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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
Isn't it weird how one elementary particle can become completely different elementary particle by "absorbing" (?) yet another elementary particle?
Yes, it's weird. Quarks and electrons are just points, they have no interior, so they can't absorb other thing. I'm not sure about the official explanation, but IIRC they old quark and the electron just disapears, and a new quark appear instead???
Actually, it's more complicated, because there appears also a new neutrino, it's something like: quark up + electron --> quark down + neutrino. But neutrinos are very difficult to see, so let's ignore it.
Actually, it's more complicated, because there is an intermediate W+ or W- particle. The W particles live for a very short time, so you can ignore it unless you work in a particle ascelerator, but to get the correct results you must use the W+ or W- particle in the middel of the transformation. The correct equation are
quark up + electron --> quark up + neutrino + W- --> quark down + neutrino
quark up + electron --> quark down + electron + W+ --> quark down + neutrino
Actually, it's more complicated, because sometimes you get a strange quark instead of a down quark. Ignoring the W+ or W- particles
quark up + electron --> quark strange + neutrino
(And perhaps there are a few more "actualies", but these are the most important weird cases.)
How exactly does that happen?
Magic? Nobody knows, we only can make experiments and guess the equations. There is people that enjoy discusing the interpretation, but I think it's better to ignore it and enjoy the agreement of equations and experiments.
Doesn't each particle species have it's own separate quantum field?
Yes
How does one convert into another?
Magic? Sorry, not good answer.
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.
A lot of the rules can be understood using magic balls. You can learn the rules to combine particles and draw Feynman diagrams as if they were magic balls. It took a long time to discover them, including two or three Nobel prices. It was very difficult, but somehow it was possible to discover one rule at a time, and add another rule a few years later, that made the whole procces slightly easier.
The equations are more difficult. I only learned a small part of them (and I had forgoten them). Also, they were discovered in small steps, sometimes as simplification or generalizations of previous equations, and had a few Nobels in the list of discoverers. Also, most particles have the same equations, for example all the quarks have the same equations so you just copy it 6 times, but photons have a different equations. And you have one big equation that combines all of them in a very long formula, but each part is simple.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had a professor who was fond of saying "the proton is a garbage can".
This is why the LHC (and other hadron colliders) has to run at such a high luminosity (collision rate). Most of the time, when it collides two protons, the parts that interact are only carrying a tiny fraction of the energy, so you don't get the interesting high energy physics you want to probe.
“In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.”
Well, maybe someone could imagine it, otherwise, all that complexity would have led to a gargantuan number of bugs and the universe would have crashed..
I 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.
"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
I’ve never understood the anthropic principle. It’s a very big maybe for seemingly no reason. Existence of a single universe is a pretty hard thing to contemplate, why should we consider multiples of it?
> all that complexity would have led to a gargantuan number of bugs and the universe would have crashed
This has always seemed to me one of the best arguments against the simulation hypothesis.
Can you expand on that? Are you saying that if we were in a simulation, the observed complexity of the universe (or the complexity of particle physics) would have caused the simulation to crash? Ergo, we are not in a simulation?
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.
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.
But also in some sense "it has to be that way," since without charge balance atoms wouldn't exist as we know them, and thus neither would all the chemistry that creates the macroscopic world we inhabit.
That's a variation on the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Maybe a kind of observer bias. If the universe weren't seemingly-perfectly balanced to allow emergent complexity in matter, we wouldn't be here to point out how seemingly-perfect it seems. (If you subscribe to a multiverse interpretation, perhaps most of the infinitely many other possible universes are dead and void.)
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!
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 ).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 1.602176634×10−19 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
There's also a anti-proton which has a negative charge. I think this is probably the smallest charge there is.
A neutron can decay into a proton, electron, and anti-neutrino. So maybe one way to think of it is that a proton is a neutron that is missing an electron, that's why it has the opposite charge of the electron.
The quarks that make up a proton (or neutron, etc) have charges that are multiples of 1/3 the electron charge. So in one sense that is the real unit charge. But because as far as we know quarks can never exist in isolation we can only ever see particles with multiples of the electronic charge.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
So first off: charge is quantized. Glossing over some weird particles (like quarks) which can't exist by themselves an integer multiple of e as their charge.
It's been a while since I finished undergrad so my knowledge is rusty, but I don't recall any isolatable particles whose charge wasn't -1e, 0, or 1e. If that's the case, the easiest explanation for why they have the same charge is that if they didn't have opposite charges there wouldn't be anything holding them together in an atom.
clearly related to measure (in the abstract sense) and harmonics of natural numbers. what has fascinated me for years has been the sense that we need to rebuild number up using complex numbers and harmonic measures. what we get are still numbers but no longer this monotonic sequence which is a ‘lazy’ or ‘simple minded’ way of ordering N. when ordered by harmonic measures of primes, N itself has structure (beyond a simple incrementing list) but the order is strictly limited to measures provided (rational) with the prime roots of the measure. (an example is the ‘primorial’ harmonic measure of {2, 3, 5} - think rings).
in these harmonic measures, ‘gaps’ between various levels naturally would arise from simple (x) op. For non-relative prime members, the mapping n x n is all over the place but for relative prime members, n x n always results in another relative prime in the ring, so, naturally those ‘lines’ are ‘stable’ and ‘in phase’ so ‘manifested’.
in other words, there is stuff in the R realm — in between ‘quanta’ — but we’re not allowed, capable, ever, of seeing or measureing it.[edit: as in they ‘exist’ in the same realm that (sqrt -1) i exists in — an unseen realm we call ‘imaginary’..]
Oops, missed the edit window. That was supposed to be "Glossing over some weird particles (like quarks) which can't exist by themselves, all particles have a charge which is an integer multiple of e"
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.
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?
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes they are just that, models, which is what I said. We need X to describe Y therefore we don’t need to pretend X is a miracle because it was always designed to describe Y. It was deduced from Y for this purpose.
No idea what you’re getting at with that conspiracy theory comment, or rather I do and think you need to touch grass and stop projecting some boogey man onto people for stating an objective fact. These are predictive models not divine truth and if you think this is a conspiracy theory you either havent studied much math yourself or your are seriously brainwashed. This is not a fringe view and is a core debate within the philosophy of mathematics with no definitive answer.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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).
'Grand Unified Theory' or the 'Theory of Everything' is to unite Quantum Mechanics with General/Special Relativity.
At scale of things in space (asteroids, planets, satellites, stars, galaxies) - We only need two constants (speed of light, and gravitational constant). The spacetime fabric bending explains everything we see at the scale. Things are very deterministic and have been verified with tons of experiments for decades around the globe.
At the quantum scale, gravity is an extremely weak force but it is still there. We have planks constant (h), elementary charge (e), speed of light.
You are right, that someday we may derive gravitational constant from another elementary particle constant.
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.
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.
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.
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 1/3e.
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.
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.
I'll take a shot at this. The "answer," such as it is, is symmetry. The electron belongs to a group called the leptons, which is to say they are lightweight. Leptons obey certain sorts of statistics and consist of the electron, the muon, the tau lepton, the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino, the tau neutrino, and their antiparticles. That's twelve in total.
The mirror of the leptons would be quarks. Up, down, charm, beauty, top, and bottom ... and their antiparticles. Twelve again! Their charges are 2/3e, -1/3e, 2/3e, -1/3e, 2/3e, -1/3e, and the reverse for the antiquarks. One bundle of three quarks is the proton, and it happens to be 2/3e + 2/3e + -1/3e. But so what? There's all kinds of other bundles. Three-quark bundles are typically hadrons (heavyweight) and two-quark bundles are mesons (medium weight). So you have a lot of choices on the other side!
The choices are caused by something called color confinement, which states that you will not get quarks alone. Indeed, you can take a pair of quarks in the aforementioned meson, and if you stretched them further and further apart, when the bond between them (mediated by gluons) snapped, you would have put so much energy into the stretching and snapping to create two new quarks, one at each end of your broken rubber band. Just as you cannot cut a piece of string such that it only has one end, so you have it with color confinement. I don't want to get too far away from the main point but because of this, quarks are found (normally, outside of Big-Bang quark-gluon plasmas) in combination ... and so eventually one of the combinations has a charge number resembling that of the electron.
Also, positrons aren't really the opposite of electrons. They're opposite on the matter/antimatter axis, which automatically flips the charge, q. They are not opposite along the lepton-quark axis, nor are they opposite along the electron-neutrino axis. Instead of one mirror, imagine many mirrors at angles to one another, and "opposite" becomes a less useful term.
One problem with your explanation is that the muon and the tau (and the pion as a decay product of the tau) all decay into electrons, neutrinos and photons, which would suggest that neither muon or tau are fundamental.
This would put the fundamental leptons being only the electron (and its antiparticle) with the neutrino and the photon.
I 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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
"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?
In a CRT monitor, you have a ray of electrons that travel in vaccum and it is electricity outside wires. With a similar device, you can create a ray of protons and have also electricity with protons instead of electrons.
Another posibility is to use a water solution with acid. A part of the electricity is made of H+ that are just protons. (Actually, each proton is atached to a water molecule, so it's more like H2O+ than a plain H+.)
I'm triying to imagine a wire where protons can move. I don't think it's theoreticaly impossible, but they are mmuch heavier and bigger than electrons, so they it looks very difficult to find a material where they can move freely.
In solids (like metals and semiconductors) the atomic nuclei form stable structures (often crystals). Protons are bound to their nuclei, and the nuclei don’t move, so neither do the protons.
Electrons, on the other hand, can move between atoms, which allows them to form an electrical current.
There are special cases, but that’s the basic answer.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The fact that the proton has the same charge in absolute value as the electron is just a consequence of the fact that the 8 elementary particles at the lowest energy level, i.e. electron and its neutrino, the 3 up quarks and the 3 down quarks have charges that sum to zero in a 3-dimensional charge space.
