10 ms·
Decades-Long Quest Reveals Details of the Proton’s Inner Antimatter
- klodolph 6y agoSince the “SeaQuest” is from circa 2000, surely it is a reference to the TV show SeaQuest DSV, which aired on NBC from 1993-1996. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV There are some fun episodes but the show is not very good and has not aged well.
- meepmorp 6y agoThere was also a seaquest game for the 2600. I don't know how well it's aged.
- KingFelix 6y agosealab 2021 is where its at
- nonameiguess 6y agoMan, that sent me down a nostalgia rabbit hole. I really liked the first season of that show, then it sucked, then it got canceled. And now I find out Jonathan Brandis killed himself 17 years ago and I didn't even realize, and apparently he dated Tatyana Ali all the way back then? And now I guess I need to go watch the Fresh Prince reunion and pretend I'm a kid again, but that's just gonna make me sad because Uncle Phil is dead now, and wait a second? Uncle Phil was both War Machine in the old Iron Man cartoon and he was Shredder! How the heck did I never know that?
- prox 6y agoAs an neophyte in QM, my mind boggles of the extraordinary energetic nature of these particles, and that this happens on a universe scale level, with laws of nature governing the same response everywhere. Also how many different levels of scale there are, from giant structures in space, to our solar system, to our human experience, to cells, atoms, quarks and I wonder if there are more such levels down to the planck scale.
- officialjunk 6y agoi would bet there are more levels we are not currently aware of. could also be a fractal.
- centimeter 6y agoAction quantization (colloquially "planck scale") suggests limits on how small these things can get (very small size = very high momentum, which is not observed).
- brianberns 6y agoBut electrons are considered to be point particles, so they would have infinite momentum in this case?
- ben_w 6y agoσ_x * σ_p ⩾ ħ/2 The product of the uncertainty in each is always at least some constant. They can still be point-like without you knowing where they are; and also knowing exactly where they are regardless of if they are point-like or extended means there is no defined momentum rather than it is defined as infinite. That said: (a) you can’t pick a number from the set of Reals with a continuous uniform distribution, so I guess you can’t ever have perfect knowledge of the location ever even in principle, and (b) I’m self taught so likely only have a half-understanding.
- fungiblecog 6y agoNo. They are vibrations of the electron field. There are no point particles in the standard model.
- centimeter 6y ago“Point particle” is an approximation that doesn’t accurately predict reality. It only works at large actions. Classical is R^3, quantum is R^3 -> C. (Sort of; this glosses over a lot.) Objects don’t really have a concrete location; they have complex-valued distributions.
- king_magic 6y agoIt's incredible how something that's both so small and everywhere is so difficult to understand. Fascinating read.
- mabbo 6y agoOnce again I am impressed with Wolchover's consistently great writing. I think I could call myself a fan at this point. There's no bullshit. There's no more glossing over details than needed. The key finding is explained in as close to a layman's terms as you can get, given it's deep physics, yet with some human elements to it. And both sides of any debate are given a chance to give their side of the story. Science writing will never please everyone, but this has exactly the level of detail I enjoy.
- king_magic 6y agoI completely agree. I find her writing very straightforward to understand.
- KingFelix 6y agoalso agree, great stuff
- avmich 6y agoQuality of her articles - depth, precision, explanation power - rivals those of Martin Gardner, which is admittedly a high bar. I don't know anybody else today coming close.
- firebaze 6y agoNot to deep into this topic, but Sabine Hossenfelder, both providing a critical insight and depth+precision is also something to consider as an outsider to physics. See backreaction.blogspot.com. Hits my sweet spot between maths, physics and layman guidance.
- whatshisface 6y agoHossenfelder is not that much of an outsider, she publishes respectable papers and is supported by many physicists, and she agrees with essentially every part of the present consensus.
- jvanderbot 6y agoThe way we study the nucleus is kind of funny: Throwing stuff at it and seeing the distribution pattern of how it bounces off or breaks out pieces. It's like if Oumuamua[1] was thrown at us and some giant gas cloud entity that wanted to see if we had planets by measuring the trajectory anomalies as it came out. Or if meteor showers were to probe atmospheres. Alright, back to work. 1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/interstellar-space-rock/546371/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/interste...
- mhh__ 6y ago"It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you." - Rutherford
- selcuka 6y agoI was suspicious about this quote as I thought tissue paper wasn't invented [1] when Rutherford said that but apparently Rutherford said this retrospectively in 1936; not in 1909. [1] Kleenex introduced the facial tissue in 1924
- mhh__ 6y agoTissue paper in the UK isn't for cleaning but rather a type of paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_paper (usually used in arts and crafts)
- perl4ever 6y agoAmong the applications of tissue paper listed at your link, are toilet tissue, facial tissue, and paper towels. It also mentions "household towels" which doesn't make sense to me, surely they don't mean what I am used to. In my area of the US, however, "tissue paper" out of context doesn't imply any of those, I don't think, rather it's the stuff used to wrap gifts or maybe to crumple up to pad them in a box. The stuff is also crumpled and put in new shoes, for instance. It doesn't strike me as that odd to call toilet paper and facial tissues "tissue paper" although I don't think it's common; however calling paper towels or other towels "tissue paper" seems strange.
