17 ms·
Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
- xhrpost 3y agoSee also: "Do protons really contain charm quarks?" https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/proton-contain-charm-quark/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/proton-contain-charm...
- standardUser 3y agoAnd neutrons, well, they have a great sense of humor.
- robotnikman 3y agoHad to re-read the Title for a sec. I thought it was referring to Proton, the compatibility layer software.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoAnd here I was thinking it was about Proton, the Mail/Calendar/VPN/Cloud Storage/PM/etc.
- avmich 3y agoHere's another pretty complex Proton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket)
- tux3 3y agoWell, the natural proton not only was first, but means first (from Greek πρῶτος) So I think we can give it priority on that one :)
- Koshkin 3y agoIncidentally, πρῶτον, too, is a word in Ancient Greek.
- nomel 3y agoTo be fair, all known implementations of Proton's execution are entirely dependent on protons.
- FredPret 3y agoDependency hell
- agloe_dreams 3y agoIn fairness, the title probably matches. You go off and write a DirectX translation layer and make it work properly in an entirely different operating environment while matching DX quirks. Absurdly complex.
- Tagbert 3y agoThen 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)
- hughesjj 3y agoWat? Neutrons are (primarily) UDD while protons are (primarily) UUD. Although I do wonder if this charm+anticharm ghost exists in other hadrons
- gus_massa 3y ago> Neutrons are (primarily) UDD while protons are (primarily) UUD. Yes, this is correct. > Although I do wonder if this charm+anticharm ghost exists in other hadrons Yes, neutrons and all the other hadrons have virtual pairs of char-anticharm quarks. (And some of them have actual charm or anticharm quarks.)
- drdeca 3y agoHuh? With a little bit more what? Complexity? I expected that they would be pretty much the same except with a different mix of the different quarks and such (and also, unstable without having a nucleus to be a part of, and with a neutral charge)
- Tagbert 3y agoI've heard neutrons described as a union of a proton and an electron based on masses. The reality is probably much more complex.
- marsissippi 3y agoCertainly 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_neutron_decay
- 3y ago
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoIs it surprising there are signs of the heavy quarks? The diagrams that include them have tiny but nonzero values. Hearken back to Hitchhiker's - it is not impossible, just highly improbable.
- pdonis 3y agoNo, it's not surprising theoretically, but experimentally it's still quite an achievement to be able to spot even these rare events.
- exmadscientist 3y agoIt was a bit of an open question what would happen with the heavy charm quarks, given that they each mass more than the entire proton, but yeah... anything else would have been a major surprise.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoFrom the article's description it sounds like they tortured the data until it told them what they wanted. If the charm did show up, how long did it exist? In conventional spectroscopy, the broader the line, the shorter the lifetime (and v.v.) It smells like a sub-attosecond lifetime, if that.
- missingET 3y agoWhat’s interesting is that there’s a net charm content: there are more charm quarks to be found than anti-charms. Given that charm quarks are heavier than the proton, you’d expect to only find them in deep inelastic collisions when they are produced in pairs with an anti-quark, so it is surprising that there’s an asymmetry.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoWait, what? I read the article as saying that it's an open question whether there's a charm asymmetry.
- SaberTail 3y agoI had a professor who was fond of saying "the proton is a garbage can". This is why the LHC (and other hadron colliders) has to run at such a high luminosity (collision rate). Most of the time, when it collides two protons, the parts that interact are only carrying a tiny fraction of the energy, so you don't get the interesting high energy physics you want to probe.
- jonahbenton 3y ago(2022)
- indigoabstract 3y ago> “In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.” Well, maybe someone could imagine it, otherwise, all that complexity would have led to a gargantuan number of bugs and the universe would have crashed..
- erikaww 3y agoJust needs a little abstraction- and not the leaky variety
- Smoosh 3y agoMaybe all the other instances crashed, but we got lucky and get to apply the anthropic principle. The real question is, are we running on bare metal, in a VM, or in a container?
- gumby 3y ago> The real question is, are we running on bare metal, in a VM, or in a container? We can't be running on the bare hardware; there is clearly an OS enforcing the hardware abstraction (e.g. every electron is identical). But is each universe its own process? What happens if you fork()?
- emmelaich 3y ago> every electron is identical That's an illusion; there is only one electron.
- ForIveSyntax 3y agobuddhism intensifies
- gumby 3y agoThat’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'.
- 3y ago
- andy_xor_andrew 3y agoI 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.
- ynniv 3y agoHuh. 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.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago> give me a religious explanation that isn't a religious explanation
- anon84873628 3y agoNo one knows. That's part of the great mystery. But also in some sense "it has to be that way," since without charge balance atoms wouldn't exist as we know them, and thus neither would all the chemistry that creates the macroscopic world we inhabit.