These 8 particles and their 8 antiparticles are located in the corners of 2 cubes of unit edge in that 3-dimensional charge space. One cube is in the first octant of the coordinates, with 1 corner in the origin, while the other cube is in the opposite octant, also with 1 corner in the origin.
The neutrino and the antineutrino are in the origin, while the electron and the positron are in the opposite corners of the cubes, in the points (-1,-1,-1) and (1,1,1), and the quarks and the antiquarks are in the 12 off-diagonal corners of the 2 cubes.
As functions of the position vector of a particle in this 3-dimensional charge space, the electric charge is the component of the position vector that is parallel to the cube diagonal that passes through origin and the corners of the electron and positron, while the corresponding component that is orthogonal to the diagonal is the so-called color charge (hence chromodynamics; while the electric forces attempt to make null the 1-dimensional electric charge, the strong forces attempt to make null the 2-dimensional color charge), which is non-null only for the quarks and antiquarks, which are off-diagonal, and it is null for electron, neutrino and their antiparticles.
The projections of the off-diagonal corners of the cubes on the diagonal are at one third and two thirds distances from origin, which is why the electric charges of the quarks are 1/3 and 2/3 in absolute value (where the unit of electric charge is the electron charge, i.e. the diagonal of one unit cube), even if in the charge space all the particles have coordinates that are either 1 or 0 in absolute value.
While this symmetry of the charges is interesting, it is not known why it is so.
In any case, if this symmetry had not existed, the Universe as we know it could not exist, because this symmetry ensures that in the nucleons the total color charge of the quarks is null, so they no longer interact through strong forces (except at very short distances, where the residual forces bind the nucleons into nuclei) and at the next level the total electric charge of the atoms is null, so they no longer interact through electric forces (except at very short distances, where the residual forces bind the atoms into molecules).
The same symmetry exists for the other 2 groups of 8 particles and 2 groups of 8 antiparticles, where the muon and the tauon correspond to the electron, because those particles have greater masses but identical charges with the first groups.
In the initial state of the Big Bang, this symmetry of the charges ensures that even if there were only particles in equal numbers and without any antiparticles, the total electric charge and the total color charge of all matter was null.
While the neutrinos do not contribute to any of the charges, their presence ensures that the total spin, i.e. the total angular momentum, was also null.
We know that the electric charge is not fundamental, but a projection of the weak isospin and hypercharge after the Higgs field symmetry breaking. How are weak isospin and hypercharge related to the 2 cubes?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
At the end of the day loads of these types of questions boil down to the anthropic principle. If it didn’t work out so that things could be stable, nothing would be asking the question.
That’s not a satisfying answer but we don’t have a better one in the realm of science. All we have left is either randomness/serendipity or spirituality/religion.
One issue I have with anthropic filter is that for some reason fundamental parameters fit into a tiny neat table. So out of the vastness of incredibly complex universes that boggle the minds of their creatures we ended up here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model_of_Element...
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, PBS Space Time did a video on this “fine tuned universe” theory and it, like all of their videos, is great. The concept seems to be that in an unbalanced universe, life couldn’t form, and we’d be incapable of having this conversation. So, either there are infinite universes and we exist as a result of being in the right one, or there’s one universe and we exist as a result of the one we’re in being right. Either way, we’re pretty lucky.
I can’t get behind all these fine tuning arguments. Who’s to say what life might form if the proton had a charge of 1.01e or if the fine structure constant was 1/138? Something about the line of reasoning that there is a multiverse and we just happen to live in favorable conditions reminds me of Pascal’s wager. It doesn’t do anything other than unfalsifiably assure the wagerer that they are important
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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).
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].
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Youdidit is an explanation, because it doesn't terminate the inquisition. You can then ask what caused you, then what caused the thing that caused you, and so on until you get to the point of saying "and that's as far as we know, we are working on figuring out the rest".
With goddidit, you abruptly got to the end through an escape hatch, and you are done having done no work. There is nothing that explains god, by definition, and there is no "figuring out the rest".
"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."
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.
"The answer that I'm arranging the events intentionally explains why an otherwise low-probability event is occurring"
Okay, I'll grant you that if someone only believes in a God creating conditions for life then the Anthropic principle sort of suggests a non-God possibility, along the lines that Evolution with natural selection presented a way for increasing complexity and intelligence to arise from random mutations without an intelligent designer.
Still, we humans exist in a visibly large and competitive 'dog eat dog' ecosystem, so observing that the ecosystem affects the life within it is a certain kind of idea which fits in with a lot of other observations. Your comment line which I quoted above assumes a low-probability event based on no other observations, when there's no reason to assume that, no sign of an 'evolution of Universes competing in a wider ecosystem of Universes'; you've declared this universe to be 'low probability' based on nothing and then seek to explain something about how we find ourselves in a low-probability universe. For all we know, this could be the only possible Universe configuration, the only solution to some Universe-equation, or an overwhelmingly likely one if all possible Universes are capable of supporting life [and the ideas of Universes which couldn't support life are, in some way, not possible].
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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."
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t take things described by physical models (proton, electron, the idea of “charge”, etc.) at too much of a face value.
All it is is a web of predictions: we do A then B seems to happen, reliably. We then transform it into a story of sorts, to categorize and classify, find patterns and correlations—that’s just how our minds work—and those models are useful, as they create shortcuts for more useful predictions—but it’s all too easy to start thinking of entities these models describe as if they were real, concrete things (that’s also how our minds work).
I recommend to maintain a sort of Schrödinger’s treatment (they exist if convenient, but otherwise they don’t really) for things described in physical models, because none of the above-mentioned categorization and classification is set in stone. None of it can be proven to be objectively true, unless you have some sort of exclusive access to the fabric of underlying reality that bypasses your consciousness.
With that in mind, you would see that the weird coincidences are not that problematic. It just means there is a better model out there, and that will always be the case.
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.
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]
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
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?
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?
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.
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.
That video really annoys me. He's right at one level but totally wrong at another. Yes, you have to explain everything in terms of things people can understand and if they don't know much you can't give a correct explanation... but also, if you actually try, people can understand a lot more than he's pretending they can. Not at a technical level, yeah, but intuitively, it is possible to get general understandings way beyond his attempts at answering that question.
For instance fundamental charges are a lot like positive and negatively-oriented vortices in a fluid, which when they touch cancel each other out and radiate energy away. They're not _exactly_ like that, but they're a lot like it, and that's a model people can understand without knowing the first thing about quantum field theory. Sure, you won't understand from that why like-charges repel each other, not really, but if you play with the analogy for a while it starts to seem why that might be true as well.
Magnetism is quite a bit trickier to explain in this model but it can done with some work. In particular: a charge radiates little linear packets of energy just by existing; when one of these packets hits another charged particle it moves a tick closer or further away (based on +/-). A current/moving charge/magnetic dipole radiates away little spiraling packets of energy which are aligned in the plane orthogonal to the conventional magnetic field; when these hit another charged particle they get rotated a tick.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 −1.602176634×10^−19 Coulombs. Quarks have either +-2(1.602176634×10^−19)/3 or +-(1.602176634×10^−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=(1.602176634×10^−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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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:
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."
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
Does that mean that the positron is somehow "part" of the proton?
No, and the standard intuition that there are discrete things made out of smaller parts breaks down when you look closely enough. The proton is a bound state of the quark and gluon fields, but it only "contains" individual quarks and gluons in a loose heuristic sense, and positrons are a different thing entirely.
Does it mean that their wave functions interact in some specific way?
Yes, or more precisely it means that the quark fields interact with the electron field (free electrons and positrons are different states of the same underlying bispinor field) and the W boson field in some specific way.
Quantum physics has always bothered me, personally, since I find it difficult to understand reasons.
Ultimately, the sort of mechanistic explanations you're looking for do not exist: the universe runs on differential equations and linear algebra, not billiard balls and clockwork.
“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.
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"
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.
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):
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.
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.
I don't think many worlds is strong enough, since it still doesn't say anything about why anything exists to begin with. You need something like the principle of plenitude.
Many-worlds doesn’t explain the complexity of the standard model at all. It merely gets rid of the arbitrariness and discontinuity implied by wave-function collapse.
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?
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?
If everything is moving away from each other, things must have a center some where
This is not correct: every object is getting further from every other object it's not gravitationally bound to, at a rate approximately proportional to the distance between them.
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.
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":
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.
Sadly (?) the word "nothing" seems to have become overloaded
"Infinity" is another one of those things that used to be murky, but simple; after Cantor we now have different infinities ℵ0, ℵ1... an un-Ockhamian proliferation of terms, and we have to worry about the spaces between them. Science ruins everything!
Perhaps 'because' if the consistency did not exist then the universe would fail to exist.
I think the unsatisfactory feeling I get from these answers is that nobody ever tries to model worlds with different physics or different physical parameters and try to make them work.
It's one thing to know that everything will break down if parameters of this universe change slightly, but I don't think anyone ever actually seriously tried to make alternatives work, and simply assumed that the only model we know that works is the only possibility.
Of course, I understand it's hard, and we might not have the compute to properly run the simulations to see how things actually work out (without quantum computers, apparently the problem is exponentially hard on classical computers). But philosophically it feels lazy and unimaginative.
nobody ever tries to model worlds with different physics or different physical parameters and try to make them work.
Alternative models are being explored all the time. There is incentive to do so, because coming up with better explanations is likely to win Nobel prizes. What is now called the standard model, however, so far explains the existing observations the best, despite being more complex and having a higher amount of arbitrariness than most physicists would like.
You're talking about better models for our current physical reality.
I'm talking about consistent models that don't match our physical reality, but that can potentially simulated and which can give rise to intelligent life.