- fnord77 6y agoso... could a "subatomic centrifuge" of sorts be built to separate the quarks and antiquarks (using energy of course to pull them apart)? Would antimatter make a good energy storage medium?
- lalaithion 6y agoYou cannot separate quarks and antiquarks. The force that holds them together increases, rather than decreases, the further apart you pull them, until the energy in that field is so strong it can spontaneously convert to matter in the form of a new quark and antiquark to bind to the now-separated old quark and antiquark.
- perl4ever 6y agoI've read that description before, and it always makes me feel like there must be a lay-appreciable way to describe those two modes that would provide more insight. There's a certain tension between the idea that something is composed of parts, yet it can't be separated. How is that fundamentally different from composite things which can be separated? That's a rhetorical question; I just mean there ought to be a more satisfying way of describing the dichotomy. Perhaps it can be described without math per se but in terms of visualizable fields?
- refulgentis 6y agopicture a rubber band, lying in a circle, on a table left half band is red rubber right half is blue as you stretch the rubber band, it resists more and more when you pull hard enough, it breaks on the red/blue divide. a new red/blue half spontaneously appears for each. now you have two rubber bands
- perl4ever 6y agoI've heard that sort of thing before. My point is, that when you consider that sort of explanation, and let's suppose it vaguely seems to make intuitive sense, then what about the things/particles that don't act like that? If the explanation of "A" doesn't distinguish between "A" and "not A" then it isn't in fact an explanation.
- dchichkov 6y agoThese systems do have a feel of cellular automatons. Questions like: why every proton is exactly the same? how particles interact? why are these clouds of particles? have much neater answers, if there is a correspondence of a "stable pattern" to a "particle". https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Spaceship#2010s https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Spaceship#2010s
- pas 6y agoThere are other particles made of quarks (generally called hadrons). Those with and odd number of quarks are called baryons. Mesons are those that have an equal number of quarks and anti-quarks. "All" protons we see are the same because the exotic configurations decay. (While protons are not yet known to decay.)
- cma 6y agoScott Aaronson gave some issues with it being cellular automata even with threads connecting them (search "Bell Inequality" https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0206089.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0206089.pdf), so Wolfram has moved on to graph automata things due to, if I am remembering right, someone figuring out efficient approximations of determining graph isomorphisms and it making evocative pictures with some simple transform models, and also it solving the Bell's Inequality no-go problem.
- frob 6y agoThe next two decades of nuclear science are going to be extremely exciting as the next-generation electron-ion collider is built and comes online in the US. Since electrons are not composite particles, electron colliders allow us to probe nuclei much more precisely than protons, neutrons, and other baryonic particles do. It's going to like going from a VHF tuner on a CRT to an 8K AR experience.
- burntsushi 6y agoWhat's different between the new collider being built in the US and HERA?
- frob 6y agoGreat question! The biggest difference is luminosity. The proposed collider, eRHIC (electron Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider), will generate 100-1000x more collisions per second than HERA. Second, eRHIC will generate ion beams as well a proton beams. This is a key distinction as protons and neutrons are modified by being inside a nucleus so their internal quark distributions are modified as well. These differences will shed light on some of the key properties of the strong nuclear force. Third, the detectors and collider will be designed to probe further down into the low-energy tail of the sea quark distribution than HERA and other previous e-p colliders did. This will include designing the beam and detector to allow for very forward instruments which would measure small deflections due to extremely low-energy particles.
- burntsushi 6y agoAh interesting! Thanks for answering. The question came from looking up electron-ion colliders on wikipedia and noticing that one had already been built. So was curious as to what had changed. Thanks again.
- wnoise 6y ago> Planned future experiments will help researchers choose between the two pictures. But whichever model is right, I would expect neither model is "right", and instead each is better at capturing slightly different aspects of the true behavior.
- iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y agoYeah this is one of those articles that reminds me that we almost certainly have no idea what is going on. Not to say we dont have good descriptive models.
- mrlonglong 6y agoThat's interesting that atoms have tiny fragments of antimatter inside them. That implies that some day it might be possible to build an engine that runs on extracting this energy. Space drive, any one?
- snowwrestler 6y agoI agree that it is super interesting but... empty space also has ephemeral fragments of antimatter in it. We can’t extract energy from it. There is already gobsmacking amounts of energy available to us in the atomic nucleus in the strong force, and we’ve been working for ~70 years to extract it (via fusion).
- whatshisface 6y ago"Has" is not exactly the right word to use. A closer analogy might be that momentum flows through both matter and antimatter quantum fields as it traverses between particles. It's more of a current than a charge. If you "froze" it and cut out a slice of the space between two particles, you wouldn't find anything there any more than you'd find electricity inside a slice of a cut power cable.
- frongpik 6y agoIirc, in a conversation with Feynman, Wheeler speculated that positrons may be hiding inside protons and that's why we don't see many positrons around.
- acvny 6y ago"We learn in school that a proton is a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks..." - do kids learn this in school nowadays? Because I don't remember learning that in school.