3 ms·
Because they do not break apart into quarks, but nucleons. That was the ELI5 version if you have a particle accelerator. Additional evidence includes phonons -
by AstralStorm 8y ago
Because they do not break apart into quarks, but nucleons.
That was the ELI5 version if you have a particle accelerator.
Additional evidence includes phonons - behavior of crystals in nonlinear optics, semiconductivity in doped crystals.
(Partial credit if you thought of concept of electron gas.)
- cperciva 8y agoThat seems like a non-answer. Uranium often breaks apart into Barium and Krypton, but nobody ever suggests that those Uranium atoms contained Barium and Krypton atoms.
- AstralStorm 8y agoUranium loses "unexplained" unaccounted for mass other than leaving behind Barium and Krypton. ELI5 continuing. What is that mass? What are its properties if you capture enough of it? Does it behave like "a mass of quarks"? Does it behave like an element? What are the constraints on that mass? It's funny that I have to talk about electroweak interactions to a guy who knows what a quark is. Perhaps they also know what a boson and fermion are. The entity known as neutron has an interesting property that causes a different set of bosons to be emitted when it's broken out than as if just random quarks were torn out. The color constraint does not explain it.