I would posit that self-consistency is the only possible ultimate reason. Whatever other reason there is, you can always continue asking “why”, like children like to do, and will never come to an end. The only final explanatory is the absence of reduction ad absurdum. Another way to state this is to say that everything logically consistent probably exists, because there cannot be any other ultimate reason why it wouldn’t.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Reductionist philosophy is very common in science. It's essentially the idea that you can break things down into simpler parts to better understand how everything works.
It's kind of "common sense", if you understand how all the components on a circuit board function individually, then you can piece together how the entire board will function. In computer science, you can reduce everything to operations comparing 1s and 0s, then use that to deterministically recreate higher-level abstractions like strings, floats, and colors on a monitor.
Then there's quantum physics, which turns reductionism on its head. Things are supposed to get less complicated as you get smaller, not more complicated! It's like the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know.
Things are supposed to get less complicated as you get smaller, not more complicated!
They're not. In general, once you take a lot of little things to make a big thing, you may notice a bunch of emergent properties, but one of the major emergent property is that... all the variability cancels out, or averages to a simple quantity. See e.g. all the complex dancing of great many particles making up everyday objects, that all average to a simple scalar number we call "temperature".
the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know
This is why the "god of the gaps" critique is so short-sighted. It relies on the assumption that as science progresses it will "close the gaps". In reality the opposite happens. Another example is the cell -- in Darwin's day it was thought to be a simple thing, but then we learned more about it and it turned out to be monstrously complex and the mystery intensifies.
We have kind of an opposite problem to the god of the gaps as well, in which a phenomenon can be determined to "just be the way it is", such as objects with mass exerting gravitational forces on each other. We can say "God made them do that" or we can give up and say "We'll never know why, it's just a constant" and both are equally problematic because either way, we assume we can't eventually discover the "why".
Nope, the "god of the gaps" critique has nothing to do scientific discovery being a route to omniscience, something only some religious figures have ever claimed to have even the possibility of access to. It's the set of things religions claim the only explanation/evidence for repeatedly shrinking, as we found explanations for weather that have more predictive power than "the wrath/favour of the gods", found cures for the stuff that was supposed to be divine or karmic punishment and found explanations for differences between animals that we can use to make different animals (in increasingly specific ways), until eventually there was nothing left of the original religious explanations of how things came to be except a determination to posit the divine as the cause of anything scientists weren't confident on.
A shift in the position of the faithful from "this an accurate account of how the world was created direct from the creator" to "well actually that stuff was all metaphorical but the Big Bang must have been God's moment because you can't explain anything that happened before then" is not a trend in favour of the explanatory power of religion.
In the case of protons (or for that matter cells), religion never had anything to say about them in the first place never mind an explanation that's more compatible with quantum phenomena than early 20th century physics, and it's quantum physicists not priests that are the people busy making them do weird things in particle accelerators and saying 'told you this might happen'.
(Also, someone should let the theists know that it's the quirkiness of quarks that proves God's design so they stop writing about how it's the perfect orderliness of atomic structure that's God's design)
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.
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.
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.
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? :-)
This is a specific example of the general point we are discussing in the other thread, so it would be better to focus on that, unless you think strongly otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"If something isn't explicable in terms of current science, it means God must be doing it" is undoubtedly a ridiculous argument. We agree there. But the assumption behind this argument is "God is a hypothesis on a par with weather patterns or germs". The new atheists share the assumption, but from it draw the conclusion "if something isn't explicable in terms of current science, it is nonetheless explicable in principle in scientific terms". Examples of this are trivial to find in their works, including the two titles I mention above. But as I explained, this assumes what it's trying to prove: that rational explanation and scientific hypothesis are one and the same. So both the religious and atheist versions of the 'god of the gaps' argument share the same assumption.
Now I have no idea which religious thinkers are pushing this absurdity, at least not today. I'm not really interested, because I know that the failure of a weak argument for a particular claim does not undermine that claim. But I do know that the new atheists bang this drum repeatedly, loudly and excitedly. It's a big part of their argument, and is very often repeated online.
Have I fairly stated their argument? Am I fair to say that the argument is circular?
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
What research have you done on this? What is your understanding of the argument, and where are its weaknesses?
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.
Smallest parts are less complicated. Even some mammals that have zero intuitions about that scale managed to develop math to describe it pretty much perfectly. Which is impossible with larger scale systems such as cells or organisms where the best we can do is some statistics that accurately predicts some thing sometimes.
There is normal heat death which is when maximum entropy is achieved. Even after that, the universe still goes on complexifying till it reaches maximum complexity at which point there is no other complex states to jump to. - Leonard Susskind.
I have no doubt quantum physicists know what they are talking about but...I always think it is the kind of excuse a schoolkid would give their teachers for their calculations being wrong.
Just to emphasize how extreme this dichotomy is, not only is quantum mechanics correct (in that it's a predictive model), it's the most correct physical theory humans have ever devised in that the measurements there have more significant figures than anything else.
It's interesting that semiconductor engineers have to directly wrestle with the magic that's quantum tunneling. This theory is really not just a theory.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
I used to think this same thing but I went down a rabbit hole a few months ago listening to people very critical of string theory like angela collier, sabbine, eric weinstein, peter woit and some others on youtube. Yeah they all have their own quirks but after listening to their take on the history of string theory the common things are it hasn't produced anything but the major proponents of it always talk like it has and in some cases outright lie about things that it has contributed.
I really like listening to brian greene and sean carroll but now when I listen to them, particularly in recent videos, it feels like there is much less substance to what they're actually saying string theory has done.
But who knows! Maybe I'll learn something new and completely flip my world view again, I'm not a physicist by any stretch so have to rely on listening to experts :)
You're not wrong, but what you're not appreciating is that the criteria for "pretty and elegant" are the same for string theory, the standard model, general relativity, and any other physical theory: a relatively simple and internally consistent mathematical framework that, when carried through in calculations, produces predictions that match a wide variety of observations, and is not contradicted by any known observations.
Proponents of string theory have not been able to propose an experiment that would allow them to exclude other theories, thereby demonstrating that string theory is better. But by the exact same token, critics of string theory have not been able to conduct an experiment that contradicts string theory, thereby allowing them to exclude it. And science moves forward by excluding theories with evidence (not just complaining about them).
Discussions of string theory among physicists are deeply intertwined with concerns about who gets famous, who gets grants, who gets tenure, who gets endowed chairs, who gets on TV and sells books, etc. But these types of concerns are a constant background noise to the practice of science, going back hundreds of years. Every scientist on Earth tends a private list of the wrong people who are getting too many resources to study the wrong thing.
If the critics of string theory could prove it was wrong, they would have, but they haven't yet. That makes it provisionally correct. Not correct, necessarily--it could be wrong! But it's not wrong yet, which is better than quite a lot of scientific theories proposed across the span of history (for now...).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I totally back the scientists and wish I could understand it better but I always like to have a chuckle that the crazy sounding parts are just the scientists making up stuff
Just because it’s quantitatively accurate doesn’t mean it’s “true”. Like a fun fact I like is the geocentrism was extremely accurate in terms of astronomical predictions when heliocentricism came about (it was actually more accurate for a while).
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.
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!”
I want whatever you're smoking, because it's the best predictive theory we have, and is constantly tested and proven. Only the why is in question, but the math absolutely works.
I mean semiconductor engineers have to deal with quantum effects when designing chips. Its not like it doesn't effect the real world, we do interact with parts of it when things get really small.
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.
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.
Popular science writers on this stuff tend to be in a similar position to the teachers. The real physics is described in complex mathematics and doesn't translate to simple English very well.
It's definitely not wrong, but maybe more akin to the earth-centric view of the universe and the insane patterns that planets would trace in the sky. Just in this case we don't have another object like the sun to use to pivot our models. Maybe there are superstructures hidden that we could access if we could look into objects outside space-time, but until then space-time reduction is what we have right now other than guesswork (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron)
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.
Definitely not. For one thing, gravity isn't just mass. The gravity of a moving baseball is higher than a nonmoving baseball. The gravity of a charged battery is higher than a discharged battery. Same protons, neutrons, and electrons, but if you change their velocity or how they are arranged then they have more gravity. It's the stress-energy tensor, not just the mass (by which you mean matter?).
Could gravity be the effect of mass in an indefinite form?
A very clear way to see this is not true is to compare stars and black holes to quarks. The space between quarks acts like they are different, larger or smaller quarks depending on how the real quarks happen to be arranged at that moment.
So, if we apply the same idea to a very large star, it would sometimes act like a black hole or a supernova or a star depending on where it was and how it happened to be doing and also maybe just sometimes spontaneously?
But mostly, if it was really far away you would expect it to act like a black hole, because from a far distance it seems like its all in one small point, and a black hole is an irreversible phase transition. But that doesn't happen, and stars look like stars no matter how far away you are. If reality worked like this, we'd expect nearby galaxies to have almost no dark matter and faraway galaxies to have lots and be very small. But instead galaxies and dark matter are pretty much the same no matter how far away they are from us.
This is a pretty ill-posed question though. I'm cramming it into a box that has an interesting answer just for fun, and I don't think it answers much of what you are asking.
We see gravity whenever we see large "clumps" of matter. We keep looking for a physical property of matter than explains gravity, but perhaps it's the lack of something. So when matter appears to attract other matter, maybe they are both "falling towards something".
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.
“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.”
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
Is it possible the universe is infinitely complex? i.e, "turtles all the way down?".
I find the concept of duality and replication in physics very interesting. Everything seems to have an opposite, with properties such that when these opposites come together, they form a bigger unit, which itself has an opposite.
I don't "believe" too many things that can't be evidentiarily substantiated, but as silly of a thing to reference for this kind of discussion, I personally have the irrational, unscientific belief that this Simpsons opening is unironically the most accurate model of the Universe that we have:
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).
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
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
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)
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..
When I was a curious kid, I asked my father the opposite: what if there is one fundamental physical rule that forbids us to know everything about the universe?
