5 ms·

Here is one fact that seems, to me, pretty convincing that there is another layer underneath what we know. The charge of electrons is -1 and protons +1. It has

Here is one fact that seems, to me, pretty convincing that there is another layer underneath what we know. The charge of electrons is -1 and protons +1. It has been experimentally measured out to 12 digits or so to be the same magnitude, just opposite charge. However, there are no theories why this is -- they are simply measured and that is it. It beggars belief that these just happen to be exactly (as far as we can measure) the same magnitude. There almost certainly is a lower level mechanism which explains why they are exactly the same but opposite.

PaulHoule 8mo ago
If it wasn't the case then matter wouldn't be stable.
- libraryofbabel 8mo ago
  Is that actually true, if the charges differed at the 12th decimal place only? That’s non-obvious to me.
  - baggy_trough 8mo ago
    Yes because matter would have a residual charge that would massively overpower gravity even at that small a discrepancy.
    - PaulHoule 8mo ago
      To be devil's advocate maybe there is a surplus deficit of 1-part-in-10^12 in electrons relative to protons.
- tasty_freeze 8mo ago
  Agreed (well, assuming the delta is more than a small fraction of a percent or whatever). But this is begging the question. If they are really independent then the vast, overwhelming fraction of all possible universes simply wouldn't have matter. Ours does have matter, so it makes our universe exceedingly unlikely. I find it far more parsimonious to assume they are connected by an undiscovered (and perhaps never to be discovered) mechanism. Some lean on the multiverse and the anthropic principle to explain it, but that is far less parsimonious.
  - PaulHoule 8mo ago
    Also note that the proton is not an elementary particle so it is really a question of "are the various quarks really 1/3, 2/3 of an electron charge". Crackpots have found thousands of formula that try to explain the ratio of the proton to electron mass but there is no expectation that there is a simple relationship between those masses since the proton mass is the sum of all sorts of terms.
    - gsf_emergency_6 8mo ago
      Crackpots are downstream of the "physics community" awarding cultural cachet to certain types of questions -- those with affordances they don't necessarily "deserve"-- but not others. (I use quotes because those are emergent concepts) Same as "hacker community" deciding that AI is worth FOMO'ing about
      - PaulHoule 8mo ago
        Well, I'm not sure I believe that "hierarchy problems" in HEP are real, but I do think the nature of the neutrino mass is interesting (we know it has a mass so it is a something and not a nothing) as is the nature of dark matter, the matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the non-observation of proton decay. That article has nothing to say about non-accelerator "big science" in HEP such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande which targets many of those questions. As for the "hacker community" I think AI is really controversial. I think other people find the endless spam of slop articles about AI more offensive than I do. It's obvious that these are struggling to make it off the "new/" page. The ones that offend me are the wanna-be celebrity software managers [1] who think we care what they think about delivering software that almost works. [1] sorry, I liked DHH's industry-changing vision behind Ruby-on-Rails, but his pronunciations about software management were always trash. You might make the case that Graham worked with a lot of startups so his essays might have had some transferable experience but they didn't. Atwood and Spolsky, likewise. Carmack is the one exception, he's a genius
        8mo ago
- jiggawatts 8mo ago
  An interesting early theory of gravity was: "What if opposite charges attract slight more strongly than identical charges repel each other?" If you tally up the forces, the difference is a residual attraction that can model gravity. It was rejected on various experimental and theoretical grounds, but it goes to show that if things don't cancel out exactly then the result can still leave a universe that would appear normal to us.
wvbdmp 8mo ago
Aren’t things like this usually explained by being the only viable configuration, or is that not the case here?
throwup238 8mo ago
Or why the quarks that make up protons and neutrons have fractional charges, with +1 protons mixing two +2/3 up quarks and one -1/3 down quark, and the neutral neutron is one up quark and two down quarks. And where are all the other Quarks in all of this, busy tending bar?
- david-gpu 8mo ago
  They have fractional charges because that is how we happen to measure charge. If our unit of charge had been set when we knew about quarks, we would have chosen those as fundamental, and the charge of the electron would instead be -3. Now, the ratios between these charges appear to be fundamental. But the presence of fractions is arbitrary.
  - jcranmer 8mo ago
    > If our unit of charge had been set when we knew about quarks, we would have chosen those as fundamental, and the charge of the electron would instead be -3. Actually, I doubt it. Because of their color charge, quarks can never be found in an unbound state but instead in various kinds of hadrons. The ways that quarks combine cause all hadrons to end up with an integer charge, with the ⅔ and -⅓ charges on various quarks merely being ways to make them come out to resulting integer charges.
  - throwup238 8mo ago
    Isn’t charge quantized? Observable isolated charges are quantized in units of e. You can call it -3 and +3 but that just changes the relative value for the quanta. The interesting question is still why the positive and neutral particles are nonelementary particles made up of quarks with a fraction of e, the math made possible only by including negatively charged ones (and yet electrons are elementary particles).
