaningful as part of
| a system built on these units
|
| That doesn't sound particularly random. And in fact we
| agree here.
| cgriswald wrote:
| No.
|
| Some of you are talking past each other. The speed of
| light being exactly the number _c_ is arbitrary, because
| the choice to use the ephemeris second as the base unit
| of time (regardless of the precision we get by now using
| cesium atom "beats") _is arbitrary_ even though it's
| based on something real. That's just standardizing our
| arbitrary choice.
|
| The charge of an electron is also effectively arbitrary
| for the same reason. We can have our units based on
| whatever real thing we want.
|
| What _isn't_ arbitrary is that, whatever units we use and
| whatever number we arrive at for the charge of the
| electron, it true that the quark charge units are (1
| /3)e. Thus, as the poster pointed out there is a
| fundamental difference in asking why it works out that
| way compared to asking why the speed of light is a
| particular derived number.
|
| tldr: The poster above is wrong about his claim that it's
| like asking "Why is the speed of light..." because he's
| comparing a _number_ to a _relationship_.
| lostemptations5 wrote:
| OP: "It's essentially asking why is the speed of light
| 299,798,452 m/s or the gravitational constant 6.67x10-11
| Nm2/kg2 I'm sure a universe could work with those
| constants varied but that's the one we have in our
| universe.
|
| There could be hypothetical universes with protons being
| half of electron and atoms would have twice the protons.
|
| However the fundamental constants are just that. A number
| that allows us to reason about how the universe works.
|
| As to why the number is that, gotta ask your God why they
| chose that specific value."
|
| And so the post I responded too said these constants are
| totally RANDOM / ARBITRARY.
|
| But they cannot be otherwise the universe wouldn't work
| (as far as we know).
|
| The measurements or units we use to express these are
| arbitrary-- but the constants themselves are DERIVED from
| the system we call the universe. Without them the system
| wouldn't work.
|
| Is this really so controversial?
| cgriswald wrote:
| As I said, people were talking past each other. I don't
| agree with the guys argument as to why that matters. I
| just don't agree with your explanation.
|
| My objection to your post is that the meter being defined
| based on physical reality isn't meaningful. It isn't the
| same thing as saying "the speed of light is c because c
| is the speed of light and we've derived it to be c (in
| our system of units)."
| chii wrote:
| Or, there's some more fundamental rule that's being
| followed that we haven't discovered yet that explains
| these numbers.
|
| Physicists have been searching for the Grand Unified
| Theory since forever, and so far, no real luck. The
| closest is something i'm not too familiar with called
| M-theory (which is a derivative(?) of string theory).
| oldandtired wrote:
| The first thing to point out here is that the
|
| > the speed of light
|
| is not
|
| > 299,798,452 m/s
|
| It is quite inaccurate to say this. The correct way to
| phrase this is that the speed of light is
| 1/sqrt(permeability * permittivity) of the medium through
| which the light is traveling.
|
| For a perfect vacuum, these two properties of that vacuum
| give a result as specified above. For other specified
| medium, you will get a different value, which could be
| greater than or less than the above figure.
|
| Little technicalities matter in such cases, as it opens
| up the discussion. Part of that discussion is that solar
| space or interstellar space or intergalactic space will
| have distributions of matter that can alter what the
| speed of light is away from the assumed perfect vacuum
| speed of light.
|
| Simple assumptions such as perfect vacuum are quite
| likely to affect how accurate our models of the universe
| are. The problem for us is that we are here and not out
| there making actual on location measurements of the
| permittivity and permeability of the relevant regions.
| The assumptions made in our models can come back and bite
| us in the long term.
|
| Now as for the models we use currently for proton and
| neutron structure, there are assumptions here that could
| well be misleading us even though our models appear to
| work. There are alternate models available (since at
| least the early 20th century) which have, as far as I
| know, not been investigated with any detailed effort.
| Now, of course, it doesn't mean that these alternatives
| are actually viable, but we don't really know at this
| time.
| pnut wrote:
| Another important point is that other things besides
| light (for instance, gravitational influence) travel at
| the speed of light.
|
| It's actually the speed of causality / information
| transfer.
| bbor wrote:
| Ok probably a dumb take but: doesn't that "stable forms
| become more common over time" principle also apply to
| protons purely by principle of them being in opposition
| to electrons? Ie the field that coalesces into the quarks
| we see today because those quarks can ultimately form
| atoms.
|
| EDIT: after reading the great Wikipedia article above,
| and a connected one [1], I think I can restate: the only
| place we can look for these particles is in atoms, so it
| shouldn't surprise us that they come in convenient forms
| to support atom formation.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_symmetry
| lagadu wrote:
| You're effectively asking why universal constants are the
| value that they are. Eventually there's no answer other
| than "it's a property of the universe we live in that we
| observed."
|
| If you keep asking why eventually you'll reach a ratio
| between two values: constants and you can't really go
| further deeper than that. Even if the values we have now
| end up not being the most fundamental, eventually you'll
| run into the fundamental ones and still have the same
| question unanswered.
| mulmen wrote:
| How does 2/3 - 1/3 not sum to 1/3? 2-1 is 1, right? What
| am I missing?
| eindiran wrote:
| 2 up quarks, so 2/3 * 2 -> 4/3. And then 4/3 - 1/3 = 3/3
| = 1
| mulmen wrote:
| Ah ha, I thought it was 1/3 _per quark_. Thanks.
| lostemptations5 wrote:
| Thanks I wondered the same
| trenchgun wrote:
| >the unitary quantity is a conveinience.
|
| Ah right, so basically its just a convenience notation?
| We could as well say that proton has 3 and electron is -3
| charge?
| feoren wrote:
| > We could as well say that proton has 3 and electron is
| -3 charge?
|
| Absolutely! In fact that would have been much more
| convenient, since the "quantum of charge" appears to be
| 1/3 of the charge of the proton. All units of charge
| we've ever observed seem to be integer multiples of 1/3
| _e_.
| est wrote:
| > a proton, in the simplist version, is made of 3 quarks.
| two up quarks one down quark.
|
| OP's article has a full paragraph dedicated saying that
| "The proton is much more than three quarks"
| riwsky wrote:
| A proton, electron, and a neutron walk into a bar...
| oldandtired wrote:
| After about 15 minutes, the neutron has changed into
| another proton and electron, so bar now has a bigger
| party on its hands.
| amelius wrote:
| How do they split the bill?
| lagadu wrote:
| This is a good question. Should the bill be split by
| mass, charge or spin?
| lavasalesman wrote:
| I like your explanation.
|
| > There is lots of matter that is still unstable.
|
| What are you referring to with this?
| undersuit wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay
|
| I need to read the article, but yeah protons might not be
| stable, we just need to wait a long time to find out.
| mianos wrote:
| And free quarks within stars in conditions where they are
| not confined. They can exist unconfined for a real short
| time. At the start of the big bang there were a lot of
| them.
| lagadu wrote:
| Quark stars, a type of star whose density sits between
| neutron stars and black holes are theorized to exist,
| though we have no conclusive observations of one yet.
| 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.
| fblp wrote:
| This is hard to wrap my brain around but thank you for the
| explanation!
| oldandtired wrote:
| 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.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I never suggested that they are fundamental, and nobody
| said that the symmetry is perfect. In fact, the way the
| various symmetries break is what gives rise to all of this
| complexity and only raise more questions.
|
| Also, photons are not leptons -- wrong spin for that. Which
| in turn can raise yet another axis for our funhouse of
| mirrors: fermions versus bosons.
| 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?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Not sure, but Protons are ~1800x more massive than
| electrons even though they have the same electric charge,
| so it seems like they would need 1800x more energy to move
| them.
|
| Power in an electric circuit is Watts, which is current in
| Amperes times voltage. Amperes are one Coulomb or
| 6.241509x10^18 electric charges per second flowing through
| a conductor. So a fixed amount of power (Watts) moves a
| known amount of charges. If we were sometimes moving
| protons instead of electrons, maybe we'd notice three
| orders of magnitude difference in quantity of charges in
| different experiments?
| sumitkumar wrote:
| It is not yet proven that electrons need to flow from
| point A to point B to transfer electric energy. There is
| local movement but not in the sense that electrons are
| flowing through a hose to transfer power.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Electric Power isn't like a pipe and water wheel where
| you need a net flow of electrons. The work is done by the
| electric field, which is why we can have AC power where
| electrons don't have any net travel.
|
| This also is why electric power flows along a wire at the
| speed of light, while electrons can only travel along a
| wire at the speed of a snail, or about 1 mm per second
| roelschroeven wrote:
| > The work is done by the electric field, which is why we
| can have AC power where electrons don't have any net
| travel.
|
| One doesn't follow from the other. We can easily
| transport power by making things like a chain or a fluid
| move back and forth, without any net travel. In a setup
| with a loudspeaker and a microphone as just one example
| the air transfers energy from one to the other without
| any net movement. In those cases it's clearly the
| movement itself which transfers the energy. Therefore
| energy transport by AC is no proof for the need of an
| electric field for energy transport.
|
| That's not say to there is no electric field, or to deny
| its role in power transfer. There certainly is an
| electric field. But that field is intimately tied to the
| electrons in the conductor, and power transfer is
| intimately tied to movement of those electrons and the
| way electrons repel each other stronger when they get
| closer together (or other charge carriers, but in typical
| conductors that means electrons). You can't have one
| without the other.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Indeed! My points was that you aren't consuming electron
| charge, like you consume kinetic energy of water flowing
| through a stereotypical waterwheel. That is to say, I was
| giving a example, not claiming a rule.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _The work is done by the electric field, which is why
| we can have AC power where electrons don 't have any net
| travel._"
|
| Still though, you asked how we know electricity uses
| electrons rather than protons and I'm sticking with
| "they're 2000x different in mass, there would be some
| measurable difference between them" even in an AC
| circuit. Oscillating a more massive conveyor belt back
| and forth 'in-place' is harder work than oscillating a
| lower mass belt. "Electrically charged" means "interacts
| with the electric field" and if energy in the electric
| field is moving heavier protons back and forth, wouldn't
| that be distinguishable from moving lighter electrons
| back and forth? Slower movement of protons, more heat
| generated, something like that?
| ludsan wrote:
| the proton motive force powers us all
| gus_massa wrote:
| 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.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Too late to edit: Instead of "H2O+", it should be "H3O+".