- retrac 3y agoThat's a variation on the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.)
- calibas 3y agoReductionist philosophy is very common in science. It's essentially the idea that you can break things down into simpler parts to better understand how everything works. It's kind of "common sense", if you understand how all the components on a circuit board function individually, then you can piece together how the entire board will function. In computer science, you can reduce everything to operations comparing 1s and 0s, then use that to deterministically recreate higher-level abstractions like strings, floats, and colors on a monitor. Then there's quantum physics, which turns reductionism on its head. Things are supposed to get less complicated as you get smaller, not more complicated! It's like the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> Things are supposed to get less complicated as you get smaller, not more complicated! They're not. In general, once you take a lot of little things to make a big thing, you may notice a bunch of emergent properties, but one of the major emergent property is that... all the variability cancels out, or averages to a simple quantity. See e.g. all the complex dancing of great many particles making up everyday objects, that all average to a simple scalar number we call "temperature".
- vacuity 3y agoAs I understand it, many "laws" in science, such as Ohm's law, also emerge from this sort of "neatness at scale".
- IshKebab 3y agoThat doesn't happen for everything. Biology is an obvious counterexample.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoOr is it? Biology at micro-scale seems much more complicated than at macro-scale. It has this thermodynamics quality to it.
- 3y ago
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agostill simpler than a k8s cluster
- geodel 3y agoAgree. I think if one bombard 100K Kubernetes cluster with softballs there still won't be a single repeatable observation.
- bmartin13 3y ago[flagged]
- clutch89 3y agoBut what is the intelligent being made of? Did they come from randomness or from yet another higher-level intelligent being? You're just scratching the surface of this rabbit-hole!
- Crespyl 3y agoIt's Djinns all the way down, that's why you've got to turn to GOD (GOD over Djinns)...
- lisper 3y agoYou are objectively wrong. It requires no faith. There is simply no evidence for an intelligent being at the root of creation, no data that cannot be explained with much simpler mechanisms than intelligence. The proton is complicated by human standards, but it still is nowhere near as complicated as intelligence. You can't have a conversation with a proton.
- ncneieixk5 3y agowhere did all these building blocks come from then? you still know nothing
- lisper 3y agoThat's not true. I know that the fundamental processes that occur in our universe can be described by simple mathematical laws, so there is no need to posit anything as complex as an intelligence to explain them. Yes, it's possible that there is an intelligence there, just as it is possible that the tooth fairy exists. But mere possibility is not enough to make a good scientific hypothesis.
- bigstrat2003 3y agoTechnically it requires faith to assert that the universe did not have its origin from some intelligent supernatural being, just as it does to assert the opposite. The only thing we can truly say based on the data is "we don't know for certain at this time".
- blackhaj7 3y agoI have no doubt quantum physicists know what they are talking about but when I read stuff like: “changes its appearance depending on how it is probed" "you can’t even imagine how complicated it is" "the proton contains traces of particles called charm quarks that are heavier than the proton itself" I always think it is the kind of excuse a schoolkid would give their teachers for their calculations being wrong
- Rayhem 3y ago> I have no doubt quantum physicists know what they are talking about but...I always think it is the kind of excuse a schoolkid would give their teachers for their calculations being wrong. Just to emphasize how extreme this dichotomy is, not only is quantum mechanics correct (in that it's a predictive model), it's the most correct physical theory humans have ever devised in that the measurements there have more significant figures than anything else.
- mcmoor 3y agoIt's interesting that semiconductor engineers have to directly wrestle with the magic that's quantum tunneling. This theory is really not just a theory.
- neuromanser 3y agoYou mean it's not just a hypothesis. I would really, really expect users of this site to know the difference.
- elpocko 3y agoWhat 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?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thriftwy 3y agoIf you supply more energy budget, the proton will be able to throw together a more effective show. I guess that's it.
- poorman 3y agoI'm surprised there isn't a gimmicky VisionPro app for it
- supportengineer 3y agoI enjoyed this sentence “The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form.” Could gravity be the effect of mass in an indefinite form? As sort of a vacuum in spacetime?
- db48x 3y agoNope.
- chadcmulligan 3y agoI always think 'an experiment' could be said better, because the thing doing the measuring is also a haze of probabilities and the measurement is how these two probabilities interact and change each other.
