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Nucleons are made up three quarks and those quarks are tiny compared to the nucleon's size. Does it really make sense to even refer to the "size" of a point pa
by causi 4y ago
Nucleons are made up three quarks and those quarks are tiny compared to the nucleon's size.
Does it really make sense to even refer to the "size" of a point particle? In physics there's really no such thing as a "solid" object that has a "volume". It's just fields of a certain radius and the centers of those fields we refer to as the "location" of a zero-volume entity.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoQuarks have a non-zero collision cross-section, so I'm not sure it's reasonable to think of them as zero-volume.
- int_19h 4y agoHow does one measure that?
- BlueTemplar 4y agoDepends. For instance in the case of the Lennard-Jones potential, which is basically the easiest but still good enough approximation of intermolecular interactions that we have, you have two fields between ~two molecules : one short-range repulsive, another long-range attractive. This results in a minimum potential at a distance r_min (see graph) that you can arguably think of as the "size" of the (spherical) molecule (at low temperatures, molecules will form "clumps" with that distance between them) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennard-Jones_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennard-Jones_potential