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydronium
| sumitkumar wrote:
| Protons are electricity. But slow. All acid/base reactions.
| Proton gradients and pumps in the biological cells all work
| on slow proton electricity.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| bugbuddy wrote:
| I am going to get downvoted into oblivion again for
| asking this follow up question but that's what I live
| for. What is the line between Physics, a scientific
| endeavor, and Metaphysics, a philosophical one?
|
| Please set my transparency as high as you can. I totally
| deserve it. Let me fade into oblivion.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Physics is testable within the known laws of physics.
| Metaphysics is not.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Broadly speaking, philosophers of science don't think
| there's a generic answer to what differentiates
| scientific inquiry from not-scientific (or
| pseudoscientific) inquiry. Popper put forward the
| criterion of falsifiability (if it's falsifiable, it's
| science, otherwise, it's not science), but after Kuhn and
| Feyerabend's arguments, philosophers generally drifted
| away from thinking there's some hard-and-fast rule to
| differentiate science and pseudoscience.
|
| If you're interested in these issues, you might enjoy
| Chalmers' _What is this Thing Called Science?_ , an
| introduction to the philosophy of science that addresses
| issues like these. Or a primary source like Feyerabend's
| _Against Method_ , quite a fun read, though maybe not one
| that many philosophers of science today would give their
| full-throated endorsement of.
| gls2ro wrote:
| Metaphysics can answer Why questions while Physics is
| more concerned with How and What questions.
| dylan604 wrote:
| As long as it's called a theory instead of fact, then why
| isn't it science. We might not have enough tech or
| information on being able to create the test.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Makes me wonder if the universe as a whole is electrically
| neutral. Someone should check!
| lnauta wrote:
| 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
| 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?
| adrian_b wrote:
| No, that figure is not it.
|
| I do not remember now where to find a suitable figure, but
| these are the coordinates of the corners of the 2 cubes:
|
| neutrino & antineutrino: (0,0,0)
|
| electron: (-1,-1,-1)
|
| positron: (1,1,1)
|
| down quarks: (-1,0,0), (0,-1,0), (0,0,-1)
|
| down antiquarks: (1,0,0), (0,1,0), (0,0,1)
|
| up quarks: (1,1,0), (1,0,1), (0,1,1)
|
| up antiquarks: (-1,-1,0), (-1,0,-1), (0,-1,-1)
|
| The particle-antiparticle pairs have an inversion symmetry
| over the origin.
|
| The quark triplets have a rotational symmetry of order 3
| around the principal diagonal of the cubes that passes
| through the origin.
|
| The weak isospin and the hypercharge are an alternative
| equivalent expression of the charges, but I prefer this
| picture as it is easier to understand and visualize. It
| also demonstrates the quantized nature of the charges that
| determine the strong and electromagnetic interactions, and
| that they are based on the same quantum, so they are not
| independent interactions. The also quantized spin must be
| added as a fourth value, to completely determine the weak
| interactions too.
|
| The various sets of values that can be taken as charges are
| related by bijections (one-to-one correspondences), so
| which are taken as fundamental is a matter of convention.
|
| In any case the chromodynamics is useful only for providing
| qualitative insights and for distinguishing things that are
| possible from those that are impossible. It is completely
| useless for computing quantities that are useful in
| practice.
|
| As it is also obvious in the parent article, it is still
| impossible to compute the mass and the magnetic moment of
| the proton, much less for any more complex nuclei or
| hadrons.
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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)
| 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.
| calamari4065 wrote:
| That just deflects the question one level down without
| explaining anything.
|
| "Because it is" is not a helpful answer to "why?"
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _deflects the question one level down without explaining
| anything_
|
| There's a lot of levels to SOC. Which do you think is
| "because it is?"
|
| If you're asking why spin values are restricted, it's in
| the spin-statistics theorem [1]. If you're asking why spin
| causes charge, that's SOC. There are lifetimes of
| understanding contained within those layers.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin-statistics_theorem
| ravi-delia wrote:
| The question wasn't "why do protons have +1 charge", it was
| "why do protons have +1 charge, *considering electrons have
| -1 charge". The fact that possible charges are restricted
| to a few values is a much more satisfying answer to the
| latter than the former
| marton78 wrote:
| Physics doesn't attempt to answer the question "why", it
| answers "how".
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Richard Feynman addresses a similar "why" question in a
| great way in this interview[1], and how "why" questions are
| problematic in science.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| You eventually have to take _something_ as given.
| gwerbret wrote:
| > 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _saying "it's because charge comes from spin" is the sort
| of obfuscatory answer_
|
| If you refuse to ask further questions, yes. If you keep
| asking why, it opens the door to what charge fundamentally
| is.
|
| > _All charged particles have spin, but not all particles
| with the same spin and other similar properties are
| charged_
|
| Spin and charge are fundamentally connected. That said, I
| was answering _according to SOC_ , which remains a
| hypothesis.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I never heard this. I'm almost sure it's wrong. Do you have a
| link?
| 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.
| computerfriend wrote:
| The first one is well known. It's because it's radiating in
| three dimensions.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
| akomtu wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| 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...
| api wrote:
| Maybe there's an inverse relationship between complexity
| and the odds of it being stable. Universes with 500000
| elementary particles might end up as entropy baths with no
| interesting structure.
|
| Meanwhile those with too few might be "crystals" with no
| dynamism.
|
| In all kinds of systems including computational models like
| cellular automata there exists a threshold known as the
| "edge of chaos" where among other interesting things
| universal computation becomes possible.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_chaos
|
| Maybe our universe is in such a zone. Not too simple for
| dynamic open ended phenomena, not too complex for order.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| 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
| leptons wrote:
| >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.
| FredPret wrote:
| How can you ask that and also claim to not be a smart person
| lmao
| Mistletoe wrote:
| 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.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Sorry that should say anthropic and not anthropomorphic haha.
| Too much time has elapsed to edit it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
| ynniv wrote:
| 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.
| clankyclanker wrote:
| 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
| timeagain wrote:
| 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
| megmogandog wrote:
| Which fine tuning arguments are you referring to?
|
| As I understand it, 'fine tuning' is simply a fact of the
| universe: that the fundamental constants have values that
| allow for the emergence of complexity, and that even slight
| changes to those values would lead to homogeneous and
| featureless universe. I don't have the physics background
| to demonstrate this for myself, but I believe it.
|
| To then reason from that fact to the existence of a
| multiverse or the existence of God is an extra step that
| one need not take, but not taking either of those steps
| doesn't invalidate the appearance that the fundamental
| constants of the universe were fine tuned for the
| production of complexity/life.
| timeagain wrote:
| Ok here's the problem. What hubris does it take to assume
| the fundamental constants could be changed? Just because
| they appear in math equations doesn't mean they can be
| twiddled and tweaked like programming variables. We have
| no prior knowledge or justification to believe any
| constants have been "tuned", because we have no
| justification in suggesting other possible values.
|
| We could just as easily say that life on earth was
| "tuned" to make "intelligent life" evolve, but we don't
| have any other 4 billion year test runs of earth to see
| what else might have evolved. In the same way we have no
| data at all about the phase space of other possible
| universes, their constants, or how their physics would
| play out on cosmological timescales.
|
| It's not that it isn't fun to think about. It's just that
| it is unscientific.
| kadoban wrote:
| > Ok here's the problem. What hubris does it take to
| assume the fundamental constants could be changed? Just
| because they appear in math equations doesn't mean they
| can be twiddled and tweaked like programming variables.
| We have no prior knowledge or justification to believe
| any constants have been "tuned", because we have no
| justification in suggesting other possible values.
|
| Nothing says that they couldn't be changed, but then
| there's the question of _why_ they can't be changed. What
| forced them to be the values they are? Some of them
| appear to be free, so are they?
| ryandamm wrote:
| You're not entirely wrong that it's unscientific, I think
| we're answering metaphysical questions. (It seems like
| questions of "why" ends up unerringly in either
| metaphysics or religion at some point.)
|
| That said, I believe the chain of logic (haven't watched
| the PBS video yet) is simply that were these fine-tuned
| constants to take any other value, there wouldn't be
| intelligent life to observe them. If the values were to
| be anything outside a narrow range, they would remain
| unobservable by entities within that hypothetical
| universe, and because we are making an observation we are
| implicitly sampling from the distribution of observable
| values. It's a Bayesian metaphysical argument?
|
| That sounds like it presumes a multiverse, but I don't
| think you need an infinite number of universes or a god
| for that to be true... that said, it does purport to
| explain how fine-tuning doesn't violate certain
| (metaphysical?) principles of science that call for
| "naturalness" (which a friend once told me boils down to
| "all unitless constants should be either 1 or 0 otherwise
| it's inelegant" or something): the fine structure
| constant is what it is because otherwise nothing would
| exist to observe that it was 1/139 or 42 or whatever.
|
| I hope this is even slightly more satisfying to read than
| it was to write.
| cdogl wrote:
| Your comment was an excellent synthesis of the discussion
| that preceded it - thank you.
| megmogandog wrote:
| I think I could've phrased my comment better.
|
| I'm not assuming the constants can be changed;
| axiomatically, they cannot, because they're fundamental
| constants of the universe. I'm also not assuming that
| some agent was around to do the tuning. In its basic form
| 'fine tuning' just means that if one of the values were
| even slightly different we wouldn't have anything like
| the universe we see today, including life. The values of
| the constants appear as if they were tuned.
|
| It's interesting you bring up evolution, because before
| that theory came about intelligent design was a
| reasonable assumption in trying to explain how well-
| adapted organisms seemed to be to their environments. It
| was as if someone had designed them for their roles! As
| it turns out the theory of evolution satisfactorily
| explains why organisms exhibit the appearance of design.
|
| In a similar way the fundamental constants exhibit the
| appearance of having been precisely set. It's hard to
| imagine a scientific theory getting 'behind' the
| constants the way evolution was able to get 'behind' the
| appearance of organisms...
| radarsat1 wrote:
| > if one of the values were even slightly different we
| wouldn't have anything like the universe we see today
|
| This is a hallmark of a chaotic system. It's not
| impossible but the chances of sitting exactly on such an
| unstable point seems very low. It seems more likely that
| the constants are some optimum in a basin of attraction,
| a stable point in some higher order dynamic system.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >because they're fundamental constants of the universe
|
| They're constants but are they fundamental? There are a
| lot (19?) of free parameters in the Standard Model. We
| determine them experimentally. But that doesn't mean that
| there isn't some deeper explanation that results in those
| values. We just don't know what it is yet.
| felipeerias wrote:
| Those constants are a feature of our models. We don't
| actually know whether the constants themselves are part
| of reality, or whether they are just there so our models
| can approximate our observations.
|
| The point is, there might be a mismatch between our model
| and the underlying reality. There could be an unknown
| deeper structure to reality which explained why those
| values appear to us as "fine tuned".
| kjqgqkejbfefn wrote:
| >doesn't invalidate the appearance that the fundamental
| constants of the universe were fine tuned for the
| production of complexity/life.
|
| I think it's the other way around, it's because we are
| complex reasoning forms of life that we must observe fine
| tuning of physical constants, necessary for the emergence
| of complexity.
|
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_Bias
|
| I also came up with my own variation of the anthropic
| principle:
|
| - 1. Extend the anthropic principle beyond physical
| connstant. Include factors such as the goldilock zone
| from planetology, the symbiogenetic origin of eukaryotic
| cells, the presence of the moon, etc ...
|
| - 2. Rethink the "anthropic situation" as a collection of
| coincidences. It doesn't directly "select for" observers,
| but for the right coincidences that allow them to exists.
|
| Two paths open for us from here:
|
| - 3.1. Either God (or whatever phenomenon can explain the
| presence of the right coincidences) exists and we were
| dealt with the right set of coincidences.
|
| - 3.2. Or alternatively, this collection of coincidences
| was built up by a random sampling process. If this is the
| case, then we should expect this collection to contain
| *superfluous* coincidences that have no impact on the
| existence of observers. Imagine you lost the key to your
| house and someone cuts a key at random from a bit of
| metal, which luckily turns out to unlock your door. This
| key has more chances to feature superfluous, redundant
| notches, than to be an exact copy of the original key.
|
| ----
|
| This brings a counterpoint to the cognitive perspective
| on pattern recognition and could be used to challenge or
| refine our understanding of why we perceive certain
| phenomena as 'coincidences' (for instance why the
| Moon/Sun ratios are the same for both their diameters and
| distances to the Earth, which allows us to observe quasi-
| perfect eclipses). This superfluous anthropic principle,
| in this case, suggests that these perceived coincidences
| might have an actual basis in the physical properties and
| probabilistic events of the universe. In other words, it
| is because God doesn't exist that we can see 'meaningful'
| coincidences "hinting" at its existence (from the
| perspective of magical thought).