Paracompact 8mo ago
Technically, the charge of a proton can be derived from its constituent 2 up quarks and 1 down quark, which have charges 2/3 and -1/3 respectively. I'm not aware of any deeper reason why these should be simple fractional ratios of the charge of the electron, however, I'm not sure there needs to be one. If you believe the stack of turtles ends somewhere, you have to accept there will eventually be (hopefully simple) coincidences between certain fundamental values, no?
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  > you have to accept there will eventually be (hopefully simple) coincidences between certain fundamental values, no? No. It’s almost certainly not a coïncidence that these charges are symmetric like that (in stable particles that like to hang out together).
  - hackyhacky 8mo ago
    > coïncidence Nïce
  - Paracompact 8mo ago
    Whence your confidence? As they say in math, "There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them." If we assume the turtle stack ends, and it ends simply (i.e. with small numbers), some of those numbers may wind up looking alike. Even more so if you find anthropic arguments convincing, or if you consider sampling bias (which may be what you mean by, "in stable particles that like to hang out together").
    - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
      > if you find anthropic arguments convincing Which makes every constant fair game. Currently, we don’t have a good process for explaining multiple universes beyond divine preference. Hence the notion that a random number settled on mirror whole sums.
- tasty_freeze 8mo ago
rjh29 8mo ago
One argument (while unsatisfying) is there are trillions of possible configurations, but ours is the one that happened to work which is why we're here to observe it. Changing any of them even a little bit would result in an empty universe.
- libraryofbabel 8mo ago
  There’s a name for that: the Anthropic principle. And it is deeply unsatisfying as an explanation. And does it even apply here? If the charge on the electron differed from the charge on the proton at just the 12th decimal place, would that actually prevent complex life from forming. Citation needed for that one. I agree with OP. The unexplained symmetry points to a deeper level.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - krzat 8mo ago
    I find the anthropic principle fascinating. I was born to this world at a certain point in time. I look around, and I see environment compatible with me: air, water, food, gravity, time, space. How deep does this go? Why I am not an ant or bacteria?
    - GordonS 8mo ago
      Presumably your parents weren't ants?
  - squeefers 8mo ago
    > There’s a name for that: the Anthropic principle. And it is deeply unsatisfying as an explanation. i feel the same about many worlds
andyfilms1 8mo ago
For a given calculation on given hardware, the 100th digit of a floating point decimal can be replicated every time. But that digit is basically just noise, and has no influence on the 1st digit. In other words: There can be multiple "layers" of linked states, but that doesn't necessarily mean the lower layers "create" the higher layers, or vice versa.
jiggawatts 8mo ago
This is "expected" from theory, because all particles seem to be just various aspects of the "same things" that obey a fairly simple algebra. For example, pair production is: photon + photon = electron + (-)electron You can take that diagram, rotate it in spacetime, and you have the direct equivalent, which is electrons changing paths by exchanging a photon: electron + photon = electron - photon There are similar formulas for beta decay, which is: proton = neutron + electron + (-)neutrino You can also "rotate" this diagram, or any other Feyman diagram. This very, very strongly hints that the fundamental particles aren't actually fundamental in some sense. The precise why of this algebra is the big question! People are chipping away at it, and there's been slow but steady progress. One of the "best" approaches I've seen is "The Harari-Shupe preon model and nonrelativistic quantum phase space"[1] by Piotr Zenczykowski which makes the claim that just like how Schrodinger "solved" the quantum wave equation in 3D space by using complex numbers, it's possible to solve a slightly extended version of the same equation in 6D phase space, yielding matrices that have properties that match the Harari-Shupe preon model. The preon model claims that fundamental particles are further subdivided into preons, the "charges" of which neatly add up to the observed zoo of particle charges, and a simple additive algebra over these charges match Feyman diagrams. The preon model has issues with particle masses and binding energies, but Piotr's work neatly sidesteps that issue by claiming that the preons aren't "particles" as such, but just mathematical properties of these matrices. I put "best" in quotes above because there isn't anything remotely like a widely accepted theory for this yet, just a few clever people throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0223 https://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0223
- tasty_freeze 8mo ago
  > This is "expected" from theory, because all particles seem to be just various aspects of the "same things" that obey a fairly simple algebra. But again, this is just observation, and it is consistent with the charges we measure (again, just observation). It doesn't explain why these rules must behave as they do. > This very, very strongly hints that the fundamental particles aren't actually fundamental in some sense. This is exactly what I am suggesting in my original comment: this "coincidence" is not a coincidence but falls out from some deeper, shared mechanism.
smnplk 8mo ago