Something that we will continuously bump against without being able to resolve further, by definition.
Is there such a thing as Gödel's incompleteness theorems in physics?
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
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
In the opposite direction, I feel mildly annoyed when people expect a precise/clear answer to questions which can be answered mostly/better with probability distributions.
Considering how you can test statistics in real life (ex: Buffon's Needle) there must be something very "statistical" embedded in reality itself (it is true that quantum mechanics pushes everything very far so can seem to complex).
Statistics and probability don’t bother me and we should use them more. Describing the very nature of the world as a soup of probability out of which observations arise and events take place, however, is getting tired. Superposition is a worn out teaching tool not an actual description of reality.
In my understanding a wave function doesn't collapse just when someone observes it; it collapses when it participates in any physical event.
"I fundamentally don’t believe that a proton is some shape shifting quantum soup of energy that doesn't form until someone comes around and thinks about it." is the way quantum mechanics is often portrayed in pop sci, but it simply can't be true. Quantum mechanics existed just fine before there was anyone to observe it and think about it.
It reflects the fact that the measurement apparatus, environment in general and the observer in particular are all also part of the "wave function". Until these are linked to the system to be observed (like the proton), the system has to be analyzed as the full set of possible configurations of its constituents.
After you link it up with the apparatus, it is pulled into the system as a new part of it, and so on. The more stuff you pull into the system, the less number of different configurations you sum over, eventually you end up with a single configuration with an observer that has a clear measurement result in her mind. This process is what is called "wavefunction collapse" in old physics texts (and a lot of modern pop-sci accounts).
What sets this apart from other purely probabilistic theories is that it's non-local, the entire linked system from the proton to the measurement apparatus to the observer has to be taken into account in the calculations if you are to be thorough. In local theories you can separate the parts of the system and handle them separately, like you could say "there is a 1% probability that a charm quark pops out in the upper left part of the proton every second" etc. You can't really do this in QM/QFT, and this is what in essence leads to all of the counter-intuitive results and confusion..
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.
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.
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!"
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]
For a second there I thought I'd missed a breakthrough or 10 and they'd actually manage to record a video of 3 quarks going about their business. Alas, it's only a "data-driven animation", but due to the noise it looks quite convincingly like an experimental recording.
The take home and "easy to digest" conclusion is that the proton is a linear superposition of states. The most likely of these states (the ones with highest amplitude) have 3 quarks. The second most likely have 5 quarks. When you make an observation you may see 3 or 5 quarks.
And neutrons, well, they have a great sense of humor.
Had to re-read the Title for a sec. I thought it was referring to Proton, the compatibility layer software.
Well, the natural proton not only was first, but means first (from Greek πρῶτος)
So I think we can give it priority on that one :)
Incidentally, πρῶτον, too, is a word in Ancient Greek.
To be fair, all known implementations of Proton's execution are entirely dependent on protons.
Dependency hell
And here I was thinking it was about Proton, the Mail/Calendar/VPN/Cloud Storage/PM/etc.
Here's another pretty complex Proton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket)
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.
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)
Huh? With a little bit more what? Complexity? I expected that they would be pretty much the same except with a different mix of the different quarks and such (and also, unstable without having a nucleus to be a part of, and with a neutral charge)
I've heard neutrons described as a union of a proton and an electron based on masses. The reality is probably much more complex.
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
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....)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleon_magnetic_moment
If you squish an electron and proton really hard, you'll get a neutron [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_degeneracy_pressure
And a neutrino: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_capture
If I understand correctly, which I probably don't, this is what releases the final wave of neutrinos in a supernova.
Wat?
Neutrons are (primarily) UDD while protons are (primarily) UUD. Although I do wonder if this charm+anticharm ghost exists in other hadrons
Yes, this is correct.
Yes, neutrons and all the other hadrons have virtual pairs of char-anticharm quarks. (And some of them have actual charm or anticharm quarks.)
Yes, just what I was thinking: a neutron is actually more complicated than a proton, it's like a proton with an electron stuck inside it.
It makes me so angry that a neutron isn't a proton and an electron stuck together.
No. you can'tput an elelctron inside a proton to get a neutron. If you make them colide and you are lucky, one of the up quarks of the proton changes to a down quark, and now you get a neutron. Both up and down quarks are elelmentary particles as far as we know.
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.
Yes, it's weird. Quarks and electrons are just points, they have no interior, so they can't absorb other thing. I'm not sure about the official explanation, but IIRC they old quark and the electron just disapears, and a new quark appear instead???
Actually, it's more complicated, because there appears also a new neutrino, it's something like: quark up + electron --> quark down + neutrino. But neutrinos are very difficult to see, so let's ignore it.
Actually, it's more complicated, because there is an intermediate W+ or W- particle. The W particles live for a very short time, so you can ignore it unless you work in a particle ascelerator, but to get the correct results you must use the W+ or W- particle in the middel of the transformation. The correct equation are
quark up + electron --> quark up + neutrino + W- --> quark down + neutrino
quark up + electron --> quark down + electron + W+ --> quark down + neutrino
Actually, it's more complicated, because sometimes you get a strange quark instead of a down quark. Ignoring the W+ or W- particles
quark up + electron --> quark strange + neutrino
(And perhaps there are a few more "actualies", but these are the most important weird cases.)
Magic? Nobody knows, we only can make experiments and guess the equations. There is people that enjoy discusing the interpretation, but I think it's better to ignore it and enjoy the agreement of equations and experiments.
Yes
Magic? Sorry, not good answer.
A lot of the rules can be understood using magic balls. You can learn the rules to combine particles and draw Feynman diagrams as if they were magic balls. It took a long time to discover them, including two or three Nobel prices. It was very difficult, but somehow it was possible to discover one rule at a time, and add another rule a few years later, that made the whole procces slightly easier.
The equations are more difficult. I only learned a small part of them (and I had forgoten them). Also, they were discovered in small steps, sometimes as simplification or generalizations of previous equations, and had a few Nobels in the list of discoverers. Also, most particles have the same equations, for example all the quarks have the same equations so you just copy it 6 times, but photons have a different equations. And you have one big equation that combines all of them in a very long formula, but each part is simple.
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.
No, it's not surprising theoretically, but experimentally it's still quite an achievement to be able to spot even these rare events.
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.
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.
What’s interesting is that there’s a net charm content: there are more charm quarks to be found than anti-charms.
Given that charm quarks are heavier than the proton, you’d expect to only find them in deep inelastic collisions when they are produced in pairs with an anti-quark, so it is surprising that there’s an asymmetry.
Wait, what? I read the article as saying that it's an open question whether there's a charm asymmetry.
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.
(2022)
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..
Just needs a little abstraction- and not the leaky variety
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?
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()?
That's an illusion; there is only one electron.
buddhism intensifies
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'.
Universe is a quantum computer, forking every Planck interval.
Why do you ask? Are you hoping to ROWHAMMER a parallel universe?
Genuinely curious if there’s any scientifically useful direction to this question
I'd watch a movie with that premise.
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.
"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
It's all WebAssembly
hahaha as a founder working on the Wasm space, this made me giggle!
We run on GPUs. The real question is, what does the AI that runs us, run on?
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?
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?
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.
I just had a really stupid thought, after finishing reading the article.
So, the electron is an elementary particle, right? Compared to the proton, the electron is "simple", yes?
Despite this difference in complexity, an electron has a charge of -e and a proton has a charge of +e. They are exactly complementary regarding charge (if I am understanding right, I am not a smart person).
my question is... why? why must protons and electrons be perfectly complementary regarding charge? if the proton is this insanely complex thing, by what rule does it end up equaling exactly the opposite charge of an electron? why not a charge of +1.8e, or +3e, or 0.1666e, etc? Certainly it is convenient that a proton and electron complement each other, but what makes that the case? Does this question even make sense?
so, there's a concept of a "positron", which I can understand - of course it has charge +e, it is the "opposite" of an electron. it is an anti-electron. at least that makes some kind of sense. but a proton is made up of this complex soup of other elementary particles following all these crazy rules, and yet it also ends up being exactly +e.
No one knows. That's part of the great mystery.
But also in some sense "it has to be that way," since without charge balance atoms wouldn't exist as we know them, and thus neither would all the chemistry that creates the macroscopic world we inhabit.
That's a variation on the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Maybe a kind of observer bias. If the universe weren't seemingly-perfectly balanced to allow emergent complexity in matter, we wouldn't be here to point out how seemingly-perfect it seems. (If you subscribe to a multiverse interpretation, perhaps most of the infinitely many other possible universes are dead and void.)
This made me think - is a concept like most even defined for infinity?
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
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!
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 ).
I could see why a charge imbalance prevents life from forming, but why would it also collapse the entire universe?
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.
Essentially dust theory from Permutation City. I've thought about this a lot.
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?
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.
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.
Sssshhhh, you’ll summon all the simulation people out of the woodwork!
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".
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?
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.
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.
Ah, I misinterpreted that.
Yes, could be the anthropic principal.
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
First, I am not a physicist. That said, he's my attempt at an answer that satisfies me: Part of the reason is charge quantization. Neither could be some fractional charge. We also observe charge conservation and electromagnetic force laws as described by quantum electrodynamics (QED). These necessitate that the electron and proton charges be precisely balanced for the universe to function as it does.
But in fact, quarks are fractionally charged: +2/3 and -1/3.
For this to work, there have to be as many quarks in the proton as the denominator of the quark charge fraction. (And what mechanism forces that?)
And why should the charges on quarks be some nice low-number fraction of the charge on the electron? Why not sqrt(3) or something?
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.
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.
Ok, I see. Also pentaquarks all have integer charge.
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 1.602176634×10−19 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_Engineerin...
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.
