Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (opens in new tab)

https://youtu.be/YmOVoIpaPrc

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

- 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

Richard Feynman on why questions

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.

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.

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-ele...

Or perhaps -- it's a constant in the simulator source code.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is in opposition to e.g. mass. There is no elementary mass, and so no particles need to have the same mass.

Is there superposition with electron charge states?

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.

"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 :)

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=vect...

Just to emphasize how extreme this dichotomy is, not only is quantum mechanics correct (in that it's a predictive model), it's the most correct physical theory humans have ever devised in that the measurements there have more significant figures than anything else.

Several studies have been done into whether practicing theoretical physicists using QM in their everyday work agree on the most basic tenets of the field.

Spoiler: they disagree on every aspect while simultaneously assuming that their opinions are correct and that everyone else agrees with them.

That’s how religions work, not how science does. Factions instead of consensus. Branches splitting off all the time and never supplanting the majority. Orthodoxy (Copenhagen). Shunning anyone that steps out of line (Everett). Refusing to question the holy texts, etc…

Another key symptom is requiring members to prove their devotion by saying and doing things that are obvious nonsense. Bending their common sense to the will of the group. In Christianity this is the trinity: one God that is three. In QM it’s the wave-particle duality, which is just nonsense. You can’t have a point with a kilometre long wavelength!! Yet, we are to believe (on faith!) that radio waves are made of photons.

Turns out that magical thinking and religiosity is the essential nature of humans, especially in large groups.

Whenever there is insufficient evidence to bring everyone into line, the line splinters into warring factions where the best argument each tribe has is: “my tribal leader said so!”

> "Researchers recently discovered that the proton sometimes includes a charm quark and charm antiquark, colossal particles that are each heavier than the proton itself."

You articulated my feeling better than I could. Surely this is something the researchers have accounted for and there's a good explanation (whether I can actually understand it is another story)

Another weird thing are virtual particles that can popup without energy. They are similar to real energetic particles in a sense that they are manifestation of the same quantum field (for example charm quark field) but they are different from real particles because they don't carry energy and thus can't live long.

World is very weird. Math works though.

Proton is just a weird ball of bubbling energy that stays in one place because up quark and down quark quantum fields got "stuck" together there through complicated colored strong force. But there's so much energy there that wants to get free but can't that there are constantly things popping in and out of existence.

Considering how you can test statistics in real life (ex: Buffon's Needle) there must be something very "statistical" embedded in reality itself (it is true that quantum mechanics pushes everything very far so can seem to complex).

If they are all bound into macroscopic object they are sharper and as a result they can make other elementary particles they "measure" (interact with) also sharper.

If particles interact with fuzzier part of macroscopic object, like an edge of a slit, they can become fuzzier, more wavy.

So the proton really is that shapeshifting soup. Never anything else. If you hit it with something hard enough it becomes momentarily disturbed into a bit sharper state that can tell us something but it immediately goes back to soup because of chaotic microscopic interactions inside.

The matter looks sharp only on macroscopic level. At the level of particles it's always fuzzy, but we have trouble of ditching the concept of little balls bouncing of each other because the math describing exchange of energy and momentum between those fuzzy "waves" looks like there were some small balls bouncing. But this comes, I believe accidentally only from the fact that all forces have sort of spherical symmetry.

What they mean by the "haze of probabilities" is that you need to iterate over all possible configurations of the gluons and quarks in the proton to produce experimental predictions.

It is for sure computationally ludicrous, but conceptually it's really not better or worse than to say that particles are billiard balls moving around by Newton's Equations. You're just more used to the latter, but spend some time working with for example Lattice QCD and you get completely used to the former being the "actual" underlying physics rules.

"I fundamentally don’t believe that a proton is some shape shifting quantum soup of energy that doesn't form until someone comes around and thinks about it." is the way quantum mechanics is often portrayed in pop sci, but it simply can't be true. Quantum mechanics existed just fine before there was anyone to observe it and think about it.

You might be right!

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...

This is a pop-sci analogy. I find it tiring as well.

The many worlds interpretation doesn't paint the picture this way. It paints it as a recursive for-each loop iterating over all solutions to the next step of the physics function.

> I still have bets on this all being a massive game of life.

...on the back of a giant turtle, amiright?

How bout placing your bets on this instead: it's the evaluation of an algorithm ("physics") on a data structure ("the universe"), and like all algorithms, exists eternally and independent of any substrate.

The real question is, are we running on bare metal, in a VM, or in a container?

Definitely not. For one thing, gravity isn't just mass. The gravity of a moving baseball is higher than a nonmoving baseball. The gravity of a charged battery is higher than a discharged battery. Same protons, neutrons, and electrons, but if you change their velocity or how they are arranged then they have more gravity. It's the stress-energy tensor, not just the mass (by which you mean matter?).

> Could gravity be the effect of mass in an indefinite form?

A very clear way to see this is not true is to compare stars and black holes to quarks. The space between quarks acts like they are different, larger or smaller quarks depending on how the real quarks happen to be arranged at that moment.

So, if we apply the same idea to a very large star, it would sometimes act like a black hole or a supernova or a star depending on where it was and how it happened to be doing and also maybe just sometimes spontaneously?

But mostly, if it was really far away you would expect it to act like a black hole, because from a far distance it seems like its all in one small point, and a black hole is an irreversible phase transition. But that doesn't happen, and stars look like stars no matter how far away you are. If reality worked like this, we'd expect nearby galaxies to have almost no dark matter and faraway galaxies to have lots and be very small. But instead galaxies and dark matter are pretty much the same no matter how far away they are from us.

This is a pretty ill-posed question though. I'm cramming it into a box that has an interesting answer just for fun, and I don't think it answers much of what you are asking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycvlJ9XMd94&ab_channel=cakta...

Something that we will continuously bump against without being able to resolve further, by definition.

Is there such a thing as Gödel's incompleteness theorems in physics?

They're not. In general, once you take a lot of little things to make a big thing, you may notice a bunch of emergent properties, but one of the major emergent property is that... all the variability cancels out, or averages to a simple quantity. See e.g. all the complex dancing of great many particles making up everyday objects, that all average to a simple scalar number we call "temperature".

A natural thing's behaviour can't be reduced to the sum of its parts. Example: an organ, taken out of an organism, stops being an organ and becomes a lump of rotting flesh. Its behaviour fundamentally and completely changes. So an organ can only be considered an organ insofar as it's a part of an organism. Similarly, an oxygen atom within a water molecule displays vastly different properties from those it would display when a free radical (or as part of an O2 molecule). Examples could be multiplied. So I don't think quantum physics is any different from the 'macro' world in this regard.

So I think the difference is natural-artificial, not quantum-macro.

This is why the "god of the gaps" critique is so short-sighted. It relies on the assumption that as science progresses it will "close the gaps". In reality the opposite happens. Another example is the cell -- in Darwin's day it was thought to be a simple thing, but then we learned more about it and it turned out to be monstrously complex and the mystery intensifies.

So I think we can give it priority on that one :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indistinguishable_particles

Neutrons are (primarily) UDD while protons are (primarily) UUD. Although I do wonder if this charm+anticharm ghost exists in other hadrons

Given that charm quarks are heavier than the proton, you’d expect to only find them in deep inelastic collisions when they are produced in pairs with an anti-quark, so it is surprising that there’s an asymmetry.