There are layers science can not access.
- f30e3dfed1c9 8mo ago
  Well OK then! Let's tell all the physicists they can close up shop now. They might not have realized it, but they're done. All their little "theories" and "experiments" and what not have taken them as far as they can go.
  - albatross79 8mo ago
    We're already in the realm of virtual particles, instantaneous collapse, fields with abstract geometric shape and no material reality, wave particle duality, quantized energy etc. The project of physics was to discover what the universe was made of. None of these things can answer that. If intelligibility was the goal, we lost that. So in an important sense, they might as well have closed up shop. If you're interested in the specific value of a certain property to the nth decimal place, there is work to do, but if you're interested in the workings of the universe in a fundamentally intelligible sense, that project is over with. What they're doing now is making doodles around mathematical abstractions that fit the data and presenting those as discoveries.
  - paganel 8mo ago
    > Let's tell all the physicists they can close up shop now. Yes, that's part of the plan. I mean, not to all the physicists, just to those whose work doesn't bring in results anymore, and it hasn't for 30 to 40 years now. At some point they (said physicists) have to stop their work and ask themselves what it is that they're doing, because judging by their results it doesn't seem like they're doing much, while consuming a lot of resources (which could have been better spent elsewhere).
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  By observing the discrepancies between theories we are accessing those layers. Whether we can access them with instruments is a different matter but with our minds we apparently can.
cozzyd 8mo ago
As soon as charge is quantized, this will happen. In any quantization scheme you will have some smallest charge. There are particles with charge +2 (the Delta++, for example), but ... anything that can decay while preserving quantum numbers will decay, so you end up with protons in the end. (ok, the quarks have fractional charge but that's not really relevant at scales we care about QED) If the question is, why is quantum mechanics the correct theory? Well, I guess that's how our universe works...
andyferris 8mo ago
The hint from quantum field theory (and things like lattice gauge theory) is that charge emerges from interesting topological states/defects of the underlying field (by "interesting topological shapes" I mean - imagine a vortex in the shape of a ring/doughnut). It's kind of a topological property of a state of the photonic field, if you will - something like a winding number (which has to be an integer). Electric charge is a kind of "defect" or "kink" in the photonic field, while color charge (quarks) are defects in the strong-force field, etc. When an electron-positron pair is formed from a vacuum, we get all sorts of interesting geometry which I struggle to grasp or picture clearly. I understand the fact that these are fermions with spin-1/2 can similarly be explained as localized defects in a field of particles with integer spin (possibly a feature of the exact same "defect" as the charge itself, in the photonic field, which is what defines an electron as an electron). EDIT: > However, there are no theories why this is -- they are simply measured and that is it. My take is that there _are_ accepted hypotheses for this, but solving the equations (of e.g. the standard model, in full 3D space) to a precision suitable to compare to experimental data is currently entirely impractical (at least for some things like absolute masses - though I think there are predictions of ratios etc that work out between theory and measurement - sorry not a specialist in high-energy physics, had more exposure to low-energy quantum topological defects).
- RupertSalt 8mo ago
  > interesting topological states/defects of the underlying field eddies in the space-time continuum?
  - UncleSlacky 8mo ago
    Is he?
    - ndsipa_pomu 8mo ago
      What?
- quchen 8mo ago
  (Note the post you’ve replied to mentioned electrons and _protons_, not positrons.)
phkahler 8mo ago
I'm convinced there are some semi-classical explanations that just haven't been figured out. Electrons are helically moving photons: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281322004_The_electron_is_a_helically-circulating_spin-12_charged_photon_generating_the_de_Broglie_wavelength https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281322004_The_elect... That's some interesting/wacky stuff, but there has been more research to improve those calculations - like deriving the electron charge and magnetic moment. Personally I like the idea that a proton is somehow literally an electron and 3 up quarks (a neutron gets 2 electrons and 3 up quarks). I am not a physicist though, so I'm sure there are reasons they "know" this is not the case. I find it fascinating that some physicists say wave functions are somehow "real" and then we've got Jacob Barandes saying you don't even need wave functions to do the computations of QM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oWip00iXbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oWip00iXbo IMHO there is a lot of exploration to be done without particle accelerators.
- aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
  > Electrons are helically moving photons How do you explain that electrons have a rest mass, but photons don't (otherwise photons couldn't move with the speed of light according to special relativity)?
  - ymolodtsov 8mo ago
    Because what we see as a photon is a the one bozon left without a pair of one of the four pre-Higgs bozons that exist prior to the electroweak symmetry breaking. That's how all of them get mass. An electron gets it directle from the VEV.