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > To then reason from that fact to the existence of a
| multiverse or the existence of God is an extra step that
| one need not take, but not taking either of those steps
| doesn't invalidate the appearance that the fundamental
| constants of the universe were fine tuned for the
| production of complexity/life.
|
| I will add that, from a classical theological point of
| view, watchmaker type arguments are considered quite weak
| [0].
|
| [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/03/thomism-
| versus-desi...
| kadoban wrote:
| A couple of the constants it's easy (for a real physicist,
| not for me) to prove there's no interesting structure to
| the universe anymore if they vary even a little. Like, no
| molecules are possible.
|
| So there's a question there for why the values are so
| exactly set, or if something forces them to be the value
| they are.
|
| The anthropic principle (that if the universe weren't
| suitable, we wouldn't be here to know) always struck me
| more of reasoning that we're _not_ special.
| raggi wrote:
| "no molecules are possible" does not imply "absolutely
| nothing forms a structured dynamic", the thought
| experiment ceases prematurely if it stops there, partly
| because the structural makeup is not yet well enough
| known to consider those outcomes. the claim of a
| completely uninteresting outcome approximating true
| nothing is empirically unlikely. abstractions tend to
| fall over far faster than reality does
| foobarbecue wrote:
| AKA the "anthropic principle."
| jodrellblank wrote:
| AKA "God did it" with a sciencey sounding name. An answer
| which explains nothing, predicts nothing, satisfies no
| curiosity, and closes the book on any further questions.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| The anthropic principle is actually the opposite - it's
| an objection to the fine-tuning argument that says
| something roughly like "well, of course the universe is
| configured in a way that allows us to be around. if it
| wasn't, we wouldn't be around to discuss it. thus, there
| is no need to appeal to an intelligent designer of the
| universe to explain its fine-tuned nature."
|
| That aside, with respect to saying an intelligent
| designer designed the universe ("God did it"):
|
| >explains nothing
|
| Well, it explains why the universe is fine-tuned, if you
| buy the argument.
|
| >predicts nothing
|
| Yep, just like any other answer to the question, since
| it's a metaphysical question rather than a scientific
| one.
|
| >satisfies no curiosity
|
| It offers an explanation.
|
| >closes the book on any further questions
|
| No more than any other answer does.
| Mauneam wrote:
| >Well, it explains why the universe is fine-tuned, if you
| buy the argument.
|
| No it doesn't. Goddidit is not an explanation.
|
| >Yep, just like any other answer to the question, since
| it's a metaphysical question rather than a scientific
| one.
|
| Nope, not like any other answer. Like Satandidit.
|
| >It offers an explanation.
|
| No it doesn't. Goddidit is not an explanation.
|
| >No more than any other answer does.
|
| No, not like other answers. Science never closes the book
| on further questions.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I suspect you're reading into my comment more than what I
| intended to say.
|
| In the context of fine-tuning arguments for God, we
| really are just arguing that an intelligent designer
| designed the universe. In isolation, this doesn't
| necessarily commit us to some mainstream religion, and in
| this context, God is just the intelligent designer of the
| universe, nothing more (though proponents of the
| arguments will go on, through other arguments, to ascribe
| more properties to this thing).
|
| >Goddidit is not an explanation.
|
| I don't know why it wouldn't be. Suppose I kept pulling a
| card from a deck and showing it to you. Every single
| time, it was the ace of spades. Why is this? Well, one
| pretty good explanation is that I know where the ace of
| spades is in the deck and I'm intentionally picking that
| card out and showing it to you. That is, there is
| intelligence/intentionality that explains this event. You
| would probably consider this as an explanation. The fine-
| tuning argument's conclusion is just as much of an
| explanation.
|
| >Nope, not like any other answer. Like Satandidit.
|
| I don't know what you mean to say here. Satandidit
| doesn't predict anything either.
|
| >No, not like other answers. Science never closes the
| book on further questions.
|
| This isn't a scientific question though. This is a
| question about why the fundamental constants of nature
| are what they are. This is a question beyond the domain
| of science. Elsewhere in this thread, someone linked a
| video of Feynman (an atheist) on "why" questions and how
| at some point they have to bottom out - and at this
| point, science cannot provide the answers.
|
| Besides, this doesn't close the book on further
| questions. We can still ask, "what kind of existence is
| this intelligent designer?", "why does this intelligent
| designer exist?", etc. And of course, questions that are
| normally under the domain of science are still under the
| domain of science.
| Mauneam wrote:
| Saying "because God did it" as an answer to any question
| has the same value as saying "because pixel cooked the
| music". If you want to consider those two groups of words
| "explanations" go for it. They are grammatically correct,
| and if they satisfy the curious mind they are good
| enough.
| namaria wrote:
| You keep insisting that 'anthropic principle' = 'god did
| it' when it's anything but. It's like you don't even read
| to the replies to your comments.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| It's not uncommon now for people to use comment sections
| to deliver lectures, they already know what they want to
| say, they break it into multiple parts and they just
| paste it in assuming that other people will happily
| provide the right kind of conjugations. Good to point it
| out.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Saying "because God did it" as an answer to any
| question has the same value as saying "because pixel
| cooked the music".
|
| The same _ascertainable to humans_ value perhaps, but if
| one assumes they are necessarily completely equal (there
| is no God, in fact) you would _typically_ want evidence.
| But this is only typically, some things in science don 't
| need proof.
| lagadu wrote:
| You've been explained time and again how the anthropic
| principle explicitly doesn't need "God" or any sort of
| intelligent design and is simply the conclusion that can
| be drawn from a statistic calculation yet you continue
| bringing that up.
|
| Repeating the same argument despite it having been
| refuted isn't conductive to further discussion, at a
| certain point you'll only get replies out of pity at
| best, like this one.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I consider the person to whom you are responding a troll,
| because they are taking a hard line stance, using abrupt
| terms, shutting down discussion, and putting much less
| effort into things than you are.
|
| That said, I agree with you roughly. I think suggesting
| an intelligent design as a possibility is not "shutting
| down curiosity". A scientific mind can entertain higher
| forms of power and look into it.
|
| Accepting the possibility of a creator is not equivalent
| to blind devotion to one of the many existing faiths.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| What caused your comment above to appear on HN?
|
| Because youdidit.
|
| That's not an explanation?
|
| There are different kinds of explanations according to
| different measures, but all explanation is about
| identifying the causes of things. "You did it" identifies
| the agent, the efficient cause. I can, of course, explain
| how the agent (you) effected the cause, but youdidit is
| still an explanation, even if it isn't the kind you are
| interested in hearing.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _the opposite ... thus, there is no need to appeal to
| an intelligent designer of the universe_ "
|
| I'm not saying it's an argument _for_ God, I 'm saying
| more that it's as logically poor and useless as 'God' as
| an answer to the question. "Why are my parents white?"
| "if they weren't, you wouldn't be asking why they are
| white". "Why am I typing with my fingers?" "if you typed
| with your toes you wouldn't be asking why you type with
| your fingers". It's not an answer, it's a wordplay
| loopback which takes up the place of an answer and blocks
| anything else from going there.
|
| > " _Well, it explains why the universe is fine-tuned, if
| you buy the argument._ "
|
| No, it observes that the universe is fine tuned but
| doesn't explain anything. How the parameters could
| possibly vary (how could the 'charge on an electron'
| concievably be tuned across the entire Universe, by any
| means, where is the tuning knob?), how the tuning
| actually happened - what process, where the multiverse
| universes could physically or temporally be, how they
| could arise, why they arise with different parameters,
| nothing. Worse, it suggests knowledge that the parameters
| can and do vary, knowledge of a multiverse or a tuning
| process applying to one universe, when that knowledge
| doesn't exist. It reassures the existence of a larger
| more powerful unknowable thing behind the scenes which
| makes this universe perfect for humans ( _cough Godlike
| cough_ ).
|
| > " _Yep, just like any other answer to the question,
| since it 's a metaphysical question rather than a
| scientific one._"
|
| "We don't know" predicts nothing, but doesn't pretend to
| be an answer, doesn't pretend to be more than it is.
|
| > " _It offers an explanation._ "
|
| It placates (or frustrates) with a non-explanation. It's
| feel-good sugar when you wanted nutrition.
|
| > " _closes the book on any further questions / No more
| than any other answer does._"
|
| More than "We don't know" does.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Well, there is a sense in which it is a good answer to
| "Why are my parents white?" if the question means "Why
| did I just so happen to be born to white parents as
| opposed to non-white parents?" and not "What
| scientifically caused my parents to be white?". The
| question about constants is more like the former than the
| latter since it's a question not about what
| scientifically caused the constants to be a certain way
| (we already know that it's not some physical phenomena
| that caused the constants to be this way - the constants
| are not a physical event to be explained physically).
|
| Pivoting to the fine-tuning argument (not the anthropic
| principle):
|
| The argument doesn't purport to answer precisely the
| questions you ask here, but it's still an explanation. To
| use the card example I used elsewhere, if I kept pulling
| the ace of spades out of a deck of cards and showing it
| to you, the answer to the question of why I'm always
| pulling the ace of spades that I've arranged these events
| intentionally still leaves the door open for other
| questions. How do I know where the ace of spades is? Is
| this a standard card deck, or are there multiple aces of
| spades in my set of cards? The answer that I'm arranging
| the events intentionally explains why an otherwise low-
| probability event is occurring, but it doesn't answer
| these questions - but that's ok, an explanation doesn't
| have to answer all questions.
| cool_beanz wrote:
| The Anthropic Principle explains why you are asking the
| question, not why the proton has that charge. Also see ht
| tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selectio
| n
| Razengan wrote:
| > _AKA "God did it"_
|
| + "Just for us" ^^
|
| e.g. Earth is the only place where life could have
| formed. We have yet to set foot on even 1 another planet
| but we are pretty sure we are alone in the entire damn
| Universe.
| freetime2 wrote:
| This is an incredible misunderstanding of the Anthropic
| principle. It has nothing to do with god, it does not
| suggest that life could only exist on Earth, and it does
| not suggest that we are alone in the universe.
|
| If anything it's an argument _against_ Intelligent
| Design. E.g. life is the statistical result of a vast
| universe (or multiverse) of permutations - some of which
| are not conducive to life, and some of which are. And
| when life looks out and says "wow it's uncanny how
| perfect this place is, there must be a divine hand at
| work" - it's only observational bias that makes it appear
| that way. Because life could only exist to make such
| observations in regions of the universe which are
| suitable for life.
|
| But on the other hand it also prevents one from saying
| "we exist, therefore intelligent life must be
| commonplace".
| XorNot wrote:
| i.e. the puddle thinking how fortunate it is that the
| ditch it is in is the perfect size for it.
| lagadu wrote:
| > we are pretty sure we are alone in the entire damn
| Universe.