Wikipedia suggests the quarks that make up the proton have charge ⅔e and -⅓e
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_quark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_quark
The post you’re replying to seems to be taking ⅓e as the basic unit of charge.
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
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
OP assigned -3 units of charge to the electron, so all works out.
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.
Resonance seems a candidate.
Information compression (edit sorry you said no one knows why the need to symmetry groups and I provided the answer).
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.
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.
There's also a anti-proton which has a negative charge. I think this is probably the smallest charge there is.
A neutron can decay into a proton, electron, and anti-neutrino. So maybe one way to think of it is that a proton is a neutron that is missing an electron, that's why it has the opposite charge of the electron.
The quarks that make up a proton (or neutron, etc) have charges that are multiples of 1/3 the electron charge. So in one sense that is the real unit charge. But because as far as we know quarks can never exist in isolation we can only ever see particles with multiples of the electronic charge.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
So first off: charge is quantized. Glossing over some weird particles (like quarks) which can't exist by themselves an integer multiple of e as their charge.
It's been a while since I finished undergrad so my knowledge is rusty, but I don't recall any isolatable particles whose charge wasn't -1e, 0, or 1e. If that's the case, the easiest explanation for why they have the same charge is that if they didn't have opposite charges there wouldn't be anything holding them together in an atom.
clearly related to measure (in the abstract sense) and harmonics of natural numbers. what has fascinated me for years has been the sense that we need to rebuild number up using complex numbers and harmonic measures. what we get are still numbers but no longer this monotonic sequence which is a ‘lazy’ or ‘simple minded’ way of ordering N. when ordered by harmonic measures of primes, N itself has structure (beyond a simple incrementing list) but the order is strictly limited to measures provided (rational) with the prime roots of the measure. (an example is the ‘primorial’ harmonic measure of {2, 3, 5} - think rings).
in these harmonic measures, ‘gaps’ between various levels naturally would arise from simple (x) op. For non-relative prime members, the mapping n x n is all over the place but for relative prime members, n x n always results in another relative prime in the ring, so, naturally those ‘lines’ are ‘stable’ and ‘in phase’ so ‘manifested’.
in other words, there is stuff in the R realm — in between ‘quanta’ — but we’re not allowed, capable, ever, of seeing or measureing it.[edit: as in they ‘exist’ in the same realm that (sqrt -1) i exists in — an unseen realm we call ‘imaginary’..]
Oops, missed the edit window. That was supposed to be "Glossing over some weird particles (like quarks) which can't exist by themselves, all particles have a charge which is an integer multiple of e"
Imagine you have a bunch of fulcrums in the air and items droping down. If the things that land on the fulcrums don't balance each other out the fulcrum tips and the items keep dropping. Eventually all the fulcrums are balanced.
A lot of these things coalesce until they are stable enough they don't fall apart. If there is a stable form and you have enough of them, eventually you get a lot of stable forms.
It is not some magical thing that makes all this balance, it is more of a settling thing where things eventually drop to a stable state. There is lots of matter that is still unstable.
This explains why atoms have 0 charge, but not why protons, which are stable even without electrons, have a charge of 1.
Put in terms of elementary particles, why is it that the ratio of electric charge between a quark and an electron is either 1:3 or 2:3?
If the universe is old, then how do you expect atoms to exist if this was not the case?
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?
How would we ever distinguish what half-a-proton is in a universe where all protons ever are _always_ paired off?
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 = 1.602176634×10−19 coulombs,
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?
Because they are mathematical models built to describe a thing and thus their entire purpose as a concept is to add up “neatly”
I'm getting very strong "angels on a pinhead" vibes from this
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.
Measure the area of a pinhead, divide by cross-sectional area of an angel. Easy peasy.
Im getting very strong “ad hominem” vibes from someone who has an irrational view of predictive models.
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.
Yes they are just that, models, which is what I said. We need X to describe Y therefore we don’t need to pretend X is a miracle because it was always designed to describe Y. It was deduced from Y for this purpose.
No idea what you’re getting at with that conspiracy theory comment, or rather I do and think you need to touch grass and stop projecting some boogey man onto people for stating an objective fact. These are predictive models not divine truth and if you think this is a conspiracy theory you either havent studied much math yourself or your are seriously brainwashed. This is not a fringe view and is a core debate within the philosophy of mathematics with no definitive answer.
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".
No the purpose of the theory is to make predictions. Any ideas about objective reality are philosophical at best.
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.
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.
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
thanks, i want to stress the model of the proton i had posited up thread is very simplified, for the purpose of explanation.
HN is a great training ground for learning how to present arguments in a compelling, engaging manner.
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.
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
by drawing a hypothetical box around your system with and measuring it, you've bounded it locally.
no, we're talking about quarks
or any isolated quantum systen
without being localized, they remain a probability wave because the "universe" of information literally doesn't know enough about them anymore
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.
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.
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.
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".
My layman understanding is that charge is not fundamental. It derives from something called weak hypercharge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_hypercharge
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.
No, because those constants are entirely arbitrary.
The curiosity here is that you have multiple numbers lining up, only separated by small integers.
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.
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).
'Grand Unified Theory' or the 'Theory of Everything' is to unite Quantum Mechanics with General/Special Relativity.
At scale of things in space (asteroids, planets, satellites, stars, galaxies) - We only need two constants (speed of light, and gravitational constant). The spacetime fabric bending explains everything we see at the scale. Things are very deterministic and have been verified with tons of experiments for decades around the globe.
At the quantum scale, gravity is an extremely weak force but it is still there. We have planks constant (h), elementary charge (e), speed of light.
You are right, that someday we may derive gravitational constant from another elementary particle constant.
I am not so sure about speed of light though.
The first thing to point out here is that the
is not
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.
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.
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
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.
How does 2/3 - 1/3 not sum to 1/3? 2-1 is 1, right? What am I missing?
2 up quarks, so 2/3 * 2 -> 4/3. And then 4/3 - 1/3 = 3/3 = 1
Ah ha, I thought it was 1/3 per quark. Thanks.
Thanks I wondered the same
Ah right, so basically its just a convenience notation? 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 1/3e.
Yes, individual dimensioned quantities are arbitrary: only the relationships between them have physical meaning.
OP's article has a full paragraph dedicated saying that "The proton is much more than three quarks"
A proton, electron, and a neutron walk into a bar…
After about 15 minutes, the neutron has changed into another proton and electron, so bar now has a bigger party on its hands.
How do they split the bill?
This is a good question. Should the bill be split by mass, charge or spin?
I like your explanation.
What are you referring to with this?
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.
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.
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.
I'll take a shot at this. The "answer," such as it is, is symmetry. The electron belongs to a group called the leptons, which is to say they are lightweight. Leptons obey certain sorts of statistics and consist of the electron, the muon, the tau lepton, the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino, the tau neutrino, and their antiparticles. That's twelve in total.
The mirror of the leptons would be quarks. Up, down, charm, beauty, top, and bottom ... and their antiparticles. Twelve again! Their charges are 2/3e, -1/3e, 2/3e, -1/3e, 2/3e, -1/3e, and the reverse for the antiquarks. One bundle of three quarks is the proton, and it happens to be 2/3e + 2/3e + -1/3e. But so what? There's all kinds of other bundles. Three-quark bundles are typically hadrons (heavyweight) and two-quark bundles are mesons (medium weight). So you have a lot of choices on the other side!
The choices are caused by something called color confinement, which states that you will not get quarks alone. Indeed, you can take a pair of quarks in the aforementioned meson, and if you stretched them further and further apart, when the bond between them (mediated by gluons) snapped, you would have put so much energy into the stretching and snapping to create two new quarks, one at each end of your broken rubber band. Just as you cannot cut a piece of string such that it only has one end, so you have it with color confinement. I don't want to get too far away from the main point but because of this, quarks are found (normally, outside of Big-Bang quark-gluon plasmas) in combination ... and so eventually one of the combinations has a charge number resembling that of the electron.
Also, positrons aren't really the opposite of electrons. They're opposite on the matter/antimatter axis, which automatically flips the charge, q. They are not opposite along the lepton-quark axis, nor are they opposite along the electron-neutrino axis. Instead of one mirror, imagine many mirrors at angles to one another, and "opposite" becomes a less useful term.
This is hard to wrap my brain around but thank you for the explanation!
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.
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.
Then I’ll ask why can’t you use protons as electricity?
Who says you can't?
Who says we don't always use it?
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
Thanks for the clarification.
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?
the proton motive force powers us all
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.
Too late to edit: Instead of "H2O+", it should be "H3O+". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydronium
Protons are electricity. But slow. All acid/base reactions. Proton gradients and pumps in the biological cells all work on slow proton electricity.
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.
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?
I also have a question. Why should any theoretical predictions be regarded as Science if there is no feasible way to test them?
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.
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.
Physics is testable within the known laws of physics. Metaphysics is not.
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.
Metaphysics can answer Why questions while Physics is more concerned with How and What questions.
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.
Makes me wonder if the universe as a whole is electrically neutral. Someone should check!
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
It’s even more complicated. The charge on the electron is partially screened by virtual positive charges emerging briefly from the vacuum, so what we measure is less than the actual charge.
But isn't the same thing going on for the proton?
(Of course, absent some good reason, one wouldn't expect the two screenings to exactly balance...)
Charge conservation still applies: vacuum polarization can only modify the apparent charge distribution, not the net value.
The fact that the proton has the same charge in absolute value as the electron is just a consequence of the fact that the 8 elementary particles at the lowest energy level, i.e. electron and its neutrino, the 3 up quarks and the 3 down quarks have charges that sum to zero in a 3-dimensional charge space.
These 8 particles and their 8 antiparticles are located in the corners of 2 cubes of unit edge in that 3-dimensional charge space. One cube is in the first octant of the coordinates, with 1 corner in the origin, while the other cube is in the opposite octant, also with 1 corner in the origin.