PaulHoule 8mo ago

If it wasn't the case then matter wouldn't be stable.

libraryofbabel 8mo ago
Is that actually true, if the charges differed at the 12th decimal place only? That’s non-obvious to me.
- baggy_trough 8mo ago
  Yes because matter would have a residual charge that would massively overpower gravity even at that small a discrepancy.
  - PaulHoule 8mo ago
    To be devil's advocate maybe there is a surplus deficit of 1-part-in-10^12 in electrons relative to protons.
tasty_freeze 8mo ago
Agreed (well, assuming the delta is more than a small fraction of a percent or whatever). But this is begging the question. If they are really independent then the vast, overwhelming fraction of all possible universes simply wouldn't have matter. Ours does have matter, so it makes our universe exceedingly unlikely. I find it far more parsimonious to assume they are connected by an undiscovered (and perhaps never to be discovered) mechanism. Some lean on the multiverse and the anthropic principle to explain it, but that is far less parsimonious.
- PaulHoule 8mo ago
  Also note that the proton is not an elementary particle so it is really a question of "are the various quarks really 1/3, 2/3 of an electron charge". Crackpots have found thousands of formula that try to explain the ratio of the proton to electron mass but there is no expectation that there is a simple relationship between those masses since the proton mass is the sum of all sorts of terms.
  - gsf_emergency_6 8mo ago
    Crackpots are downstream of the "physics community" awarding cultural cachet to certain types of questions -- those with affordances they don't necessarily "deserve"-- but not others. (I use quotes because those are emergent concepts) Same as "hacker community" deciding that AI is worth FOMO'ing about
    - PaulHoule 8mo ago
      Well, I'm not sure I believe that "hierarchy problems" in HEP are real, but I do think the nature of the neutrino mass is interesting (we know it has a mass so it is a something and not a nothing) as is the nature of dark matter, the matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the non-observation of proton decay. That article has nothing to say about non-accelerator "big science" in HEP such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande which targets many of those questions. As for the "hacker community" I think AI is really controversial. I think other people find the endless spam of slop articles about AI more offensive than I do. It's obvious that these are struggling to make it off the "new/" page. The ones that offend me are the wanna-be celebrity software managers [1] who think we care what they think about delivering software that almost works. [1] sorry, I liked DHH's industry-changing vision behind Ruby-on-Rails, but his pronunciations about software management were always trash. You might make the case that Graham worked with a lot of startups so his essays might have had some transferable experience but they didn't. Atwood and Spolsky, likewise. Carmack is the one exception, he's a genius
      - 8mo ago
jiggawatts 8mo ago
An interesting early theory of gravity was: "What if opposite charges attract slight more strongly than identical charges repel each other?" If you tally up the forces, the difference is a residual attraction that can model gravity. It was rejected on various experimental and theoretical grounds, but it goes to show that if things don't cancel out exactly then the result can still leave a universe that would appear normal to us.