- hwillis 3y ago> As sort of a vacuum in spacetime? Definitely not. For one thing, gravity isn't just mass. The gravity of a moving baseball is higher than a nonmoving baseball. The gravity of a charged battery is higher than a discharged battery. Same protons, neutrons, and electrons, but if you change their velocity or how they are arranged then they have more gravity. It's the stress-energy tensor, not just the mass (by which you mean matter?). > Could gravity be the effect of mass in an indefinite form? A very clear way to see this is not true is to compare stars and black holes to quarks. The space between quarks acts like they are different, larger or smaller quarks depending on how the real quarks happen to be arranged at that moment. So, if we apply the same idea to a very large star, it would sometimes act like a black hole or a supernova or a star depending on where it was and how it happened to be doing and also maybe just sometimes spontaneously? But mostly, if it was really far away you would expect it to act like a black hole, because from a far distance it seems like its all in one small point, and a black hole is an irreversible phase transition. But that doesn't happen, and stars look like stars no matter how far away you are. If reality worked like this, we'd expect nearby galaxies to have almost no dark matter and faraway galaxies to have lots and be very small. But instead galaxies and dark matter are pretty much the same no matter how far away they are from us. This is a pretty ill-posed question though. I'm cramming it into a box that has an interesting answer just for fun, and I don't think it answers much of what you are asking.
- bloopernova 3y agoIn the article, quarks and such are referred to as having momentum and angular momentum. Is that the same thing that affects objects at our scale, or does it mean something different?
- db48x 3y agoSame thing.
- boringuser2 3y ago[flagged]
- Vecr 3y agoMore or less the weak anthropic principle. Maybe once people get universal sequence predictors really going there would be a better argument.
- boringuser2 3y agoRather than waiting for god-machines, you could just believe in god. Not specifically any religion, just god. Or god-entity. Or god-force. Basically, deus ex machina except for philosophy It's a surprisingly strong position. Respects occams razor, low amount of moving parts, etc.
- msla 3y agoA supernatural being is the exact opposite of Occam's Razor, in that it posits a maximally-complex being that did everything.
- boringuser2 3y ago"Maximality" is neither implied nor required. All that is required is sufficient intellectual superiority to man, which is extremely feasible. It's just for our understanding that we'd call such a being god. That's the word for it.
- Vecr 3y agoA universal sequence predictor can be used as a vastly better version of Occam's razor. It's not a god machine unless someone uses it wrong.
- malablaster 3y agoSummary: “The proton is an incredibly complex particle that physicists are still working to fully understand. Experiments over decades have revealed that the proton is not just three quarks, but contains a sea of transient gluons and quark-antiquark pairs. The HERA accelerator provided evidence of this "gluon dandelion" structure by detecting low-momentum quarks and antiquarks emerging from gluon splitting. Most recently, machine learning analysis of thousands of proton snapshots found traces of heavy charm quarks within the proton, suggesting its makeup is a quantum mixture of different quark states. Future experiments like the Electron-Ion Collider aim to map out the spins and 3D structure of quarks and gluons inside the proton. One interesting finding highlighted is the recent discovery, through machine learning analysis of past proton data, that the proton contains traces of heavy charm quarks, implying its composition involves different quark combinations in a quantum superposition. This suggests the proton's makeup is more complex than previously understood.”
- RicoElectrico 3y agoThe headline image could make for a nice wallpaper, full size: https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2022/10/PROTON_2880x1620_Lede.webp https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2022/10/PROTON...
- odyssey7 3y agoIs the state space of a single proton sufficiently complex for the complete range of first-person experience to fit within it?
- tomrod 3y agoThat sea of quarks might be one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen!
- arter 3y agoA question that came to me as I was reading the article was - what makes us think that all protons are the same ? Can it be that instead of every proton having a superposition of 3 quarks, or 5 quarks or more, we have some protons with 3 and others with 5 ? How did they verify that this is not a case ? I am assuming they never managed to isolate 1 proton and test it twice.
- rapjr9 3y agoWhen I read articles like this I can't help but think that if they were probing apples with a hammer, using stronger and stronger hammer blows, they would conclude that apples are flat and mushy. With stronger hammer blows they'd find the apples are paper thin and hot. How do they know when doing these collision experiments that some of the resulting particles are not popping out of the CMB and aren't actually in the things being collided at all?
- dvsfish 3y agoI literally was just having a foggy version of this exact same thought whilst reading the article. Especially > "Researchers recently discovered that the proton sometimes includes a charm quark and charm antiquark, colossal particles that are each heavier than the proton itself." You articulated my feeling better than I could. Surely this is something the researchers have accounted for and there's a good explanation (whether I can actually understand it is another story)
- empath-nirvana 3y agohttps://profmattstrassler.com/2022/09/09/protons-and-charm-quarks-a-lesson-from-virtual-particles/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/09/09/protons-and-charm-q... It's explained better here. tl;dr; is that they are virtual particles and don't have the same mass as a "real" charm quark.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoThey're basically plunking the underlying fields with a lot of energy in a small space, causing waves, which are then measured as particles. In a sense, they're not really finding particles that were already there, but they're measuring the behavior of fields at high energies and small scales.