|
| We absolutely are not sure of that in any way, shape or
| form. Quite the opposite, given our knowledge of the
| universe and conditions necessary for life forming, it's
| highly unlikely we're alone. There's a reason that we
| call a paradox the fact that we haven't found any
| extraterrestrial life yet: the Fermi Paradox.
|
| Anyway, the anthropic principle says nothing about that.
| jxdxbx wrote:
| the anthropic principle is why we find ourselves in such
| an unlikely place (a habitable planet) instead of
| somewhere that can't support life. it's not an argument
| for god.
|
| it's not entirely trivial. if someone says "god did it"
| because we find ourselves on earth not mars the anthropic
| principle is a better explanation.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| If somebody asks why Earth is more suited to life than
| Mars, we could talk about temperature, size, magnetic
| field, water availability. If someone asks but why Earth
| has all that and Mars doesn't, then "God did it" and "if
| it were the other way around you would be asking the
| other way around" both offer as little information
| (none), as little explanation (none) as each other.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| My favorite version of the anthropic principle is one
| where you say that ALL of the universes exist -- with all
| possible values of arbitrary constants. We just observe
| this one because we're alive here (and most of the others
| are not habitable).
| lm28469 wrote:
| > An answer which explains nothing, predicts nothing,
| satisfies no curiosity, and closes the book on any
| further questions.
|
| Which law of the universe guarantees the satisfaction of
| your curiosity again ?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| The same one which guarantees you will understand my
| point before coming in with a smug putdown about
| something I didn't say. "We don't know" is a far better
| answer than the Anthropic principle. The anthropic
| principle is worse than an answer, it has negative value,
| it answers nothing but has the shape and feel of an
| answer, it's a fake.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| 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.
| fwip wrote:
| I don't think the claim requires a uniform distribution,
| just that the values come from some possible distribution
| (of any shape). With enough (or infinite) shots on goal,
| you're gonna get all combinations of them.
|
| The question "why these values of constants instead of
| others?" sort of presupposes that other values are
| possible. If you instead believe that the values are fixed,
| then your answer is just "because that's the only value
| that's possible."
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Yes, you're right, the distribution need not be uniform.
| The assumption is that the distribution is such that the
| probability that all the constants are within the
| Goldilocks range is very low (not even necessarily that
| the constants are fixed). But yes, either way, my answer
| is that there's no reason to believe this assumption.
| okamiueru wrote:
| 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".
| dcow wrote:
| It's like a listicle that tells you every best coffee
| machine in 2024 is a valid purchase to the right kind of
| consumer when you're looking for the best one.
| cocoa19 wrote:
| The channel is definitely not targeted for the lay person.
|
| A counter example, Derek from Veritasium, he did a phd in
| physics education and it shows. Some of his videos are
| complex in content, but dumbed down so most people can
| understand.
|
| I enjoy PBS space time and listening to Matt O'Dowd, but I
| understand at the most 20-40% of what is covered on the
| videos. It is frustrating because I like the topics being
| discussed.
| hugryhoop wrote:
| Derek tackles easier subjects than PBS space.
| okamiueru wrote:
| I'm not convinced. When he talks about things I
| understand, he does so in a way that I still find
| frustratingly convoluted. In these cases, it's not for a
| lack of education. It probably just means that this style
| of presenting topics just isn't for me, which is
| completely fine. Diversity in free education is great and
| commendable.
|
| But I think you touch on the part that I think is the
| reason why. Because PBS _tries_ to dumb things down, but
| instead of doing it like Derek does, which adds clarity,
| PBS does it by "mystifying" it. Probably tickles
| someone's itch, but I find it annoying.
|
| Take the video posted, for example. It starts out
| immediately with thumbnail "Life = Multiverse?". If it
| really was for the niche audience, that title is
| remarkably dumb, although understandable for the same
| reasons clickbait titles work. Perhaps PBS meant to
| present the question whether one leads to or suggests the
| other? "Life ~ Multiverse?" would better express that.
| Though, the thought process of how multiverse and the
| anthropic principle go together is: "Multiverse ~ Life?".
|
| The video starts out by expressing three statements,
| related to the Anthropic Principle
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle). Had
| they instead worded those statements as to be correct, it
| would be a very nice way of introducing the topic.
|
| This is how it is presented:
|
| "Life exists in our universe" ~ "Our universe is capable
| of producing and sustaining life". Which is fine. We
| understand what producing and sustaining life is, because
| it is really just the first statement with some added
| anthropomorphism.
|
| The next one, which is the whole point of the "hook" for
| the video, and is probably intended to be a little bit
| cheeky, except that he keeps a straight face, so, unless
| you know enough, it'll probably just misinform you.
|
| "Okay. Let's try one final uncontroversial statement.
| Therefore, there are countless universes".
|
| Well, no. Multiverse theory is one way to explain the
| unlikeliness of the physical constants working out the
| way they "conveniently" do in our universe. But this
| logical inference is not an "uncontroversial statement".
| It doesn't qualify, yet it is dumbed down to suggest it
| does. I'm sure that the following "Hm", and look to the
| side, is meant to express this. What do I know. But I'm
| not particularly amused or impressed.
|
| So, so far, we've seen the thumbnail, and the first three
| sentences before the intro video rolls. And, it's been 1.
| Inaccurate information in thumbnail, 2. incorrect logical
| inference 3. false conclusion.
|
| I can probably continue the video, but this is why I
| dislike PBS so much. It doesn't really try to dumb things
| down. It just IMO, fails to communicate science well.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Yeah, your confusion there is like being confused from
| the use of a literary device. The intent was exactly to
| illustrate why the implication 'life -> multiverse' may
| be problematic.
|
| It was communicated just fine, I think you should
| continue watching?
| okamiueru wrote:
| Are you sure you got the argument I'm presenting? You did
| quickly make an edit to avoid a rather rude remark.
|
| My point is that their use of literary devices, as you
| put it, are often misleading if not flat out wrong. The
| listener needs to he able identify them as such, and I
| don't think that's a good way to communicate science.
|
| It doesn't mean that PBS is bad. Note that I have made no
| such statement. I'm just saying that I dislike it, and
| tried to be constructive as to why. If this offended you,
| like your initial remark might suggest, perhaps you are
| reading too much into it.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| I did want to avoid implying that videos are harder to
| understand if you find nonverbal cues hard to understand,
| but sure. That would genuinely be a reason to avoid PBS
| videos and that's fine.
|
| The point is their use of the literary device here was
| not misleading nor 'flat wrong'. It is serving as a
| jumping off point from the video title 'Does Life Need a
| Multiverse to Exist?'. You may argue that such a question
| is ill posed, but then state your argument properly.
|
| Read: they are NOT talking about the anthropic principle
| here. You are probably confused because you are trying to
| shoehorn this into discussion when the video is not even
| talking about this yet. Yes the anthropic principle is
| cogent to the video but not until later.
| okamiueru wrote:
| Sounds like we agree then.
|
| The difference in opinion is that I don't consider
| literary devices to validate incorrect or misleading
| statements. Which is why I dislike PBS. You do, and
| that's fine. To each their own.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| > Read: they are NOT talking about the anthropic
| principle here. You are probably confused because you are
| trying to shoehorn this into discussion when the video is
| not even talking about this yet. Yes the anthropic
| principle is cogent to the video but not until later.
|
| You are not only confused because they are using a
| literary device, you are _primarily_ confused because you
| think they are talking about the anthropic principle,
| when they are _not_.
|
| Anyways. I am sure you have your reasons for disliking
| PBS. Just that the reason you've given here is
| incoherent, for reasons I understand (trying to make a
| point quickly etc). No worries.
| okamiueru wrote:
| You seem very hung up on my incorrect assumption as to
| what extent the video was about the anthropic principle
| or not. I have not watched it, nor do I intend to, and I
| am happy with being wrong about it. That said, it also
| isn't relevant to my dislike of PBS, or arguments
| presented. I just happened to click and take a peek at
| this particular video, to see if I could pinpoint the
| kind of stuff that I have come to associate with them. I
| didn't need to watch very long to find examples.
| Examples, that you can take at face value, in it's own
| isolated context, which makes it completely irrelevant
| what you are hung up on, and suggesting I am confused by.
|
| So, I'll make it simple.
|
| "LIFE = MULTIVERSE?", is... a very dumb statement. It can
| function as a clickbait, but I'm assuming that PBS wants
| to suggest a relationship of inference. Why start out
| with possibly giving someone a wrong idea/concept? Now,
| this isn't a big deal. I just took a peek, and the first
| thing I saw was rather dumb. So, that's what I'll
| mention.
|
| Secondly is the sequence of statements, that are
| explicitly stated as "uncontroversial" in the inference
| between them.
|
| They are:
|
| "Life exists in our universe" ~ "Our universe is capable
| of producing and sustaining life" ~ "there are countless
| universes".
|
| I'm taking these at face value. Third inference is
| invalid for more than one reason. Yet, it is presented as
| nothing but. You consider that OK. I can only think of
| two possible explanations for why: 1. You consider it OK
| to be incorrect and misleading when it is used as a
| literary device. 2. You do not understand why it is an
| invalid inference.
|
| Either is fine by me. However, I'm not really confused.
| This... isn't very confusing. The only thing I've stated
| as a personal opinion here, is that I dislike PBS for
| being misleading and incorrect, as a literary device. You
| suggested that they weren't being misleading or
| incorrect, because there is a "hint hint, nudge nudge"
| that it might be ironic. So, my person opinion is: well,
| that's pretty fucking annoying. Hence my conclusion.
| Which is why I'll just stick to Derek and the likes who
| can manage to dumb things down to my level. Everyone is
| happy.
|
| PS: .. and in case you might argue this; it also doesn't
| matter what they explain later on, if that's why you
| mentioned I should watch on. There is no
| "uncontroversial" series of arguments that will reach the
| logical conclusion "there are countless universes". It's
| just one of several ways to reason about why life, and
| the laws of physics, happen to allow something otherwise
| improbable. Which is what I'm assuming they will get to,
| but again, I have no intentions of watching it.
| lagadu wrote:
| I believe you're in error with the assumption that "there
| are countless universes" means multiverse in his
| description. It means that there are countless universe
| possibilities we can imagine, one for each permutation of
| the universal constants. Other than a small subset of
| them, one of which we exist in, nearly all of them would
| not be able to contain life because they wouldn't have
| conditions to do so. It doesn't imply that these other
| universes exist in some "physical" sense, only
| conceptual.
| iankp wrote:
| 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.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| You would think that with my username, I should know the
| answer. But I have no clue
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| 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.
| cozzyd wrote:
| 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.
| strogonoff wrote:
| 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 Schrodinger'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.
| westurner wrote:
| Are there intermediate [electron,] charge states between + and
| - in superfluids and/or superconductors?
|
| Is there superposition with electron charge states?
| anon84873628 wrote:
| 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.