wvbdmp 8mo ago

Aren’t things like this usually explained by being the only viable configuration, or is that not the case here?

throwup238 8mo ago

Or why the quarks that make up protons and neutrons have fractional charges, with +1 protons mixing two +2/3 up quarks and one -1/3 down quark, and the neutral neutron is one up quark and two down quarks. And where are all the other Quarks in all of this, busy tending bar?

david-gpu 8mo ago
They have fractional charges because that is how we happen to measure charge. If our unit of charge had been set when we knew about quarks, we would have chosen those as fundamental, and the charge of the electron would instead be -3. Now, the ratios between these charges appear to be fundamental. But the presence of fractions is arbitrary.
- jcranmer 8mo ago
  > If our unit of charge had been set when we knew about quarks, we would have chosen those as fundamental, and the charge of the electron would instead be -3. Actually, I doubt it. Because of their color charge, quarks can never be found in an unbound state but instead in various kinds of hadrons. The ways that quarks combine cause all hadrons to end up with an integer charge, with the ⅔ and -⅓ charges on various quarks merely being ways to make them come out to resulting integer charges.
- throwup238 8mo ago
  Isn’t charge quantized? Observable isolated charges are quantized in units of e. You can call it -3 and +3 but that just changes the relative value for the quanta. The interesting question is still why the positive and neutral particles are nonelementary particles made up of quarks with a fraction of e, the math made possible only by including negatively charged ones (and yet electrons are elementary particles).

Paracompact 8mo ago

Technically, the charge of a proton can be derived from its constituent 2 up quarks and 1 down quark, which have charges 2/3 and -1/3 respectively. I'm not aware of any deeper reason why these should be simple fractional ratios of the charge of the electron, however, I'm not sure there needs to be one. If you believe the stack of turtles ends somewhere, you have to accept there will eventually be (hopefully simple) coincidences between certain fundamental values, no?

JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
> you have to accept there will eventually be (hopefully simple) coincidences between certain fundamental values, no? No. It’s almost certainly not a coïncidence that these charges are symmetric like that (in stable particles that like to hang out together).
- hackyhacky 8mo ago
  > coïncidence Nïce
- Paracompact 8mo ago
  Whence your confidence? As they say in math, "There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them." If we assume the turtle stack ends, and it ends simply (i.e. with small numbers), some of those numbers may wind up looking alike. Even more so if you find anthropic arguments convincing, or if you consider sampling bias (which may be what you mean by, "in stable particles that like to hang out together").
  - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
    > if you find anthropic arguments convincing Which makes every constant fair game. Currently, we don’t have a good process for explaining multiple universes beyond divine preference. Hence the notion that a random number settled on mirror whole sums.
tasty_freeze 8mo ago

rjh29 8mo ago

One argument (while unsatisfying) is there are trillions of possible configurations, but ours is the one that happened to work which is why we're here to observe it. Changing any of them even a little bit would result in an empty universe.

