9 ms·
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 an
by 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 agoThis 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 agoIf the universe is old, then how do you expect atoms to exist if this was not the case?
- pdabbadabba 3y agoCouldn'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 agoHow would we ever distinguish what half-a-proton is in a universe where all protons ever are _always_ paired off?
- derefr 3y agoPresumably the same way we distinguish individual quarks: by smashing the atoms up. (The more interesting question would be the opposite: what if it was two electrons per proton? Then you could throw around some photons and end up with a half-proton negatively-ionized molecule. What would that look like?)
- selecsosi 3y agoYou are going down the path of theoretical particle physics! It is the ultimate question of that to answer what is the fundamental element that makes up matter and what should we "name" that has a useful property that can either be used or helps to explain how other things work. In reality, "protons" do not "exist" but are semi(very) stable collections of energy that interact in an interesting enough way in a group that it is useful for us to retain the name, rather than refer to it by its constituents. Electrons don't really glob up into things like atoms due to repulsion (no moderation by the stron/weak nuclear forces) so we don't have a really useful reason to keep going beyond the definition of the electron so we just stop trying to find additional constituent parts.
- Dylan16807 3y agoWe see naked protons and mismatches between nuclei and electrons all the time, so I don't see why half-charge protons would be "_always_" paired off.
- lazide 3y agoSure. Some interesting thoughts in sibling comments too. Personally, I find the taste of hot chocolate just as nice regardless of the exact mix of quarks composing its constituent elements.
- lagadu 3y agoIf that were to be the case, we'd have to change the values of the other forces that these charged particles interact with, such as the strong force. Not that it wouldn't necessarily be possible, but it would require everything we know about physics to be remodeled because the consequences are vast, fundamental even. So yes, with an entirely different model of the universe that would likely be possible.
- rolph 3y agoa proton, in the simplist version, is made of 3 quarks. two up quarks one down quark. down qwark is -1/3 e ; up quark is +2/3 e. they sum up to +1 e. neutrons are the opposite made of 3 quarks. two down quarks one up quark. and sum to 0e the unitary quantity is a conveinience. 1 e = 1.602176634×10−19 coulombs,
- mulmen 3y agoHow does 2/3 - 1/3 not sum to 1/3? 2-1 is 1, right? What am I missing?
- eindiran 3y ago2 up quarks, so 2/3 * 2 -> 4/3. And then 4/3 - 1/3 = 3/3 = 1
- mulmen 3y agoAh ha, I thought it was 1/3 per quark. Thanks.
- lostemptations5 3y agoThanks I wondered the same
- Balgair 3y agoYes, yes, I also understand this. But why are they in units of 1/3(e). Why are down quarks not -0.398390847895...(e) and up quarks not +0.6234098129034809234...(e). Why do they add up so damn neatly?
- edgyquant 3y agoBecause they are mathematical models built to describe a thing and thus their entire purpose as a concept is to add up “neatly”
- 3y ago
- riwsky 3y agoA proton, electron, and a neutron walk into a bar…
- oldandtired 3y agoAfter about 15 minutes, the neutron has changed into another proton and electron, so bar now has a bigger party on its hands.
- lavasalesman 3y agoI like your explanation. > There is lots of matter that is still unstable. What are you referring to with this?
- undersuit 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay I need to read the article, but yeah protons might not be stable, we just need to wait a long time to find out.
- mianos 3y agoAnd free quarks within stars in conditions where they are not confined. They can exist unconfined for a real short time. At the start of the big bang there were a lot of them.
- lagadu 3y agoQuark stars, a type of star whose density sits between neutron stars and black holes are theorized to exist, though we have no conclusive observations of one yet.