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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 electro

• ynniv 3y ago
  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.
• anon84873628 3y ago
  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.
  • retrac 3y ago
    That'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.)
    • buildbot 3y ago
      This made me think - is a concept like most even defined for infinity?
      • kjeetgill 3y ago
        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!
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
      • wruza 3y ago
        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
    • ccozan 3y ago
      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 ).
      • p1mrx 3y ago
        I could see why a charge imbalance prevents life from forming, but why would it also collapse the entire universe?
      • wruza 3y ago
        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.
  • colordrops 3y ago
    Yes, could be the anthropic principal.
  • DonHopkins 3y ago
    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=12975257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593432
• mkw5053 3y ago
  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.
  • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    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?
    • Gravityloss 3y ago
      There exist "stable" exotic particles of that have non ordinary amounts of lower level quarks. https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/lhcb-discovers-longest-lived-exotic-matter-yet?language_content_entity=und https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/lhcb-discovers-long... Maybe they might have non integer charge.
      • exmadscientist 3y ago
        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.
        • Gravityloss 3y ago
          Ok, I see. Also pentaquarks all have integer charge.
    • rainbowzootsuit 3y ago
      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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment [2] https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineering/Electronics/DC_Electrical_Circuit_Analysis_-_A_Practical_Approach_(Fiore)/03%3A_Series_Resistive_Circuits/3.02%3A_Conventional_Current_Flow_and_Electron_Flow https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineerin...
• aap_ 3y ago
  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.
  • SECProto 3y ago
    > quarks have -1 and 2. 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/Up_quark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_quark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_quark
    • bradrn 3y ago
      The post you’re replying to seems to be taking ⅓e as the basic unit of charge.
    • opportune 3y ago
      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
      • lnauta 3y ago
        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
• exmadscientist 3y ago
  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.
• lIl-IIIl 3y ago
  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.
  • wiml 3y ago
    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.
    • a_gnostic 3y ago
      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.
      • calamari4065 3y ago
        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.
        • twic 3y ago
          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?
• jkhdigital 3y ago
  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.
• SECProto 3y ago
  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
• rimunroe 3y ago
  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.
  • metricspaces 3y ago
    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’..]
  • rimunroe 3y ago
    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"
• mianos 3y ago
  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.
  • gizmo686 3y ago
    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?
    • lazide 3y ago
      If the universe is old, then how do you expect atoms to exist if this was not the case?
      • pdabbadabba 3y ago
        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?
        • yifanl 3y ago
          How would we ever distinguish what half-a-proton is in a universe where all protons ever are _always_ paired off?
          • 3y ago
• at_a_remove 3y ago
  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.
  • fblp 3y ago
    This is hard to wrap my brain around but thank you for the explanation!
  • oldandtired 3y ago
    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.
• m3kw9 3y ago
  Then I’ll ask why can’t you use protons as electricity?
  • s1artibartfast 3y ago
    Who says you can't? Who says we don't always use it?
    • jodrellblank 3y ago
      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?
      • sumitkumar 3y ago
        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.
      • s1artibartfast 3y ago
        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
        • roelschroeven 3y ago
          > 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.
• femto 3y ago
  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?
  • bugbuddy 3y ago
    I also have a question. Why should any theoretical predictions be regarded as Science if there is no feasible way to test them?
    • NegativeLatency 3y ago
      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.
      • bugbuddy 3y ago
        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.
• wrycoder 3y ago
  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.
  • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    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...)
    • nyssos 3y ago
      > (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.
• adrian_b 3y ago
  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.
• y04nn 3y ago
  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=vector#Quantization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_charge?useskin=vect...
• dboreham 3y ago
  Something...something...gauge theory. Or perhaps -- it's a constant in the simulator source code.
  • dylan604 3y ago
    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)
• JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > 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.
  • calamari4065 3y ago
    That just deflects the question one level down without explaining anything. "Because it is" is not a helpful answer to "why?"
    • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > 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. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin–statistics_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin–statistics_theorem
    • ravi-delia 3y ago
      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
    • marton78 3y ago
      Physics doesn't attempt to answer the question "why", it answers "how".
    • magicalhippo 3y ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• carabiner 3y ago
  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.
  • computerfriend 3y ago
    The first one is well known. It's because it's radiating in three dimensions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
  • akomtu 3y ago
    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.
• api 3y ago
  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.
  • wruza 3y ago
    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_Elementary_Particles.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model_of_Element...
    • api 3y ago
      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 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.
• JohnMakin 3y ago
  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
• leptons 3y ago
  >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. Sorry, I'm high.
• FredPret 3y ago
  How can you ask that and also claim to not be a smart person lmao
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• Mistletoe 3y ago
  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.
  • Mistletoe 3y ago
    Sorry that should say anthropic and not anthropomorphic haha. Too much time has elapsed to edit it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
• clankyclanker 3y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/YmOVoIpaPrc
  • foobarbecue 3y ago
    AKA the "anthropic principle."
    • jodrellblank 3y ago
      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.
      • knightoffaith 3y ago
        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. >satisfies no curiosity It offers an explanation. >closes the book on any further questions No more than any other answer does.
        • Mauneam 3y ago
          >Well, it explains why the universe is fine-tuned, if you buy the argument. No it doesn't. Goddidit is not an explanation. >Yep, just like any other answer to the question, since it's a metaphysical question rather than a scientific one. Nope, not like any other answer. Like Satandidit. >It offers an explanation. No it doesn't. Goddidit is not an explanation. >No more than any other answer does. No, not like other answers. Science never closes the book on further questions.
• sixQuarks 3y ago
  You would think that with my username, I should know the answer. But I have no clue
• empath-nirvana 3y ago
  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.
• cozzyd 3y ago
  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.
• strogonoff 3y ago
  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.
• westurner 3y ago
  Are there intermediate [electron,] charge states between + and - in superfluids and/or superconductors? Is there superposition with electron charge states?
  • anon84873628 3y ago
    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.
    • westurner 3y ago
      Quantum Hall effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hall_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hall_effect : > 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] Fractional quantum Hall effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_quantum_Hall_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_quantum_Hall_effect : > 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 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://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-023-01694-y ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38139569 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-complicated-thing-imaginable-20221019/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/inside-the-proton-the-most-co... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39374020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39374020 : > 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?
• quantified 3y ago
  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?
• instagib 3y ago
  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-electron-and-proton-have-the-same-but-opposite-electric-charge https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21753/why-do-ele...
• steve76 3y ago
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• ambyra 3y ago
  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.
• alex_smart 3y ago
  https://youtu.be/36GT2zI8lVA https://youtu.be/36GT2zI8lVA Richard Feynman on why questions
  • ajkjk 3y ago
    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-to-particles-and-antiparticles/ 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.
    • exe34 3y ago
      > 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.
• otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  > give me a religious explanation that isn't a religious explanation
• xwolfi 3y ago
  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.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ajkjk 3y ago
  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.
  • trenchgun 3y ago
    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?
    • vihren 3y ago
      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.
    • lagadu 3y ago
      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.
• importantstuff 3y ago
  No one who has replied to your question has got the right answer. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21753/why-do-electron-and-proton-have-the-same-but-opposite-electric-charge 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.
  • polskibus 3y ago
    Which answer on physicsexchange is the right one? The top scored ?
    • guenthert 3y ago
      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.
      • importantstuff 3y ago
        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.
      • feoren 3y ago
• mise_en_place 3y ago
  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.
• sumitkumar 3y ago
  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.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• da39a3ee 3y ago
  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?
• nurettin 3y ago
  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.
• compumetrika 3y ago
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• gpsx 3y ago
  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.
• amai 3y ago
  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.
• EchoReflection 3y ago
  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 :)
• silent_cal 3y ago
  Checkmate, atheists