| westurner wrote:
| Quantum Hall effect:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hall_effect :
|
| > _The fractional quantum Hall effect is more complicated
| and still considered an open research problem. [2] Its
| existence relies fundamentally on electron-electron
| interactions. In 1988, it was proposed that there was
| quantum Hall effect without Landau levels. [3] This quantum
| Hall effect is referred to as the quantum anomalous Hall
| (QAH) effect. There is also a new concept of the quantum
| spin Hall effect which is an analogue of the quantum Hall
| effect, where spin currents flow instead of charge
| currents. [4]_
|
| Fractional quantum Hall effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Fractional_quantum_Hall_effect :
|
| > _The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) is a physical
| phenomenon in which the Hall conductance of 2-dimensional
| (2D) electrons shows precisely quantized plateaus at
| fractional values of e^{2} /h, where e is the electron
| charge and h is the Planck constant. It is a property of a
| collective state in which electrons bind magnetic flux
| lines to make new quasiparticles, and excitations have a
| fractional elementary charge and possibly also fractional
| statistics_
|
| westurner.github .io/hnlog/#story-38139569 ctrl-f "quantum
| Hall", "hall effect" :
|
| - "Electrical switching of the edge current chirality in
| quantum Hall insulators" (2023)
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-023-01694-y (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38139569 )
|
| But that's not elementary charge.
|
| "Inside the proton, the 'most complicated thing you could
| possibly imagine'" (2024)
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/inside-the-proton-the-most-
| co... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39374020 :
|
| > _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?_
| quantified wrote:
| 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?
| instagib wrote:
| 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...
| ambyra wrote:
| 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.
| alex_smart wrote:
| https://youtu.be/36GT2zI8lVA
|
| Richard Feynman on why questions
| ajkjk wrote:
| 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.
| exe34 wrote:
| > Not at a technical level, yeah, but intuitively, it is
| possible to get general understandings way beyond his
| attempts at answering that question.
|
| The issue with giving people an intuitive model that's not
| at the same level of complexity to the mathematical models,
| in my experience, is that a lot of people, including out-
| of-field experts then run with the intuitive model into
| bizarre territory and treat it as a prediction of the
| original tested theory. They reason correctly within the
| simplified world of the analogy but when it clashes with
| the real world, they dig down and reaffirm their
| preconceived notions.
|
| On the other hand, I suppose they were never going to
| honour Cromwell's rule anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Yeah my read on this is that Feynman enjoys being kind of a
| know-it-all prick, but he caught himself here for the sake
| of the interview.
|
| His first instinct was to be a dick about it, then he sort
| of softly walked that back using an excuse about it being a
| long explanation. In the end, he gave a good answer, he
| just had to first pretend that it was a pain because of how
| smart he is and how much he understands.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > give me a religious explanation that isn't a religious
| explanation
| xwolfi wrote:
| 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.
| ajkjk wrote:
| 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.
| trenchgun wrote:
| 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?
| vihren wrote:
| That's purely by convention. It's just that we fist
| discovered electrons and protons and quarks with their
| fractional charges came in much later.
| lagadu wrote:
| To be clear, we say that an electron has -1e charge: that
| "e" is the absolute value of the charge of an electron. The
| charge of an electron is approximately -1.602176634x10^-19
| Coulombs. Quarks have either +-2(1.602176634x10^-19)/3 or
| +-(1.602176634x10^-19)/3 coulombs charge.
|
| It's a fraction because we simply decided it was easier to
| describe an electron's charge as "e" and quark charges as
| being a fraction of that. It's entirely by convention.
|
| We could've just as easily have described, like you
| mentioned, a quark to have either +-q or +-2q charge and
| electrons have -3q (where q=(1.602176634x10^-19)/3 C). We
| just happened to find electrons significantly before. It's
| also convenient as we don't see free quarks so every charge
| we see in the universe is a multiple of e, there's no
| advantage to going smaller than that.
| importantstuff wrote:
| 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.
| polskibus wrote:
| Which answer on physicsexchange is the right one? The top
| scored ?
| guenthert wrote:
| The top scored is just the answer liked best. The fact that
| it refers to proton decay and quantum gravity, both
| hypotheses which, as plausible as they might be, are not
| experimentally testable at this time, renders in my mind
| the confidence of the answer questionable.
| importantstuff wrote:
| The top answer has multiple reasons. The one I am
| referring to in particular is this section: "I should
| point out that if you believe that the standard model
| matter is complete, then anomaly cancellation requires
| that the charge of the proton is equal to the charge of
| the positron, because there is instanton mediated proton
| decay as discovered by t'Hooft, and this is something we
| might concievable soon observe in accelerators. So in
| order to make the charge of the proton slightly different
| from the electron, you can't modify parameters in the
| standard model, you need to add a heck of a lot of
| unobserved nearly massless fermions with tiny U(1)
| charge." It makes no reference to quantum gravity.
| feoren wrote:
| > The fact that it refers to proton decay ...
|
| You don't need spontaneous proton decay for the answer to
| work, just positron emission:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission
| hansbo wrote:
| 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?
| coldtea wrote:
| Not a physisist, but "consistency with the model" doesn't
| mean "because that's how some arbitrary model says it
| should be".
|
| It's more like: "Because we have arrived at a model that
| describes well most other aspect of those particles and
| their behavior, and has verified predictive power, and
| given the constrains and calculations based on that model,
| that's what its charge would be".
| awestroke wrote:
| Still does not explain "why"
| chaxor wrote:
| I just would like to point out that "why" is not a
| scientific question. Feynman mentions this quite a lot.
| The question "why" doesn't have answers in science. A
| question of "How" has a better chance of being answered
| in science.
| foldr wrote:
| I think that was a fairly idiosyncratic point of view of
| Feynman's. In actual scientific practice you can find
| hundreds of examples of published scientific papers that
| address 'why' questions. Here are a couple of completely
| random examples:
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11207-009-9338
| -5
|
| https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8174/4/3/63
| coldtea wrote:
| They answer the why's with the same way @hansbo
| complained about not answering the why, e.g:
|
| " We show that the symmetries of this non-commutative
| space unify the standard model of particle physics with
| (2) chiral gravity. The algebra of the octonionic space
| yields spinor states which can be identified with three
| generations of quarks and leptons. The geometry of the
| space implies quantisation of electric charge, and leads
| to a theoretical derivation of the mysterious mass ratios
| of quarks and the charged leptons. Quantum gravity is
| quantisation not only of the gravitational field, but
| also of the point structure of space-time."
| foldr wrote:
| It's not uncommon for a scientific paper to raise a
| question without fully answering it (science is hard).
| The point is that actual scientific practice does not
| appear to care about any distinction that can usefully be
| described as a distinction between 'how' and 'why'
| questions. You can keep asking 'but why?' ad infinitum
| and never arrive at a fully satisfying explanation.
| However, the same is also try of 'but how?' We will find
| no ultimate answers, but the questions that stimulate
| scientific research certainly seem to include 'why'
| questions.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| The 'why' is because 'it's what balances'
|
| i.e. it's the only combination that works. A proton is a
| bunch of other particles that, when combined together,
| balance out an electron. The 'why' is 'because that's a
| stable configuration' in the same way that water at 25c
| is liquid not gas because the 'rules' of the local
| environment dictate that.
|
| I mean, why do those particles exist at all? That's
| really what you're asking. Why do electrons exist, why do
| protons 'form' from subatomic particles to balance them
| out? Existential kinda question.
| ljosifov wrote:
| "Why" is more of a philosophy question, pre-scientific or
| a-scientific if you like. Science question would be
| "How". Maybe not this particular Q, but having in mind
| that on every A-answer, one can again ask Q-question
| "Why". That's more philosophy not so much science, imo.
| hansbo wrote:
| I don't think it explains "How" either, in this case.
| ruszki wrote:
| There are causal links, but we always have axioms for
| which either there is no reasons, they are just how they
| are, or we don't know the reasons, we have just
| experimental evidence for them. At the end, the answer to
| "why" is always, because they are just how they are.
| zahllos wrote:
| Exactly this. Or to put it another way we don't actually
| know how the rules of the universe work. So we can't
| follow a process of deductive reasoning that "why"
| follows from this or that implication.
|
| Take quantum mechanics. This came out of observations
| that particles exhibited wave-like behaviour. Mathematics
| predicts certain things when you start to apply the wave
| equation. These are then experimentally verified and the
| model is shown to be pretty good, although it has some
| deficiencies like not fully linking up with relativity.
| There are some doubts in some areas of what it predicts
| as well from what I understand from talking to
| researchers.
|
| As the article says the original model was that protons
| were fundamental particles: nothing smaller. This model
| held up for quite some time but then observational data
| demonstrated it was insufficient. Same with the three
| quark model. Knowing the various deficiencies we might go
| so far as to say "the model that a proton is a +1 charge
| is good enough" and use that _because that works_ for
| many situations and that 's as much as we need. Although
| of course, there are always scientists looking to
| complete the picture.
|
| Science is the incremental acquisition of knowledge
| through observation and experimentation - and there's an
| awful lot we haven't figured out.
| XorNot wrote:
| Isn't the primary experimental argument beta decay from
| that link? A nucleus can emit a positron, and observably
| loses nuclear charge equal to one positive electron.
|
| So by a pretty simple inferrence you could conclude the
| proton has a positive in it, hence the charge (it of course
| isn't literally like this for other reasons though).
|
| And since we also observe antiprotons, the opposite can
| clearly apply.
| hansbo wrote:
| So a proton can emit a positron. Does that mean that the
| positron is somehow "part" of the proton? Does it mean
| that their wave functions interact in some specific way?
| Is there another reason?
|
| Quantum physics has always bothered me, personally, since
| I find it difficult to understand reasons. Not
| philosophical reasons, I am fine with axioms and
| foundations to models, but rather intuitive reasons why
| it works a certain way. I know it is an extremely strong
| theory which makes unexpected, later confirmed,
| predictions, but there is a frustration that the only
| explanation to things is "math".
| XorNot wrote:
| Sort of? But it's less "there is a particle doing things"
| and more "there's a probability field which can describe
| a particle doing something" (alongside a bunch of other
| probabilities it interacts with).
|
| One of the ways you can calculate the probability of
| nuclear decay for example is to assume that the particle
| you expect to see is literally existent and trapped
| inside a potential well defined by the atomic nucleus and
| then calculate the probability it tunnels out of that to
| free space.
|
| The thing is "why" does get pretty anthropic: protons
| match electrons because we observe them to, and then on
| top of that we observe nuclear decay causing the
| conversion of a proton to a neutron + a positron (within
| the limits of our instruments) - so our model predicts
| that these are in fact the same value, and we keep
| measuring to check that they converge in that direction
| (it would be a big deal, for example, if we discovered
| this wasn't the case - every physicist would love to find
| out that proton charge and electron charge are actually
| slightly different).
