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?
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,
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?
Mathematically it works out that way because the standard model is build up from symmetry groups. The hand wavy explanation is that the symmetries observed in nature wouldn't be reproduced if the charges differed by random irrational numbers.
The same is also generally true of other conserved quantities in the SM. Noether's theorem unifies symmetries and conservation laws as the same thing.
As far as a more fundamental explanation as to WHY the universe is this way, ask your god i guess.
If you keep asking why eventually you'll reach a ratio between two values: constants and you can't really go further deeper than that. Even if the values we have now end up not being the most fundamental, eventually you'll run into the fundamental ones and still have the same question unanswered.
I’m sure a universe could work with those constants varied but that’s the one we have in our universe.
There could be hypothetical universes with protons being half of electron and atoms would have twice the protons.
However the fundamental constants are just that. A number that allows us to reason about how the universe works.
As to why the number is that, gotta ask your God why they chose that specific value.
EDIT: after reading the great Wikipedia article above, and a connected one [1], I think I can restate: the only place we can look for these particles is in atoms, so it shouldn’t surprise us that they come in convenient forms to support atom formation.
I mentioned this recently, in the context of the laziness in language, leading to the miseducation of those who don't know better, and was heavily downvoted and ridiculed
keep it up, hn, you'll see idiocracy soon enough and then no one will trigger you
Ah right, so basically its just a convenience notation? We could as well say that proton has 3 and electron is -3 charge?
Absolutely! In fact that would have been much more convenient, since the "quantum of charge" appears to be 1/3 of the charge of the proton. All units of charge we've ever observed seem to be integer multiples of 1/3e.
OP's article has a full paragraph dedicated saying that "The proton is much more than three quarks"
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?
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.
Personally, I find the taste of hot chocolate just as nice regardless of the exact mix of quarks composing its constituent elements.