libraryofbabel 8mo ago
There’s a name for that: the Anthropic principle. And it is deeply unsatisfying as an explanation. And does it even apply here? If the charge on the electron differed from the charge on the proton at just the 12th decimal place, would that actually prevent complex life from forming. Citation needed for that one. I agree with OP. The unexplained symmetry points to a deeper level.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- krzat 8mo ago
  I find the anthropic principle fascinating. I was born to this world at a certain point in time. I look around, and I see environment compatible with me: air, water, food, gravity, time, space. How deep does this go? Why I am not an ant or bacteria?
  - GordonS 8mo ago
    Presumably your parents weren't ants?
- squeefers 8mo ago
  > There’s a name for that: the Anthropic principle. And it is deeply unsatisfying as an explanation. i feel the same about many worlds

andyfilms1 8mo ago

For a given calculation on given hardware, the 100th digit of a floating point decimal can be replicated every time. But that digit is basically just noise, and has no influence on the 1st digit. In other words: There can be multiple "layers" of linked states, but that doesn't necessarily mean the lower layers "create" the higher layers, or vice versa.

jiggawatts 8mo ago

This is "expected" from theory, because all particles seem to be just various aspects of the "same things" that obey a fairly simple algebra. For example, pair production is: photon + photon = electron + (-)electron You can take that diagram, rotate it in spacetime, and you have the direct equivalent, which is electrons changing paths by exchanging a photon: electron + photon = electron - photon There are similar formulas for beta decay, which is: proton = neutron + electron + (-)neutrino You can also "rotate" this diagram, or any other Feyman diagram. This very, very strongly hints that the fundamental particles aren't actually fundamental in some sense. The precise why of this algebra is the big question! People are chipping away at it, and there's been slow but steady progress. One of the "best" approaches I've seen is "The Harari-Shupe preon model and nonrelativistic quantum phase space"[1] by Piotr Zenczykowski which makes the claim that just like how Schrodinger "solved" the quantum wave equation in 3D space by using complex numbers, it's possible to solve a slightly extended version of the same equation in 6D phase space, yielding matrices that have properties that match the Harari-Shupe preon model. The preon model claims that fundamental particles are further subdivided into preons, the "charges" of which neatly add up to the observed zoo of particle charges, and a simple additive algebra over these charges match Feyman diagrams. The preon model has issues with particle masses and binding energies, but Piotr's work neatly sidesteps that issue by claiming that the preons aren't "particles" as such, but just mathematical properties of these matrices. I put "best" in quotes above because there isn't anything remotely like a widely accepted theory for this yet, just a few clever people throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0223 https://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0223

tasty_freeze 8mo ago
> This is "expected" from theory, because all particles seem to be just various aspects of the "same things" that obey a fairly simple algebra. But again, this is just observation, and it is consistent with the charges we measure (again, just observation). It doesn't explain why these rules must behave as they do. > This very, very strongly hints that the fundamental particles aren't actually fundamental in some sense. This is exactly what I am suggesting in my original comment: this "coincidence" is not a coincidence but falls out from some deeper, shared mechanism.

smnplk 8mo ago

There are layers science can not access.