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _Does that mean that the positron is somehow "part" of
| the proton?_
|
| A photon turns into a (virtual) electron-positron pair.
| Does it mean that the photon consists of these particles?
| bbor wrote:
| "The model does not hold" === "existence wouldn't be
| possible". We found atomic particles, then did some more
| experiments and found quarks within the atomic particles.
| The quarks appear to be complex but predictable subsets of
| the particles. So "why do those subsets add to 1" invites a
| tautology, because the whole reason we found them in the
| first place is that they add up to exactly one, and
| therefor can be part of atoms.
|
| It's like asking why the left engine of an aircraft happens
| to emit the same amount of thrust as the right engine; if
| that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be a plane to talk
| about in the first place, just an art piece or a flaming
| crash.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > What causes it? Consistency of a model cannot be the
| ultimate reason, right?
|
| Which epistemic foundation in which your "why" question is
| answered do you consider as acceptable for you?
| sullyj3 wrote:
| Whenever you're asking for an explanation this deep in the
| ontology stack, you need to think about what kind of
| explanation would be satisfying to you, and whether you can
| reasonably expect intuitive answers in domains that lie far
| outside of your everyday experience. Human brains aren't
| built to grasp this stuff intuitively.
|
| At a certain point, the reason we like some particular
| wacky physical model is always going to be "it has the best
| combination of explanatory power and simplicity"
| tinganho wrote:
| A thing can be explained with its constituent parts or
| explained by a parallel analogy. If you don't understand
| the constituent parts or the analogy or there are neither
| of these. You won't understand it.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _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?_
|
| Perhaps 'because' if the consistency did not exist then the
| universe would fail to exist.
|
| There was the Big Bang, but we do not know what caused the
| Big Bang. But the _particular_ Big Bang that started our
| _particular_ universe may not have been the only one to
| occur. There could have been multiple previous Big Bangs
| where the 'properties' of each of those created universes
| may not have had the same consistency as we experience, and
| the inconsistency(s) could have resulted in a 'collapse' or
| 'destruction' of those universes.
|
| Whereas it was just a _coincidence_ that our Big Bang got
| things 'right' for the universe to continue to develop.
|
| We could simply be experiencing survivorship bias in/with
| our universe.
|
| As someone who dabbles in philosophy, and to use its
| language, our existence is contingent (we, and our
| universe, do not have to exist):
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency_(philosophy)
| User23 wrote:
| Which leads to the wonderful question: why are there any
| contingent things? And: why are the contingent things
| that there are as complex as they are?
|
| I don't know of any plausible naturalist explanation
| besides Many-Worlds. And that supposes for the sake of
| discussion that Many-Worlds is in fact naturalist.
| neycoda wrote:
| I've heard an amusing conjecture that I'm not sure how
| much to take seriously unless there's a mind underlying
| the universe (like in simulation theory).
|
| The void in its infinite time and endless space (the same
| as neither existing) became bored with itself, and in its
| attempt to destroy itself, split and created the universe
| we have now. Full of endless wonders and anomalies and
| beauty and travesty. All for the amusement of itself as
| one that remembers the abyssal void.
| kamaal wrote:
| Thats interesting, what are the chances of another big
| bang, after our(the current one) big bang?
|
| Could it happen while this universe is here?
| plussed_reader wrote:
| I recently came into the concept of the great attractor;
| the mysterious force that our galaxy is hurtling towards.
| It is thought to be some supermass of star material and
| other things.
|
| What if that supermass is another(the next?) big bang
| forming; energy just slides around some universe space
| banging off here and there, forever?
| kamaal wrote:
| I don't know much about this of this of course.
|
| But it does feel like you might have a point here. If
| everything is moving away from each other, things must
| have a center some where, and thats where this new big
| bang is forming?
| neycoda wrote:
| I'm curious how the field that allows vibration exists
| instead of just pure nothing that isn't a field that
| doesn't allow vibration or bending or virtual particles
| etc. Heisenberg's principle seems contingent on the void
| of nothing being a field that can wobble.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Heisenberg 's principle seems contingent on the void
| of nothing being a field that can wobble._
|
| Sadly (?) the word "nothing" seems to have become
| overloaded, so now--depending on who you talk to--you can
| have the word pointing to different concepts. See "seven
| types/levels of nothing":
|
| * https://rlkuhn.com/wp-content/uploads/Closer-to-Truth-
| Essays...
|
| * https://closertotruth.com/news/levels-of-nothing-by-
| robert-l...
| Zondartul wrote:
| A silly thought I had while reading that article: it
| presupposes that "nothing" is a noun. In doing so, it
| assumes that in the sentence "the <noun> <verbs>" you can
| substitute "nothing" and it would mean "<nothing> is an
| entity that does the <verbing>" instead of "<verbing>
| simply does not happen", and I feel that is a meaningful
| distinction.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| Wait, proton decay was proven?
| feoren wrote:
| "Decay" is an unfortunate historical word for what are
| essentially bidirectional pathways between groups of
| particles. It usually just means "transform". We know a
| proton can transform into a neutron, positron, and
| (electron) neutrino in "beta plus decay" (and the reverse
| can also happen, and all sorts of other things). This is
| all the answerer means when they say "decay". When this
| transformation occurs, all conservation laws must hold; in
| particular, charge conservation. Therefore charge(neutron)
| + charge(positron) + charge(neutrino) == charge(proton),
| and we know charge(neutron) and charge(neutrino) are zero,
| so charge(positron) == charge(proton). I suppose it's
| possible we don't have a full picture of beta-plus decay,
| and there's some nearly undetectable fourth particle
| carrying off a tiny bit of charge, but my understanding is
| that a lot of the rest of our understanding of particle
| physics would have to be wrong for this to be the case.
|
| This is not the same as "spontaneous proton decay", which
| has not been observed.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| 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.
| sumitkumar wrote:
| 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.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| 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?
| nurettin wrote:
| 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.
| gpsx wrote:
| 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.
| amai wrote:
| 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.
| EchoReflection wrote:
| 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 :)
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Or is it? Biology at micro-scale seems much more
| complicated than at macro-scale. It has this thermodynamics
| quality to it.
| 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".
| neuromanser wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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)
| knightoffaith wrote:
| >It's the set of things religions claim the only
| explanation/evidence for repeatedly shrinking
|
| I haven't read The God Delusion or wherever the "god of the
| gaps" critique originated - what is this actually referring
| to? Are we just talking about like, pagan polytheistic
| explanations of natural phenomena? What serious Christian
| or Buddhist thinkers using religion to explain things like
| weather or medicine are being referred to here?
|
| >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.
|
| As early as St. Augustine, writing around ~400, and one of
| the most influential Christian thinkers, we have discussion
| of the account of creation in Genesis being metaphorical.
| Long, long before the theory of the Big Bang.
| notahacker wrote:
| > I haven't read The God Delusion or wherever the "god of
| the gaps" critique originated - what is this actually
| referring to?
|
| A rare point of agreement between Nietzsche and the
| evangelist Henry Drummond was that the Christian
| apologetic approach of "ah, but _that_ hasn 't been
| explained yet, so it must be God's will" to all the
| discoveries of the Enlightenment wasn't a very impressive
| one. Not least because of the tendency of gaps to cease
| to be gaps.
|
| Ultimately "the more we learn, they more we learn we
| don't know", to quote the OP is a route to agnosticism
| not a belief in a particular deity, and it's particularly
| hard to see an omipotent, benevolent God who created man
| in his own image in the incomprehensibility of quantum
| indeterminacy to the average layman (although I'll give
| credit to the _creativity_ of those suggesting that
| _three_ quarks must be proof of the Trinity)
|
| > What serious Christian or Buddhist thinkers using
| religion to explain things like weather or medicine are
| being referred to here?
|
| It'd be easier to ask what serious theologian said "nope,
| this stuff about the weather being controlled by divine
| fiat and pestilence being a punishment for the Fall is
| just stories and actually you might be able to alter them
| - perhaps even in your favour - as soon as you stop
| praying and start doing." well in advance of the
| accompanying science? Augustine, since you're apparently
| a fan, was pretty confident that the problem of
| pestilence was the product of a literally occurring Fall
| involving two actual First People, which doesn't square
| very well with evolutionary biology.
|
| Monotheism hasn't _quite_ had the problem of people
| landing on the moon god, but it 's fair to say that what
| many mainstream monotheists believe today has changed
| considerably in scope from what mainstream monotheism
| purported to explain for most of its existence.
|
| > As early as St. Augustine, writing around ~400, and one
| of the most influential Christian thinkers, we have
| discussion of the account of creation in Genesis being
| metaphorical
|
| Sure, Augustine made four different attempts to explain
| Genesis because even in his time the six day account -
| still an article of faith for many other Christians even
| today - didn't make much sense. None of them involved
| evolution from apes, and he still ended up with Adam and
| Eve being literal people who caused suffering for
| everyone [and everything] else via Original Sin.
| geye1234 wrote:
| > Augustine, since you're apparently a fan, was pretty
| confident that the problem of pestilence was the product
| of a literally occurring Fall involving two actual First
| People, which doesn't square very well with evolutionary
| biology.
|
| My understanding is that the current hypothesis says we
| are, in fact, all descended from one couple. I could be
| wrong about that though.
|
| In any case, there's no contradiction between Original
| Sin, and germs and immunity and the like, as explanations
| for disease. See my previous comment.
| notahacker wrote:
| I'm not sure about this current hypothesis about the
| first man and the woman who evolved from his rib before
| their apple consumption caused pain receptors to evolve,
| pathogens to acquire pathogenicity and reproduction to
| require sinful lust. Were they Homo Erectus, Homo Sapiens
| or Tyrannosaurus Rex? :-)
| jononomo wrote:
| Well, a lot of things don't square well with evolutionary
| biology, which is why the field is in crisis.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I know evolutionary psychology has been getting a lot of
| heat, but is evolutionary biology in general in crisis?
| As far as I know people like Gould weren't rejecting
| evolution wholesale so much as they were rejecting
| adaptationism.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Central to Christian theology is the idea of the non-
| competitive transcendence of God. Augustine also says
| (along with basically every Christian) that all things
| are caused by God and exist/occur only through God's
| will. But in statements like this, he isn't ruling out or
| making these claims in opposition to natural explanations
| for phenomena in the world, because God's actions don't
| "compete" with physical phenomena at the same
| metaphysical level.
| geye1234 wrote:
| > 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 [scientific]
| explanations...
|
| The 'god of the gaps' argument, which is pushed very hard
| by the new atheists[0], is question-begging and therefore
| worthless. The assumption is that if something is going to
| be explained at all, it must be via scientific methods.
| Therefore (they say) the appeal to God should be seen as a
| poor hypothesis, comparable in kind to scientific
| hypotheses, but vastly less useful in terms of prediction.
|
| The whole debate is about whether it's rational to think
| that the entirety of an explanation for something is
| scientific. Therefore, the 'god of the gaps' argument is
| circular and question-begging.
|
| The good arguments for God's existence and attributes,
| which the new atheists ignore[1] or grossly straw-man,
| involve the most basic of observations (such as 'there is
| change' or 'there are objects of the same type'), followed
| by deductions from said observations. They're rational
| arguments, assuming they're successful, but they're not
| scientific hypotheses. They do not appeal to things we
| can't explain, nor to complexity, nor to any alleged design
| (the last phrase is misleading anyway).
|
| [0] It's in Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, I think Krauss too
|
| [1] Dennett gives them one paragraph out of 478 pages in
| _Breaking the Spell_ , and is guilty in this paragraph of a
| very common straw-man, which shows how little he's read.
| Dawkins also uses the same straw-man in _God Delusion_
| IIRC.
| notahacker wrote:
| The idea that if something wasn't explicable in terms of
| contemporary science it must be evidence of a role for
| divine fiat was around (and lambasted even by fellow
| theists) decades before the New Atheists turned up. It's
| also implicit in the argument I'm replying to.
|
| The fact that _other arguments exist_ for religious
| belief systems (though attempting to deduce the necessity
| of an unchanging omni-being from the observation "there
| is change" sounds like it'd be a stretch that makes
| Anselm's Ontological Argument seem respectable) doesn't
| alter the frequency with which "contemporary science
| can't explain this stuff ergo the explanation must be
| divine" arguments are implicitly or explicitly made. Or
| indeed the tendency of longstanding religious beliefs to
| have to drop axioms once considered fundamental enough to
| execute dissenters for in the face of overwhelming
| evidence. None of which has anything to do with quantum
| physics, which no religion that I'm aware of has anything
| to say on the matter.