- scotty79 3y agoWell, not from CMB (because it's too weak) but from the energy delivered by hitting it, through pair creation. Another weird thing are virtual particles that can popup without energy. They are similar to real energetic particles in a sense that they are manifestation of the same quantum field (for example charm quark field) but they are different from real particles because they don't carry energy and thus can't live long. World is very weird. Math works though. Proton is just a weird ball of bubbling energy that stays in one place because up quark and down quark quantum fields got "stuck" together there through complicated colored strong force. But there's so much energy there that wants to get free but can't that there are constantly things popping in and out of existence.
- andoando 3y agoIs it possible the universe is infinitely complex? i.e, "turtles all the way down?". I find the concept of duality and replication in physics very interesting. Everything seems to have an opposite, with properties such that when these opposites come together, they form a bigger unit, which itself has an opposite.
- cooper_ganglia 3y agoI 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=caktalfraktal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycvlJ9XMd94&ab_channel=cakta...
- mettamage 3y agoThere is a fractal-like nature to the universe due to certain math thingies working out on all levels (e.g. scale free networks/power laws being all over the place).
- lying4fun 3y agoThe other day I was washing dishes and there was some water dilluted milk residue in my plate, but due to plate having been moved around it painted a nebula like pattern - it was beautiful, a sight to behold. So I thought what’s the invariant here between the milk and nebulas that make them look the same. Do you think that stuff you mentioned could explain this and countless similar phenomena
- lying4fun 3y agoI’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
- JimmyRuska 3y agoSounds 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
- Ono-Sendai 3y agoFor all the simulation argument believers, note that we can't even accurately simulate a single nucleus.
- luxuryballs 3y agoI’m of the opinion that particles are like galaxies, the more we zoom in the more we’re going to find, there won’t be an end only another achievement of zoom level.
- Razengan 3y agoWait till you see the sophon.
- electrondood 3y ago> The positively charged particle at the heart of the atom is an object of unspeakable complexity It's not an object at all. The reason quantum physics is so weird, is that our conceptual model of things existed ng as discrete objects no longer works. An "object" is like a conceptual convenience method on some region of spacetime.
- dcow 3y ago“The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form.” I’m getting really tired of hazy probability distributions and waves that only collapse and materialize when observed. I 100% accept that QM is a useful tool to model our current understanding based on increasingly sophisticated observations, but I fundamentally don’t believe that a proton is some shape shifting quantum soup of energy that doesn't form until someone comes around and thinks about it. That is unless reality is approximated and expensive compute is directed only toward what’s being observed to better enhance the simulation. I probably need to add that I am also tired of simulation theory. I really suspect we just aren't good enough at observing things or don’t exist in enough dimensions to understand what we’re observing. And so the cross sections we are able to pin down end up looking like they are part of some probabilistic system. I still have bets on this all being a massive game of life.
- desmosxxx 3y agoIIUC, that is just a hidden variables theory. Bells theorem tells us that it would at least be non-local which is just as weird/interesting IMO.
- demurgos 3y agoI really enjoyed this Minute Physics and 3Blue1Brown video describing hidden variables and Bell's theorem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs As you said, it's implies that we're not failing to measure some "hidden variable" that would explain probabilities away, but that the vary nature of these objects is probabilistic.
- scotty79 3y agoFor 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.
- roland_nilsson 3y agoReading this I couldn't help thinking of the epicycle theory of planetary motion. Under the holy assumption that planets had to move in perfect circles, people invented increasingly complicated circles-on-top-of-circles models in order to explain all observed trajectories. Then Kepler came along and said "hey, it's an ellipse!"
- VagabundoP 3y agoThe article didn't explain how the charm quark and antiquark hiding in there are heavier than the proton? The video/animations were pretty nice though.
- retrac98 3y ago"mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form" Sounds like your average codebase.
- quickthrower2 3y agoIs the proton population homogeneous or is each like a snowflake? Physically can proton 1 behave differently to proton 2 modulo the usual quantum uncertainty around speed/position.
- passion__desire 3y agoIn 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indistinguishable_particles
- bondarchuk 3y agoFor a second there I thought I'd missed a breakthrough or 10 and they'd actually manage to record a video of 3 quarks going about their business. Alas, it's only a "data-driven animation", but due to the noise it looks quite convincingly like an experimental recording.
- ronald_raygun 3y agoThe proton is the most complicated thing I could ever imagine? Pshhhh whatever. I can easily imagine two protons.
- codewiz 3y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262637
- crazygringo 3y agoNot a dupe (usually used for discussion from the same day or week), but a previous discussion (from two years ago).
- piombisallow 3y agoThe complexity of fundamental physics is vastly overrated, it's just unintuitive. The simplest cell is orders of magnitude more complex than a proton.
- bluepoint 3y agoThe 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.
- silent_cal 3y agoI'm starting to think the model of the atom I learned in school was just plain wrong