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Gravity Helps Show Strong Force Strength in the Proton (jlab.org)
66 points by thunderbong 7 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments



I explained roughly speaking why this is called gravitational without actually involving an experimental use of background gravity or gravitons in this comment some months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35444056


From the article: “At its peak, this is more than a four-ton force that one would have to apply to a quark to pull it out of the proton,” Burkert explained.


"Protons are built of three quarks that are bound together by the strong force."

Except, not. The number of "quarks" isn't even a constant.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04998-2


The "number of quarks" has no possible interpretation as a well-defined, knowable quantity except that it would be three.


Five is right out.


The number of valence quarks is 3. Or, put in a more rigorous way, the baryon number of a proton is 1.


so does that make the quote I included totally correct?


It makes your point hostile equivocation. If there is a reasonable definition that makes a statement correct and one that makes it incorrect, it is generally not advancing a conversation to assert that the incorrect definition is the one being used and then start berating people for using the wrong one. There are still perfectly reasonable senses in which one can say "protons are made of three quarks" and where that statement is as accurate as could be asked for at this level of detail.


nice opinion but these materials can be used for teaching children.

you might as well teach kids that particles actually exist independently or that gravity is made by mass. oh wait, we do!

while you're at it, hammer years of decontextualized proofs into my kid's adolescent brain so he totally loses his taste for math.

people deserve better, so, no, dude, it's not hostile equivocation, and i suspect you're actually projecting. i wonder what immediate reaction you have when people tell you you're participating in harming people, mr debate expert.


I remember being a kid. I remember the other kids in school looking a diagram of how a moon orbits a planet that orbits a star and thinking it was a picture of a mouse. This was about age 6.

In my teens I wanted to learn about computer graphics, took me a while (years) to find out that would be matrices and what they do to vectors. Fortunately, from what my niece says, this seems to have become a thing people can actually learn now in the UK during secondary school.

The quantum wave functions necessary for it to even matter that a proton or neutron isn't literally just three quarks, involves maths I'm currently trying to teach myself on Brilliant.org having not at any point needed it despite having just turned 40.

Bluntly, the only time I ever bother with anything more complex than the Bohr model is when I toy with ideas such as "what would it take for a Casimir cavity's negative energy effect to result in mass reduction exceeding the natural mass of the material it is made from?"[0] — to which the answer at my level of comprehension is "not only is this not possible if you replaced every electron with a tauon, it still isn't going to work in a lasagna phase neutronium[1]".

[0] AKA "can you use Casimir cavities to make a warp drive? No, no you cannot" https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/can-a-casim... — though note also that I was using an extremely simplified version of the Casimir equation that I assume stops being a good approximation when the wavelengths being excluded imply energy sufficient for pair production events.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pasta


People react to me fine.

I invite you to do something I bet you've never done before. This week, as you are interacting with people in real life, watch their faces carefully throughout the entire conversation.

You're going to learn something about yourself. You're not going to enjoy it. But then the question is, what are you going to do about it?


Evidence for intrinsic charm quarks in the proton

"Here we provide evidence for intrinsic charm by exploiting a high-precision determination of the quark–gluon content of the nucleon3 based on machine learning and a large experimental dataset."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04998-2

this is a tentative model of a Machine Learning "thought experiment". physical observation of the phenomenon must be confirmed before this is cannonized as scientific fact.


Stating the conserved quantity (baryon number = 1) makes it correct in a precise, meaningful way, even if it's not the whole story. Most people don't have the background to understand the subtleties of interacting quantum field theory.




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