| jononomo wrote:
| Wow, this is well-stated!
| geye1234 wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| passion__desire wrote:
| 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.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| still simpler than a k8s cluster
| geodel wrote:
| Agree. I think if one bombard 100K Kubernetes cluster with
| softballs there still won't be a single repeatable observation.
| 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.
| neuromanser wrote:
| You mean it's not just a hypothesis.
|
| I would really, really expect users of this site to know
| the difference.
| elpocko wrote:
| What if they don't? Will they cease to be users of this
| site? What if they speak a lot more languages than you,
| just not perfectly? Does it even matter what you would
| expect?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Users of this site who pay attention to how science is
| actually practiced, and not the oversimplified cartoon
| version they teach us in school, know that the boundary
| between a "theory" and a "hypothesis" is rather blurry.
| For instance, have you ever noticed how it's called
| "string theory" despite having no real evidence for it?
| Have you ever heard anyone, let alone a real scientist,
| complain about this nomenclature?
|
| Early theories and fleshed-out hypotheses overlap a lot.
| There's no sharp transition from one to the other.
| infamouscow wrote:
| I think it's important to draw a distinction between the
| formal and natural sciences. HN is overrepresented by
| folks with backgrounds in mathematics and computer
| science where using "theory" is correct, e.g., set
| theory.
|
| Bret Weinstein explained the distinction between a
| hypothesis and theory a few weeks ago on YOUR WELCOME.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac4MnNrs6g4
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I specifically cited an example in the natural sciences,
| specifically physics. IIRC chemistry and biology do
| similar shenanigans at times. Again, consider how you
| could possibly draw a sharp distinction when accumulation
| of evidence is so often a gradual process.
|
| I'll consider responding to the video if you give me a
| reasonable timeslice, but I'm not going to watch the
| whole hour.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| String theory is supported by a ton of evidence in that
| it can produce many predictions and hypotheses that match
| observed data. That's why it's called a "theory" and why
| people continue to study it.
|
| What's missing is a test that would produce evidence that
| would allow us to _distinguish_ between string theory and
| competing theories. But that's not nearly the same thing
| as saying it has "no real evidence."
| philipswood wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but string theory is still in
| the "it's so pretty and elegant is must be true kind of
| territory".
|
| Not only do they have no proof, most of the potential
| experimental confirmations are at energies so high
| they're effectively out of reach for the foreseeable near
| future.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| In fact that's exactly what I meant by saying it has "no
| real evidence". Otherwise you could claim the totality of
| the universe as evidence for your pet Theory of
| Everything as long as it's not actually falsified yet,
| including but not limited to a theory where fundamental
| particles are fairies who use slide rules to decide how
| to interact.
| volemo wrote:
| If you fairy theory predicts the outcomes as well as the
| other theories that are on the table now then indeed it
| belongs there with them until someone finds a way to
| distinguish them and prove one is a better model of the
| reality. Better yet if the fairy model makes the
| calculations "cleaner" and easier.
| mcmoor wrote:
| The (scientific) theory is really not just a (colloquial)
| theory
| julianeon wrote:
| The other famous example is PET scanners, which actually
| use a form of antimatter: positrons (the antimatter
| counterpart of electrons).
| hwillis wrote:
| You don't even need that. The prediction he's referring
| to as most accurate is the magnetic moment of the
| electron, which is used in plain old MRIs. If we didn't
| have the quantum mechanical correction, all of our MRI
| images would be distorted. Only by a few pixels, but it'd
| be noticeable!
| tonyarkles wrote:
| In some devices it's something they have to fight against.
| In others, like SSDs, it's the feature that makes them
| work! It's not just a theory and it's not just another flaw
| that we've got to work around, we've taken it from a theory
| and turned it into useful technology.
| sph wrote:
| We used fire in our daily lives even before organic
| chemistry existed.
| seeknotfind wrote:
| 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.
| hwillis wrote:
| > So many significant digits includes a level of self-
| consistency of the model
|
| No, that's incorrect. The specific measurement -the most
| accurate scientific prediction humans have ever made, the
| anomalous magnetic moment- is only to 1 in 10 trillion. The
| magnetic moment (think moment of inertia) is the ratio of
| force from the magnetic field to the mass of the electron.
| You put an electron into a magnetic field, and it'll turn
| to face the field at a certain speed. If you stick the
| electron in a vacuum, it overshoots (because of rotational
| momentum) and ends up wobbling back and forth at a specific
| frequency. That's how MRIs work; they make a big magnetic
| field (stronger on one end) and then measure how many
| electrons are wobbling in different areas, since the
| electrons in high-strength fields wobble faster.
|
| Specifically, you expect the wobble to get ~2.8025 GHz
| (similar to a microwave oven) faster for every 1000 gauss
| (please, no jokes about teslas). It's very convenient to
| measure a difference in frequency, since you can just
| measure the drift over time. Because that frequency is
| relatively high it takes about 30 minutes for the frequency
| to drift off by a half-cycle and totally cancel out your
| reference.
|
| And it's super easy to get a reference frequency, too. It's
| just the charge of an electron divided by 2x the mass of an
| electron. Did you do this experiment in physics class?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcn2VgBNJjg
|
| Then you measured the charge/mass ratio of an electron. A
| clock that's accurate to 1 in 10 trillion is also not a big
| deal, although unless you have an oscilloscope in your
| house its probably more accurate than any clock you own.
| Still, you can buy a better Phase Locked Loop for a couple
| bucks.
|
| If you just wanted to measure the difference, you don't
| need that much precision, though. The correction from
| quantum mechanics is pretty large, relatively speaking:
| ~0.16%. Even the next several digits are super easy, and
| it's only those last ones that you really need to bust out
| the liquid helium.
|
| Lawrence and Livingston made the first cyclotron out of
| literal junk: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/common
| s/6/61/4-inch-c...
|
| And it really doesn't take much more than junk to get to
| that 0.16% accuracy that lets you see that a classical
| prediction of the electron is just VERY wrong. But if you
| listen to those wizards with the bongos, suddenly they're
| _really, really right_ about what that difference is:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertex_function
| seeknotfind wrote:
| For instance, there is disagreement on if time is
| quantized, and relatively says time is relative. So at
| the point we might reimagine the basis of our
| understanding, two independent measurements of Hz are
| incomparable. Whatever is out there for us to discover,
| I'm sure it'll take us all by surprise. I've no doubt you
| know way more about how we measure these things in
| practice than I do, but our scientific model and
| measurements are inextricably linked. This isn't a useful
| way to think for most practitioners, but it's the
| perspective that the next Newton or the next Einstein
| will need to consider. So, in rootier poster comment that
| this feels like a wrong calculation, I want to treasure
| that part of the perspective that seeks to reimagine the
| fundamentals.
| hwillis wrote:
| > but our scientific model and measurements are
| inextricably linked. [...] This isn't a useful way to
| think for most practitioners, but it's the perspective
| that the next Newton or the next Einstein will need to
| consider.
|
| I totally get it, and you aren't _wrong_ , but this is
| literally _the thing_ it applies to the least. The core
| thing here is that the obvious assumption about how the
| universe would work is _very_ ( >.1%) wrong, and the
| purely theoretical quantum math is incredibly, absurdly,
| _amazingly_ correct.
|
| It's not about measuring some amazingly small thing and
| having it be amazingly correct. It's about us seeing an
| _incredibly large error_ in how the universe seems to
| behave, which QED explained _perfectly_. It 's like the
| ultraviolet catastrophe or einstein's cross except its
| _billions_ of times more correct.
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| 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
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| 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).
| alok-g wrote:
| How do you define 'true'?
|
| If two theories are working very well with no experiment
| available to indicate right vs. wrong for them, Occam's
| Razor would be all we would have to make a choice. That
| however does not really make one of them truer than the
| other.
| 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.
| daedrdev wrote:
| 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| An _actual_ semiconductor engineer that works at ASML has
| uploaded a whole series of videos that debunk the existence
| of photons in free space[1].
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/V6G8ZZmeJzc
|
| Quantum Mechanics is a set of mathematical tricks,
| shortcuts for numerical computation, that is all. People
| have become so enamored with the results of those
| computations that they've blithely ignored the limited
| scope of these shortcuts. You've found a nailgun, it's
| better than a hammer. That doesn't mean everything is a
| nail now.
|
| [1] Essentially, "particles" like photons are a short-hand
| terminology and a matching set of mathematical shortcuts
| for the behaviour of waves in a potential well (or any
| cavity). It doesn't make any sense outside of that
| scenario, such as light traversing empty space. All of that
| behaviour is perfectly predictable with ordinary wave
| mechanics. No quantum woodoo is required.
| canjobear wrote:
| How do you explain double-slit experiment results under
| this view?
|
| - The screen accumulates dots corresponding to photons.
|
| - Any measurement that would let you determine which slit
| a photon went through destroys the wavelike interference
| pattern at the screen.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| 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.
| bowsamic wrote:
| That's not really true, there may be ways to experimentally
| distinguish between those disagreements
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It's really easy to spout bullshit like that, if you have
| absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and you're just
| trying to carry the water for religion by unfairly accusing
| science of having religion's fundamental flaws.
|
| It's a veritable Gish Gallop of logical fallacies:
|
| False Analogy: The argument compares quantum mechanics (QM)
| to religion, stating that both involve factions, orthodoxy,
| and unchallengeable beliefs. However, this is a false analogy
| because the nature and methods of scientific inquiry (e.g.,
| empirical evidence, peer review, falsifiability) are
| fundamentally different from those of religious belief (which
| is based on faith and doctrine). The comparison
| oversimplifies and misrepresents both science and religion.
|
| Strawman Fallacy: The argument misrepresents the nature of
| quantum mechanics by suggesting that it operates purely on
| faith or dogma, similar to religious belief. This ignores the
| extensive empirical and theoretical work that underpins
| quantum mechanics.
|
| Ad Hominem (Circumstantial): The argument suggests that
| scientists who work in the field of QM are practicing a form
| of religious devotion rather than scientific inquiry. This is
| an ad hominem attack because it attempts to discredit QM by
| attacking the motives or character of its practitioners,
| rather than addressing the scientific validity of the field
| itself.
|
| Hasty Generalization: The argument makes broad
| generalizations about quantum mechanics and its practitioners
| based on limited observations (e.g., some disagreements among
| physicists). Scientific disagreements are a normal part of
| the scientific process and do not necessarily imply that the
| entire field is akin to a religion.
|
| Appeal to Ignorance (Argumentum ad Ignorantiam): The argument
| implies that because some aspects of QM (like wave-particle
| duality) seem counterintuitive or hard to comprehend, they
| must therefore be nonsensical or based on faith. This is an
| appeal to ignorance, as it suggests a lack of understanding
| or evidence is equivalent to proof of the argument's
| correctness.
|
| Overgeneralization/Sweeping Generalization: The argument
| overgeneralizes the behavior of scientific communities,
| suggesting that all scientific disagreements lead to "warring
| factions" and are akin to religious schisms. This overlooks
| the nuanced and varied ways in which scientific communities
| debate, test, and revise theories.