The neutrino and the antineutrino are in the origin, while the electron and the positron are in the opposite corners of the cubes, in the points (-1,-1,-1) and (1,1,1), and the quarks and the antiquarks are in the 12 off-diagonal corners of the 2 cubes.
As functions of the position vector of a particle in this 3-dimensional charge space, the electric charge is the component of the position vector that is parallel to the cube diagonal that passes through origin and the corners of the electron and positron, while the corresponding component that is orthogonal to the diagonal is the so-called color charge (hence chromodynamics; while the electric forces attempt to make null the 1-dimensional electric charge, the strong forces attempt to make null the 2-dimensional color charge), which is non-null only for the quarks and antiquarks, which are off-diagonal, and it is null for electron, neutrino and their antiparticles.
The projections of the off-diagonal corners of the cubes on the diagonal are at one third and two thirds distances from origin, which is why the electric charges of the quarks are 1/3 and 2/3 in absolute value (where the unit of electric charge is the electron charge, i.e. the diagonal of one unit cube), even if in the charge space all the particles have coordinates that are either 1 or 0 in absolute value.
While this symmetry of the charges is interesting, it is not known why it is so.
In any case, if this symmetry had not existed, the Universe as we know it could not exist, because this symmetry ensures that in the nucleons the total color charge of the quarks is null, so they no longer interact through strong forces (except at very short distances, where the residual forces bind the nucleons into nuclei) and at the next level the total electric charge of the atoms is null, so they no longer interact through electric forces (except at very short distances, where the residual forces bind the atoms into molecules).
The same symmetry exists for the other 2 groups of 8 particles and 2 groups of 8 antiparticles, where the muon and the tauon correspond to the electron, because those particles have greater masses but identical charges with the first groups.
In the initial state of the Big Bang, this symmetry of the charges ensures that even if there were only particles in equal numbers and without any antiparticles, the total electric charge and the total color charge of all matter was null.
While the neutrinos do not contribute to any of the charges, their presence ensures that the total spin, i.e. the total angular momentum, was also null.
Can you please link to a picture of the 2 cubes?
Is this image another visualization of the same thing?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model.svg
We know that the electric charge is not fundamental, but a projection of the weak isospin and hypercharge after the Higgs field symmetry breaking. How are weak isospin and hypercharge related to the 2 cubes?
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.
Thanks!
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...
Something...something...gauge theory.
Or perhaps -- it's a constant in the simulator source code.
Maybe it's so difficult because it's not a constant, but a magic number used in the code. (yeah, I'm dealing with lots of magic numbers in some code currently being worked on)
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.
That just deflects the question one level down without explaining anything.
"Because it is" is not a helpful answer to "why?"
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
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
Physics doesn't attempt to answer the question "why", it answers "how".
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
You eventually have to take _something_ as given.
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.
If you refuse to ask further questions, yes. If you keep asking why, it opens the door to what charge fundamentally is.
Spin and charge are fundamentally connected. That said, I was answering according to SOC, which remains a hypothesis.
I never heard this. I'm almost sure it's wrong. Do you have a link?
Why does light decay quadratically and not linearly? Why are the laws of physics algebraic at all? Why did the Big Bang happen? Ask enough why's and get to: we just don't know. Turtles all the way down.
The first one is well known. It's because it's radiating in three dimensions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
They are algebraic because our minds today can see only algebraic relationships between events.
The big bang is a "scientific myth" - a story that describes the creation of the world in sciency terms.
At the end of the day loads of these types of questions boil down to the anthropic principle. If it didn’t work out so that things could be stable, nothing would be asking the question.
That’s not a satisfying answer but we don’t have a better one in the realm of science. All we have left is either randomness/serendipity or spirituality/religion.
One issue I have with anthropic filter is that for some reason fundamental parameters fit into a tiny neat table. So out of the vastness of incredibly complex universes that boggle the minds of their creatures we ended up here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model_of_Element...
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.
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
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.
How can you ask that and also claim to not be a smart person lmao
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.
Sorry that should say anthropic and not anthropomorphic haha. Too much time has elapsed to edit it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
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.
So, PBS Space Time did a video on this “fine tuned universe” theory and it, like all of their videos, is great. The concept seems to be that in an unbalanced universe, life couldn’t form, and we’d be incapable of having this conversation. So, either there are infinite universes and we exist as a result of being in the right one, or there’s one universe and we exist as a result of the one we’re in being right. Either way, we’re pretty lucky.
https://youtu.be/YmOVoIpaPrc
I can’t get behind all these fine tuning arguments. Who’s to say what life might form if the proton had a charge of 1.01e or if the fine structure constant was 1/138? Something about the line of reasoning that there is a multiverse and we just happen to live in favorable conditions reminds me of Pascal’s wager. It doesn’t do anything other than unfalsifiably assure the wagerer that they are important
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.
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.
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?
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.
Your comment was an excellent synthesis of the discussion that preceded it - thank you.
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...
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.
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.
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”.
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).
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...
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.
"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
AKA the "anthropic principle."
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.
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"):
Well, it explains why the universe is fine-tuned, if you buy the argument.
Yep, just like any other answer to the question, since it's a metaphysical question rather than a scientific one.
It offers an explanation.
No more than any other answer does.
No it doesn't. Goddidit is not an explanation.
Nope, not like any other answer. Like Satandidit.
No it doesn't. Goddidit is not an explanation.
No, not like other answers. Science never closes the book on further questions.
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).
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.
I don't know what you mean to say here. Satandidit doesn't predict anything either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Youdidit is an explanation, because it doesn't terminate the inquisition. You can then ask what caused you, then what caused the thing that caused you, and so on until you get to the point of saying "and that's as far as we know, we are working on figuring out the rest".
With goddidit, you abruptly got to the end through an escape hatch, and you are done having done no work. There is nothing that explains god, by definition, and there is no "figuring out the rest".
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.
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).
"We don't know" predicts nothing, but doesn't pretend to be an answer, doesn't pretend to be more than it is.
It placates (or frustrates) with a non-explanation. It's feel-good sugar when you wanted nutrition.
More than "We don't know" does.
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.
Okay, I'll grant you that if someone only believes in a God creating conditions for life then the Anthropic principle sort of suggests a non-God possibility, along the lines that Evolution with natural selection presented a way for increasing complexity and intelligence to arise from random mutations without an intelligent designer.
Still, we humans exist in a visibly large and competitive 'dog eat dog' ecosystem, so observing that the ecosystem affects the life within it is a certain kind of idea which fits in with a lot of other observations. Your comment line which I quoted above assumes a low-probability event based on no other observations, when there's no reason to assume that, no sign of an 'evolution of Universes competing in a wider ecosystem of Universes'; you've declared this universe to be 'low probability' based on nothing and then seek to explain something about how we find ourselves in a low-probability universe. For all we know, this could be the only possible Universe configuration, the only solution to some Universe-equation, or an overwhelmingly likely one if all possible Universes are capable of supporting life [and the ideas of Universes which couldn't support life are, in some way, not possible].
The Anthropic Principle explains why you are asking the question, not why the proton has that charge. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection
+ "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.
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".
i.e. the puddle thinking how fortunate it is that the ditch it is in is the perfect size for it.
That's the weak anthropic principle.
The strong anthropic principle is: the puddle thinking how fortunate it is that there water at all
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.
That was sarcasm about the people who do say/believe things like that.
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.
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.
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).
The "why is there something rather than nothing" is a fascinating and mind boggling philosophical question.
A good read is https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2018/02/08/why-is-...
Which law of the universe guarantees the satisfaction of your curiosity again ?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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".
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.
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.
Derek tackles easier subjects than PBS space.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You would think that with my username, I should know the answer. But I have no clue
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.
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.
Don’t take things described by physical models (proton, electron, the idea of “charge”, etc.) at too much of a face value.
All it is is a web of predictions: we do A then B seems to happen, reliably. We then transform it into a story of sorts, to categorize and classify, find patterns and correlations—that’s just how our minds work—and those models are useful, as they create shortcuts for more useful predictions—but it’s all too easy to start thinking of entities these models describe as if they were real, concrete things (that’s also how our minds work).
I recommend to maintain a sort of Schrödinger’s treatment (they exist if convenient, but otherwise they don’t really) for things described in physical models, because none of the above-mentioned categorization and classification is set in stone. None of it can be proven to be objectively true, unless you have some sort of exclusive access to the fabric of underlying reality that bypasses your consciousness.
With that in mind, you would see that the weird coincidences are not that problematic. It just means there is a better model out there, and that will always be the case.
Are there intermediate [electron,] charge states between + and - in superfluids and/or superconductors?
Is there superposition with electron charge states?
The typical model of superconductivity says that electrons in the material pair up to form a quasiparticle -- the "cooper pair" -- with new properties, namely not experiencing resistance. The original quantized charge of the electrons still adds up to the same amount.
Unlike protons an neutrons, electrons are considered elementary particles that can't be broken down any further, so their charge can not be "divided" into something less than 1.
Quantum Hall effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hall_effect :
Fractional quantum Hall effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_quantum_Hall_effect :
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 :
"Electrons become fractions of themselves in graphene, study finds" https://phys.org/news/2024-02-electrons-fractions-graphene.a... :
"Fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect in multilayer graphene" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-07010-7
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?
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...
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.
https://youtu.be/36GT2zI8lVA
Richard Feynman on why questions
That video really annoys me. He's right at one level but totally wrong at another. Yes, you have to explain everything in terms of things people can understand and if they don't know much you can't give a correct explanation... but also, if you actually try, people can understand a lot more than he's pretending they can. Not at a technical level, yeah, but intuitively, it is possible to get general understandings way beyond his attempts at answering that question.