f30e3dfed1c9 8mo ago
Well OK then! Let's tell all the physicists they can close up shop now. They might not have realized it, but they're done. All their little "theories" and "experiments" and what not have taken them as far as they can go.
- albatross79 8mo ago
  We're already in the realm of virtual particles, instantaneous collapse, fields with abstract geometric shape and no material reality, wave particle duality, quantized energy etc. The project of physics was to discover what the universe was made of. None of these things can answer that. If intelligibility was the goal, we lost that. So in an important sense, they might as well have closed up shop. If you're interested in the specific value of a certain property to the nth decimal place, there is work to do, but if you're interested in the workings of the universe in a fundamentally intelligible sense, that project is over with. What they're doing now is making doodles around mathematical abstractions that fit the data and presenting those as discoveries.
- paganel 8mo ago
  > Let's tell all the physicists they can close up shop now. Yes, that's part of the plan. I mean, not to all the physicists, just to those whose work doesn't bring in results anymore, and it hasn't for 30 to 40 years now. At some point they (said physicists) have to stop their work and ask themselves what it is that they're doing, because judging by their results it doesn't seem like they're doing much, while consuming a lot of resources (which could have been better spent elsewhere).
jacquesm 8mo ago
By observing the discrepancies between theories we are accessing those layers. Whether we can access them with instruments is a different matter but with our minds we apparently can.

cozzyd 8mo ago

As soon as charge is quantized, this will happen. In any quantization scheme you will have some smallest charge. There are particles with charge +2 (the Delta++, for example), but ... anything that can decay while preserving quantum numbers will decay, so you end up with protons in the end. (ok, the quarks have fractional charge but that's not really relevant at scales we care about QED) If the question is, why is quantum mechanics the correct theory? Well, I guess that's how our universe works...

andyferris 8mo ago

The hint from quantum field theory (and things like lattice gauge theory) is that charge emerges from interesting topological states/defects of the underlying field (by "interesting topological shapes" I mean - imagine a vortex in the shape of a ring/doughnut). It's kind of a topological property of a state of the photonic field, if you will - something like a winding number (which has to be an integer). Electric charge is a kind of "defect" or "kink" in the photonic field, while color charge (quarks) are defects in the strong-force field, etc. When an electron-positron pair is formed from a vacuum, we get all sorts of interesting geometry which I struggle to grasp or picture clearly. I understand the fact that these are fermions with spin-1/2 can similarly be explained as localized defects in a field of particles with integer spin (possibly a feature of the exact same "defect" as the charge itself, in the photonic field, which is what defines an electron as an electron). EDIT: > However, there are no theories why this is -- they are simply measured and that is it. My take is that there _are_ accepted hypotheses for this, but solving the equations (of e.g. the standard model, in full 3D space) to a precision suitable to compare to experimental data is currently entirely impractical (at least for some things like absolute masses - though I think there are predictions of ratios etc that work out between theory and measurement - sorry not a specialist in high-energy physics, had more exposure to low-energy quantum topological defects).

RupertSalt 8mo ago
> interesting topological states/defects of the underlying field eddies in the space-time continuum?
- UncleSlacky 8mo ago
  Is he?
  - ndsipa_pomu 8mo ago
    What?
quchen 8mo ago
(Note the post you’ve replied to mentioned electrons and _protons_, not positrons.)

phkahler 8mo ago

I'm convinced there are some semi-classical explanations that just haven't been figured out. Electrons are helically moving photons: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281322004_The_electron_is_a_helically-circulating_spin-12_charged_photon_generating_the_de_Broglie_wavelength https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281322004_The_elect... That's some interesting/wacky stuff, but there has been more research to improve those calculations - like deriving the electron charge and magnetic moment. Personally I like the idea that a proton is somehow literally an electron and 3 up quarks (a neutron gets 2 electrons and 3 up quarks). I am not a physicist though, so I'm sure there are reasons they "know" this is not the case. I find it fascinating that some physicists say wave functions are somehow "real" and then we've got Jacob Barandes saying you don't even need wave functions to do the computations of QM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oWip00iXbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oWip00iXbo IMHO there is a lot of exploration to be done without particle accelerators.

aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
> Electrons are helically moving photons How do you explain that electrons have a rest mass, but photons don't (otherwise photons couldn't move with the speed of light according to special relativity)?
- ymolodtsov 8mo ago
  Because what we see as a photon is a the one bozon left without a pair of one of the four pre-Higgs bozons that exist prior to the electroweak symmetry breaking. That's how all of them get mass. An electron gets it directle from the VEV.