|
| No True Scotsman: By defining 'true' science as being free of
| disagreements or factions (and suggesting QM doesn't meet
| this standard), the argument potentially commits a No True
| Scotsman fallacy, where arbitrary criteria are set up to
| define what 'real' science should look like.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| [re False Analogy]: You falsely assume that just because
| something is called a science that it has _all_ of the
| attributes of an idealised, perfect science. A field of
| study can be named "Science of such-and-such" and be
| filled wall-to-wall with bickering quacks that don't agree
| on the basics. In practice, every scientific field has its
| flaws due to historical reasons, strong personalities
| overruling common-sense, etc. For example, the beta-amyloid
| hypothesis for explaining Alzheimer's disease is an example
| where you can't get published unless you "toe the line" and
| agree with a hypothesis that hasn't lead to a cure after
| decades of dead end research.
|
| [re Straw Man Fallacy]: I didn't say it depends _purely_ on
| faith. I said that its practitioners have splintered into
| mutually incompatible cliques much like how religions tend
| to. This is a social phenomenon, and a criticism of the
| people and their organisation, not the mathematics or
| results, per-se.
|
| [re Ad Hominem]: So you're saying that nobody is ever
| allowed to question the effectiveness of a field of
| scientific study at being actually scientific? PS: "Half of
| all published medical studies are wrong." is a well-known
| issue with the medical science field. Should we tar-and-
| feather the heathens questioning the holiness of the
| priests?
|
| [re Hasty Generalization]: "some" disagreements!? They
| can't agree on _any_ fundamental aspects! Are photons real,
| or just a mathematical shorthand? Is there "action at a
| distance", or is it strictly local? Etc... You'll find that
| if you ask a bunch of physicists these questions, they'll
| give different answers.
|
| [re Appeal to Ignorance]: Wave-particle duality is not
| "wrong" in the sense that it is a mathematically valid
| method for calculations (or not). The issue is that it's
| "just a trick", much like the Fourier transform or the
| Laplace transform. Most students only learned to perform
| calculations in this one way, and are blithely unaware that
| this is a short-cut with well established _specific_
| limitations. It doesn 't apply to all things everywhere.
| I'm saying you didn't read the footnotes in the manual, not
| that the manual was wrong.
|
| [Overgeneralization]: Nope, just one. Other scientific
| communities have _other_ issues. They all do to some
| extent. To pretend that all scientists (as people),
| scientific fields of study, or scientific processes are
| perfect and above criticism is deeply ignorant of reality
| and human nature.
|
| [No True Scotsman]: This is the opposite argument to the
| one above. Pick one.
|
| It boils down to this: I don't even have to know how to do
| a thing myself to recognise that other people don't know
| either. If two of them disagree on matters of fact, _one of
| them is wrong_. If many of them disagree in many ways, more
| than likely they are _all wrong_. This same criticism is
| popularly levelled against religions (plural!) of which
| there are many mutually exclusive variants, even within one
| main branch such as Islam or Christianity. They _regularly
| kill each other_ over such disagreements, such as Shia vs
| Sunni or Protestant vs Catholic.
|
| You're saying I shouldn't criticise this.
|
| On what basis do you think that?
|
| Or did ChatGPT think this for you?
| bowsamic wrote:
| I'm really confused here as a quantum physicist myself.
| Yes there is huge disagreement and yes it's a problem,
| but also what is the alternative? It's not like we can
| just give up on quantum mechanics because you personally
| have philosophical problems with it. My task is to reduce
| the fundamental quantum noise that we see in
| gravitational wave detectors after removing all the
| classical noise. How would it be constructive to just say
| "let's pretend there is no quantum noise?"
|
| To me it's exciting that there is no clear interpretation
| for quantum mechanics, and it also nicely retroactively
| casts doubt on our interpretation for all previous
| theories: did classical mechanics just coincidentally
| present as deterministic? Etc. maybe you think questions
| about determinism are woo but I think that would be quite
| extreme
|
| Honestly, I don't see why it's a problem that there are
| different interpretations of quantum mechanics
| DonHopkins wrote:
| He's apoplectic that ChatGPT was able to cut through his
| bluster and bullshit and enumerate his Gish Gallop of
| logical fallacies like a hot knife cutting through
| butter. If it stings so much, then maybe he should first
| run his own ridiculous conspiracy theories and baseless
| accusations against science and false equivalencies about
| religion through ChatGPT himself before posting them
| here, to strengthen them up and educate himself, instead
| of embarrassing himself by being so thoroughly and
| effectively schooled by a mere LLM and an actual quantum
| physicist.
|
| Original Argument:
|
| Quantum Mechanics as Religion: Quantum mechanics (QM) is
| likened to a religion, with disagreements among
| physicists, an orthodox Copenhagen interpretation, and
| adherence to seemingly nonsensical concepts like wave-
| particle duality.
|
| Logical Fallacies and Mistakes:
|
| False Analogy: Comparing QM to religion overlooks
| fundamental differences in methodologies and goals.
| Science is empirical and self-correcting; religion is
| based on faith.
|
| Strawman Fallacy: Misrepresents QM as purely faith-based
| or dogmatic. QM is grounded in empirical evidence and
| rigorous mathematics.
|
| Ad Hominem: Attacks the character or motives of QM
| practitioners, rather than addressing the scientific
| validity of QM itself.
|
| Hasty Generalization: Overgeneralizes from disagreements
| among physicists to claim the entire field is
| unscientific.
|
| Appeal to Ignorance: Assumes that because aspects of QM
| are counterintuitive, they must be nonsensical or faith-
| based.
|
| Overgeneralization/Sweeping Generalization: Claims that
| disagreements in QM are indicative of flaws in all
| scientific fields, ignoring the diversity and complexity
| of scientific disciplines.
|
| No True Scotsman: Imposes arbitrary criteria for what
| constitutes 'real' science, excluding QM based on its
| interpretive disagreements.
|
| Validity of Arguments:
|
| Limited Validity in Recognizing Disagreements: The
| argument validly recognizes the existence of
| disagreements and different interpretations within QM,
| which is a natural aspect of any evolving scientific
| field.
|
| Misinterpretation of Nature of Science: However, the
| argument fails to appreciate the empirical basis of
| science and the role of theoretical diversity in
| scientific progress.
|
| Rebuttal from an Actual Scientist:
|
| Quantum Mechanics as a Practical and Evolving Science:
| The scientist highlights the practical applications of
| QM, the excitement of unresolved questions, and the
| evolving nature of scientific understanding.
|
| Assessment of Rebuttal:
|
| Practicality and Utility: The rebuttal correctly
| emphasizes the practical applications of QM, which are
| well-established and empirically validated.
|
| Scientific Progress and Open Questions: The scientist's
| view of the unresolved aspects of QM as exciting and
| valuable is in line with the nature of scientific
| inquiry, which thrives on exploration and continuous
| refinement.
|
| Conclusion:
|
| The original argument conflates the philosophical and
| interpretative aspects of QM with religious belief, using
| several logical fallacies. It overlooks the empirical
| foundation and practical success of QM.
|
| The rebuttal from the scientist provides a more accurate
| representation of QM as a practical, empirically
| grounded, and continuously evolving field of science. The
| existence of different interpretations and unresolved
| questions is not a flaw but a driving force for further
| research and understanding.
| tim333 wrote:
| 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.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| 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)
| 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.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| 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.
| hwillis wrote:
| > 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.
| supportengineer wrote:
| 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".
| hwillis wrote:
| > We keep looking for a physical property of matter than
| explains gravity
|
| No, the Einstein field equations actually wrap things up
| pretty neatly as far as why it happens (although not how).
| Energy, momentum, stress, and mass are all the same. Energy
| turns into matter and vice versa. E=mc^2.
|
| Going faster doesn't change your velocity relative to
| light, just your reference frame. In the same way, getting
| heavier changes your reference frame. If you're changing
| your relative time, you're also changing how far you're
| traveling from an external reference. And if the distance
| is changing, it means space is warping... which is exactly
| what gravity is. Energy/mass/momentum warps space and that
| gives us gravity.
| 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.
| malablaster wrote:
| 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."
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| The headline image could make for a nice wallpaper, full size:
| https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2022/10/PROTON...
| xhrpost wrote:
| See also: "Do protons really contain charm quarks?"
|
| https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/proton-contain-charm...
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Is the state space of a single proton sufficiently complex for
| the complete range of first-person experience to fit within it?
| tomrod wrote:
| That sea of quarks might be one of the most beautiful things I've
| ever seen!
| arter wrote:
| 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.
| rapjr9 wrote:
| 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?
| dvsfish wrote:
| 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)
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| 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.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| andoando wrote:
| 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.
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| 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...
| mettamage wrote:
| 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).
| lying4fun wrote:
| The other day I was washing dishes and there was some water
| dilluted milk residue in my plate, but due to plate having
| been moved around it painted a nebula like pattern - it was
| beautiful, a sight to behold. So I thought what's the
| invariant here between the milk and nebulas that make them
| look the same. Do you think that stuff you mentioned could
| explain this and countless similar phenomena
| lying4fun wrote:
| 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
| andoando wrote:
| Yeah thats my thought too! What if there was a whole
| universe inside of an atom? Or on the other hand, we and
| everything we observe is just a single atom in a greater
| collection of atoms forming what is table to some other
| consciousness?
|
| I know I probably sound like a complete goon, but it makes
| a lot of sense to me.
|
| (I just watched the simpson video. haha, I thought I was
| being original)
| tauntz wrote:
| Shower thought: maybe not even an atom but what if our
| "universe" is a short-lived quark or antiquark? For an
| observer in the "next level" universe, that quark would
| exist only for 10^-24 seconds (or whatever the lifetime
| of quarks is) but for us, that's the whole lifetime of
| the universe. And it's turtles all the way down indeed,
| with infinite universes all over the place..
| sph wrote:
| 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 Godel's incompleteness theorems in
| physics?
| andoando wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
| JimmyRuska wrote:
| 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
| yazzku wrote:
| Control.Monad.Random
| canjobear wrote:
| The difference is that these thunks can interfere and get
| entangled with each other.
| Ono-Sendai wrote:
| For all the simulation argument believers, note that we can't
| even accurately simulate a single nucleus.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| 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.
| Razengan wrote:
| Wait till you see the sophon.
| electrondood wrote:
| > 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.
| dcow wrote:
| "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.
| desmosxxx wrote:
| 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.
| demurgos wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| notfed wrote:
| > 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.
| vladms wrote:
| 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).
| sph wrote:
| I get what you mean, but still I'd rather accept probabilistic
| particles than the 11-dimensional bull that is string theory.
| kalekold wrote:
| > 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...
| roelschroeven wrote:
| 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.
| l33tman wrote:
| 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..
| l33tman wrote:
| 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.
| willy_k wrote:
| 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.
| roland_nilsson wrote:
| 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!"
| VagabundoP wrote:
| 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.
| retrac98 wrote:
| "mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until
| an experiment forces it to take a concrete form"
|
| Sounds like your average codebase.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| 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.
| passion__desire wrote:
| 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
| bondarchuk wrote:
| 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.
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| The proton is the most complicated thing I could ever imagine?
| Pshhhh whatever. I can easily imagine two protons.
| codewiz wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262637
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not a dupe (usually used for discussion from the same day or
| week), but a previous discussion (from two years ago).
| bluepoint wrote:
| 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.
| piombisallow wrote:
| The complexity of fundamental physics is vastly overrated, it's
| just unintuitive. The simplest cell is orders of magnitude more
| complex than a proton.
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