For instance fundamental charges are a lot like positive and negatively-oriented vortices in a fluid, which when they touch cancel each other out and radiate energy away. They're not _exactly_ like that, but they're a lot like it, and that's a model people can understand without knowing the first thing about quantum field theory. Sure, you won't understand from that why like-charges repel each other, not really, but if you play with the analogy for a while it starts to seem why that might be true as well.
(See https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/09/24/samuel-becketts-guide-... for some pictures of this... I wish I had better though.)
Magnetism is quite a bit trickier to explain in this model but it can done with some work. In particular: a charge radiates little linear packets of energy just by existing; when one of these packets hits another charged particle it moves a tick closer or further away (based on +/-). A current/moving charge/magnetic dipole radiates away little spiraling packets of energy which are aligned in the plane orthogonal to the conventional magnetic field; when these hit another charged particle they get rotated a tick.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know the actual answer, but from my understanding of QFT the answer is going to be roughly this shape:
Charge is not actually a quantity on the real number line; it's more of a "count" of something. Not sure what exactly. The "topological defect" model of charges in 2d is a decent analogy though, in which a charge can be e.g. a count of how many vortices there are in a field which are oriented in a certain direction (picture a bathtub with a bunch of drains, and ask, how many tornado-like vortices, if we count clockwise vortices as +1 and counterclockwise as -1, are there? The number can vary but obviously it has to be an integer because what would half a vortex even mean?)
But that model is too simple for charge, since quarks have +-1/3 or 2/3 but the result always adds up to an integer in a hadron. Maybe it's something like a type of winding number or linking number? I don't know. Whatever it is, when the "correct" explanation is found, it will be obvious why it is always an integer and why its constituents are always 1/3 or 2/3, and it will no longer seem interesting to ask why it can't be any old fraction, because that misunderstands the "type" of object that it is counting.
Is there a reason why we say quarks have fractional charge instead of having just +-1 or +-2? And Then electron and proton would have -3 and +3?
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.
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 −1.602176634×10^−19 Coulombs. Quarks have either +-2(1.602176634×10^−19)/3 or +-(1.602176634×10^−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=(1.602176634×10^−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.
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.
Which answer on physicsexchange is the right one? The top scored ?
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.
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.
You don't need spontaneous proton decay for the answer to work, just positron emission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission
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?
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".
Still does not explain "why"
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.
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
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."
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.
"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.
I don't think it explains "How" either, in this case.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
A photon turns into a (virtual) electron-positron pair. Does it mean that the photon consists of these particles?
No, and the standard intuition that there are discrete things made out of smaller parts breaks down when you look closely enough. The proton is a bound state of the quark and gluon fields, but it only "contains" individual quarks and gluons in a loose heuristic sense, and positrons are a different thing entirely.
Yes, or more precisely it means that the quark fields interact with the electron field (free electrons and positrons are different states of the same underlying bispinor field) and the W boson field in some specific way.
Ultimately, the sort of mechanistic explanations you're looking for do not exist: the universe runs on differential equations and linear algebra, not billiard balls and clockwork.
“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.
Which epistemic foundation in which your "why" question is answered do you consider as acceptable for you?
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"
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.
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)
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.
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.
I don't think many worlds is strong enough, since it still doesn't say anything about why anything exists to begin with. You need something like the principle of plenitude.
Many-worlds doesn’t explain the complexity of the standard model at all. It merely gets rid of the arbitrariness and discontinuity implied by wave-function collapse.
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?
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?
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?
This is not correct: every object is getting further from every other object it's not gravitationally bound to, at a rate approximately proportional to the distance between them.
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.
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...
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.
"Infinity" is another one of those things that used to be murky, but simple; after Cantor we now have different infinities ℵ0, ℵ1... an un-Ockhamian proliferation of terms, and we have to worry about the spaces between them. Science ruins everything!
The use of "literally" to mean figuratively has grown in popularity in recent years (as a form of emphasis); though it is not a new use:
* https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally
I think the unsatisfactory feeling I get from these answers is that nobody ever tries to model worlds with different physics or different physical parameters and try to make them work.
It's one thing to know that everything will break down if parameters of this universe change slightly, but I don't think anyone ever actually seriously tried to make alternatives work, and simply assumed that the only model we know that works is the only possibility.
Of course, I understand it's hard, and we might not have the compute to properly run the simulations to see how things actually work out (without quantum computers, apparently the problem is exponentially hard on classical computers). But philosophically it feels lazy and unimaginative.
Alternative models are being explored all the time. There is incentive to do so, because coming up with better explanations is likely to win Nobel prizes. What is now called the standard model, however, so far explains the existing observations the best, despite being more complex and having a higher amount of arbitrariness than most physicists would like.
You're talking about better models for our current physical reality.
I'm talking about consistent models that don't match our physical reality, but that can potentially simulated and which can give rise to intelligent life.
Well, you'd need to ask a question that can be answered with science rather than philosophy, generally.
I would posit that self-consistency is the only possible ultimate reason. Whatever other reason there is, you can always continue asking “why”, like children like to do, and will never come to an end. The only final explanatory is the absence of reduction ad absurdum. Another way to state this is to say that everything logically consistent probably exists, because there cannot be any other ultimate reason why it wouldn’t.
Wait, proton decay was proven?
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Checkmate, atheists
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.
They're not. In general, once you take a lot of little things to make a big thing, you may notice a bunch of emergent properties, but one of the major emergent property is that... all the variability cancels out, or averages to a simple quantity. See e.g. all the complex dancing of great many particles making up everyday objects, that all average to a simple scalar number we call "temperature".
As I understand it, many "laws" in science, such as Ohm's law, also emerge from this sort of "neatness at scale".
That doesn't happen for everything. Biology is an obvious counterexample.
Or is it? Biology at micro-scale seems much more complicated than at macro-scale. It has this thermodynamics quality to it.
This is why the "god of the gaps" critique is so short-sighted. It relies on the assumption that as science progresses it will "close the gaps". In reality the opposite happens. Another example is the cell -- in Darwin's day it was thought to be a simple thing, but then we learned more about it and it turned out to be monstrously complex and the mystery intensifies.
We have kind of an opposite problem to the god of the gaps as well, in which a phenomenon can be determined to "just be the way it is", such as objects with mass exerting gravitational forces on each other. We can say "God made them do that" or we can give up and say "We'll never know why, it's just a constant" and both are equally problematic because either way, we assume we can't eventually discover the "why".
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.
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)
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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? :-)
This is a specific example of the general point we are discussing in the other thread, so it would be better to focus on that, unless you think strongly otherwise.
Well, a lot of things don't square well with evolutionary biology, which is why the field is in crisis.
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.
Yes. There was a conference on this in 2016: https://www.quantamagazine.org/scientists-seek-to-update-evo...
You can also read my other comment on this topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37014923
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.
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.
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.
"If something isn't explicable in terms of current science, it means God must be doing it" is undoubtedly a ridiculous argument. We agree there. But the assumption behind this argument is "God is a hypothesis on a par with weather patterns or germs". The new atheists share the assumption, but from it draw the conclusion "if something isn't explicable in terms of current science, it is nonetheless explicable in principle in scientific terms". Examples of this are trivial to find in their works, including the two titles I mention above. But as I explained, this assumes what it's trying to prove: that rational explanation and scientific hypothesis are one and the same. So both the religious and atheist versions of the 'god of the gaps' argument share the same assumption.
Now I have no idea which religious thinkers are pushing this absurdity, at least not today. I'm not really interested, because I know that the failure of a weak argument for a particular claim does not undermine that claim. But I do know that the new atheists bang this drum repeatedly, loudly and excitedly. It's a big part of their argument, and is very often repeated online.
Have I fairly stated their argument? Am I fair to say that the argument is circular?
What research have you done on this? What is your understanding of the argument, and where are its weaknesses?
Wow, this is well-stated!
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.
Smallest parts are less complicated. Even some mammals that have zero intuitions about that scale managed to develop math to describe it pretty much perfectly. Which is impossible with larger scale systems such as cells or organisms where the best we can do is some statistics that accurately predicts some thing sometimes.
There is normal heat death which is when maximum entropy is achieved. Even after that, the universe still goes on complexifying till it reaches maximum complexity at which point there is no other complex states to jump to. - Leonard Susskind.
still simpler than a k8s cluster
Agree. I think if one bombard 100K Kubernetes cluster with softballs there still won't be a single repeatable observation.
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
Just to emphasize how extreme this dichotomy is, not only is quantum mechanics correct (in that it's a predictive model), it's the most correct physical theory humans have ever devised in that the measurements there have more significant figures than anything else.
It's interesting that semiconductor engineers have to directly wrestle with the magic that's quantum tunneling. This theory is really not just a theory.
You mean it's not just a hypothesis.
I would really, really expect users of this site to know the difference.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.”
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.
I used to think this same thing but I went down a rabbit hole a few months ago listening to people very critical of string theory like angela collier, sabbine, eric weinstein, peter woit and some others on youtube. Yeah they all have their own quirks but after listening to their take on the history of string theory the common things are it hasn't produced anything but the major proponents of it always talk like it has and in some cases outright lie about things that it has contributed.
I really like listening to brian greene and sean carroll but now when I listen to them, particularly in recent videos, it feels like there is much less substance to what they're actually saying string theory has done.
But who knows! Maybe I'll learn something new and completely flip my world view again, I'm not a physicist by any stretch so have to rely on listening to experts :)
You're not wrong, but what you're not appreciating is that the criteria for "pretty and elegant" are the same for string theory, the standard model, general relativity, and any other physical theory: a relatively simple and internally consistent mathematical framework that, when carried through in calculations, produces predictions that match a wide variety of observations, and is not contradicted by any known observations.
Proponents of string theory have not been able to propose an experiment that would allow them to exclude other theories, thereby demonstrating that string theory is better. But by the exact same token, critics of string theory have not been able to conduct an experiment that contradicts string theory, thereby allowing them to exclude it. And science moves forward by excluding theories with evidence (not just complaining about them).
Discussions of string theory among physicists are deeply intertwined with concerns about who gets famous, who gets grants, who gets tenure, who gets endowed chairs, who gets on TV and sells books, etc. But these types of concerns are a constant background noise to the practice of science, going back hundreds of years. Every scientist on Earth tends a private list of the wrong people who are getting too many resources to study the wrong thing.
If the critics of string theory could prove it was wrong, they would have, but they haven't yet. That makes it provisionally correct. Not correct, necessarily--it could be wrong! But it's not wrong yet, which is better than quite a lot of scientific theories proposed across the span of history (for now...).
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.
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.
The (scientific) theory is really not just a (colloquial) theory
The other famous example is PET scanners, which actually use a form of antimatter: positrons (the antimatter counterpart of electrons).
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!
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.
We used fire in our daily lives even before organic chemistry existed.
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.
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/commons/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
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.
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.
That’s awesome to hear.
I totally back the scientists and wish I could understand it better but I always like to have a chuckle that the crazy sounding parts are just the scientists making up stuff
Just because it’s quantitatively accurate doesn’t mean it’s “true”. Like a fun fact I like is the geocentrism was extremely accurate in terms of astronomical predictions when heliocentricism came about (it was actually more accurate for a while).
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.
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!”
I want whatever you're smoking, because it's the best predictive theory we have, and is constantly tested and proven. Only the why is in question, but the math absolutely works.
I mean semiconductor engineers have to deal with quantum effects when designing chips. Its not like it doesn't effect the real world, we do interact with parts of it when things get really small.
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.
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.
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.
That’s not really true, there may be ways to experimentally distinguish between those disagreements
Popular science writers on this stuff tend to be in a similar position to the teachers. The real physics is described in complex mathematics and doesn't translate to simple English very well.
It's definitely not wrong, but maybe more akin to the earth-centric view of the universe and the insane patterns that planets would trace in the sky. Just in this case we don't have another object like the sun to use to pivot our models. Maybe there are superstructures hidden that we could access if we could look into objects outside space-time, but until then space-time reduction is what we have right now other than guesswork (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron)
If you supply more energy budget, the proton will be able to throw together a more effective show. I guess that's it.
I'm surprised there isn't a gimmicky VisionPro app for it
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?
Nope.
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.
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?).
A very clear way to see this is not true is to compare stars and black holes to quarks. The space between quarks acts like they are different, larger or smaller quarks depending on how the real quarks happen to be arranged at that moment.
So, if we apply the same idea to a very large star, it would sometimes act like a black hole or a supernova or a star depending on where it was and how it happened to be doing and also maybe just sometimes spontaneously?
But mostly, if it was really far away you would expect it to act like a black hole, because from a far distance it seems like its all in one small point, and a black hole is an irreversible phase transition. But that doesn't happen, and stars look like stars no matter how far away you are. If reality worked like this, we'd expect nearby galaxies to have almost no dark matter and faraway galaxies to have lots and be very small. But instead galaxies and dark matter are pretty much the same no matter how far away they are from us.
This is a pretty ill-posed question though. I'm cramming it into a box that has an interesting answer just for fun, and I don't think it answers much of what you are asking.
We see gravity whenever we see large "clumps" of matter. We keep looking for a physical property of matter than explains gravity, but perhaps it's the lack of something. So when matter appears to attract other matter, maybe they are both "falling towards something".
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.
In the article, quarks and such are referred to as having momentum and angular momentum.
Is that the same thing that affects objects at our scale, or does it mean something different?
Same thing.
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.”
The headline image could make for a nice wallpaper, full size: https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2022/10/PROTON...
See also: "Do protons really contain charm quarks?"
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/proton-contain-charm...
Is the state space of a single proton sufficiently complex for the complete range of first-person experience to fit within it?
That sea of quarks might be one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen!
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.
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?
I literally was just having a foggy version of this exact same thought whilst reading the article. Especially
You articulated my feeling better than I could. Surely this is something the researchers have accounted for and there's a good explanation (whether I can actually understand it is another story)
https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/09/09/protons-and-charm-q...
It's explained better here.
tl;dr; is that they are virtual particles and don't have the same mass as a "real" charm quark.
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.
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.
Is it possible the universe is infinitely complex? i.e, "turtles all the way down?".
I find the concept of duality and replication in physics very interesting. Everything seems to have an opposite, with properties such that when these opposites come together, they form a bigger unit, which itself has an opposite.
I don't "believe" too many things that can't be evidentiarily substantiated, but as silly of a thing to reference for this kind of discussion, I personally have the irrational, unscientific belief that this Simpsons opening is unironically the most accurate model of the Universe that we have:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycvlJ9XMd94&ab_channel=cakta...
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).
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
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
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)
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..
Which would also mean, there is an opposite to our universe that is our anti-quark :]
When I was a curious kid, I asked my father the opposite: what if there is one fundamental physical rule that forbids us to know everything about the universe?
Something that we will continuously bump against without being able to resolve further, by definition.
Is there such a thing as Gödel's incompleteness theorems in physics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
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
Control.Monad.Random
The difference is that these thunks can interfere and get entangled with each other.
For all the simulation argument believers, note that we can't even accurately simulate a single nucleus.
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.
Wait till you see the sophon.
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.
“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.
IIUC, that is just a hidden variables theory. Bells theorem tells us that it would at least be non-local which is just as weird/interesting IMO.
I really enjoyed this Minute Physics and 3Blue1Brown video describing hidden variables and Bell's theorem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs
As you said, it's implies that we're not failing to measure some "hidden variable" that would explain probabilities away, but that the vary nature of these objects is probabilistic.
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.
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.
...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.
In the opposite direction, I feel mildly annoyed when people expect a precise/clear answer to questions which can be answered mostly/better with probability distributions.
Considering how you can test statistics in real life (ex: Buffon's Needle) there must be something very "statistical" embedded in reality itself (it is true that quantum mechanics pushes everything very far so can seem to complex).
Statistics and probability don’t bother me and we should use them more. Describing the very nature of the world as a soup of probability out of which observations arise and events take place, however, is getting tired. Superposition is a worn out teaching tool not an actual description of reality.
I get what you mean, but still I'd rather accept probabilistic particles than the 11-dimensional bull that is string theory.
You might be right!
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
In my understanding a wave function doesn't collapse just when someone observes it; it collapses when it participates in any physical event.
"I fundamentally don’t believe that a proton is some shape shifting quantum soup of energy that doesn't form until someone comes around and thinks about it." is the way quantum mechanics is often portrayed in pop sci, but it simply can't be true. Quantum mechanics existed just fine before there was anyone to observe it and think about it.
It reflects the fact that the measurement apparatus, environment in general and the observer in particular are all also part of the "wave function". Until these are linked to the system to be observed (like the proton), the system has to be analyzed as the full set of possible configurations of its constituents.
After you link it up with the apparatus, it is pulled into the system as a new part of it, and so on. The more stuff you pull into the system, the less number of different configurations you sum over, eventually you end up with a single configuration with an observer that has a clear measurement result in her mind. This process is what is called "wavefunction collapse" in old physics texts (and a lot of modern pop-sci accounts).
What sets this apart from other purely probabilistic theories is that it's non-local, the entire linked system from the proton to the measurement apparatus to the observer has to be taken into account in the calculations if you are to be thorough. In local theories you can separate the parts of the system and handle them separately, like you could say "there is a 1% probability that a charm quark pops out in the upper left part of the proton every second" etc. You can't really do this in QM/QFT, and this is what in essence leads to all of the counter-intuitive results and confusion..
QFT is the most well-tested physics theory mankind has developed and certainly is not a "haze" as the pop-sci articles write.
What they mean by the "haze of probabilities" is that you need to iterate over all possible configurations of the gluons and quarks in the proton to produce experimental predictions.
It is for sure computationally ludicrous, but conceptually it's really not better or worse than to say that particles are billiard balls moving around by Newton's Equations. You're just more used to the latter, but spend some time working with for example Lattice QCD and you get completely used to the former being the "actual" underlying physics rules.
QFT is not complete. It’s one lens through which we model our observations of micro systems. Being well tested just means it’s precise, not accurate.
That does not follow. What inaccuracies are you thinking about?
Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but wouldn’t a “massive game of life” also be a simulation? I guess there’s a difference between a mechanistic simulation with emergent intelligence vs a Matrix-like one designed to accommodate (an) intelligence. It’s an important distinction but they’re both simulations.
Yes, the universe is a quantum computer that is continuously calculating itself.
“Simulation theory” suggests we’re part of some other being’s simulation.
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!"
The article didn't explain how the charm quark and antiquark hiding in there are heavier than the proton?
The video/animations were pretty nice though.
"mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form"
Sounds like your average codebase.
Is the proton population homogeneous or is each like a snowflake?
Physically can proton 1 behave differently to proton 2 modulo the usual quantum uncertainty around speed/position.
In quantum mechanics, indistinguishable particles (also called identical or indiscernible particles) are particles that cannot be distinguished from one another, even in principle. Species of identical particles include, but are not limited to, elementary particles (such as electrons), composite subatomic particles (such as atomic nuclei), as well as atoms and molecules. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indistinguishable_particles
For a second there I thought I'd missed a breakthrough or 10 and they'd actually manage to record a video of 3 quarks going about their business. Alas, it's only a "data-driven animation", but due to the noise it looks quite convincingly like an experimental recording.
The proton is the most complicated thing I could ever imagine? Pshhhh whatever. I can easily imagine two protons.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262637
Not a dupe (usually used for discussion from the same day or week), but a previous discussion (from two years ago).
The 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.
The complexity of fundamental physics is vastly overrated, it's just unintuitive. The simplest cell is orders of magnitude more complex than a proton.
I'm starting to think the model of the atom I learned in school was just plain wrong