I just had a really stupid thought, after finishing reading the article.
So, the electron is an elementary particle, right? Compared to the proton, the electron is "simple", yes?
Despite this difference in complexity, an electron has a charge of -e and a proton has a charge of +e. They are exactly complementary regarding charge (if I am understanding right, I am not a smart person).
my question is... why? why must protons and electrons be perfectly complementary regarding charge? if the proton is this insanely complex thing, by what rule does it end up equaling exactly the opposite charge of an electron? why not a charge of +1.8e, or +3e, or 0.1666e, etc? Certainly it is convenient that a proton and electron complement each other, but what makes that the case? Does this question even make sense?
so, there's a concept of a "positron", which I can understand - of course it has charge +e, it is the "opposite" of an electron. it is an anti-electron. at least that makes some kind of sense. but a proton is made up of this complex soup of other elementary particles following all these crazy rules, and yet it also ends up being exactly +e.
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.
This 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?
a 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,
Yes, 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?
when you understand quantum theory correctly, you will realize that particles don't exist by themselves. They are a temporary localization. this means that the number of quarks inside a proton is not actually fixed. when a particle becomes disentangled with the system, that localized it, there's no longer a particle
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
HN is a great training ground for learning how to present arguments in a compelling, engaging manner.
that may be true, but I'm already highly trained at that. But hey, what if you just ratchet up the difficulty to infinity. Then it will train people even better. Either that or it'll destroy the community because you dont have any criterion of right and wrong in your claim.
It doesnt matter how correct people are. The more correct people are the worse they're treated. The better we get at presenting true arguments the more you will resent us and the more you have no choice but to react with violence (being unable to admit your lie), as HNers do now with trap counterarguments and gaslighting. No wonder suicide is on the rise.
What's the lie that needs to be admitted?
the lie i meant is if people claim to want to know what they dont yet. it usually happens without their realization.
look in the history of the greater philosophers
you see it in the mechanism of narcissistic abuse as well
you might also read up on the girardian scapegoat. the point is people like the comfort of falsehood so it tends to propagate more easily. few who were around masters wanted the actual teaching rather than some life quality improvements and basic answers. One of the merits certain people can get by hanging out around a real teacher is that those people can pretend that they were one of the people who wanted to know in front of those who don't know any better.
I feel what you’re saying, but it’s incumbent on people who understand stuff to explain it to people who don’t in a way that they can comprehend
The reality is that we’re all ignorant about most things, so having an attitude with someone around something you know - irrespective of how you know it - is a losing strategy and as you said leads to poor interactions
Try to give people more grace and you’ll find people are more capable than you might know
I'll try to keep it in mind. thanks for your kindness.
What do you mean by "temporary localization"? That protons move? That they can poof? They dont seem to self destruct.
On a side note: are there any models that assume that there are fields/shapes that are constanly bombarbed by neutrinos and other stuff. Thks bombardment seems to be always ignored
without being localized, they remain a probability wave because the "universe" of information literally doesn't know enough about them anymore
no, we're talking about quarks
or any isolated quantum systen
by drawing a hypothetical box around your system with and measuring it, you've bounded it locally.
I was ready to up vote until the third paragraph.
Reading your other comments down thread doesn't paint you in a good light. Maybe your argument about laziness in language wasn't as cogent as you thought. Maybe you aren't as good at presenting arguments as you thought.
In other words, maybe you need some humility.
yeah maybe
but if you knew for sure you'd be able to be sure of that and also show the proof
instead what you did is present the impression that you had which is a synthesis of what you encountered and what was in you from the past.
If you study much philosophy, you'll have to admit the fact that a large number of people turn away from what is true. It's not pleasant to you, I know. nor is it pleasant for you to see the product of the system that you want to close your eyes to talking to you in an unpleasant manner.
thanks, i want to stress the model of the proton i had posited up thread is very simplified, for the purpose of explanation.
So far as I can tell, the fact that
"particles" are just what we call particular kinds of excitations in quantum fields
doesn't in any way answer, or obviate, or otherwise demystify the question of
why the electric charge associated with one sort of "particle" should be exactly 3x the electric charge associated with another.
So your comment is not only gratuitously rude, it's also either (1) wrong or (2) missing some essential explanation.
It’s essentially asking why is the speed of light 299,798,452 m/s or the gravitational constant 6.67x10-11 Nm2/kg2
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.
No, because those constants are entirely arbitrary.
The curiosity here is that you have multiple numbers lining up, only separated by small integers.
They are arbitrary in the sense that we could just change them and the universe wouldn't fl appart -- or are they derived from aonething deeper.
The obvious way in which those constants are arbitrary is that the meter is just a random length we compare other lengths to (and the gram is an arbitrary mass we use). So, the precise numbers are only meaningful as part of a system built on these units
"Since 2019 the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium."
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre)
I wouldn't call it totally random, no. It's really derived from somethings real in this universe.
That doesn't sound particularly random. And in fact we agree here.
No.
Some of you are talking past each other. The speed of light being exactly the number c is arbitrary, because the choice to use the ephemeris second as the base unit of time (regardless of the precision we get by now using cesium atom “beats”) is arbitrary even though it’s based on something real. That’s just standardizing our arbitrary choice.
The charge of an electron is also effectively arbitrary for the same reason. We can have our units based on whatever real thing we want.
What isn’t arbitrary is that, whatever units we use and whatever number we arrive at for the charge of the electron, it true that the quark charge units are (1/3)e. Thus, as the poster pointed out there is a fundamental difference in asking why it works out that way compared to asking why the speed of light is a particular derived number.
tldr: The poster above is wrong about his claim that it’s like asking “Why is the speed of light…” because he’s comparing a number to a relationship.
OP: "It’s essentially asking why is the speed of light 299,798,452 m/s or the gravitational constant 6.67x10-11 Nm2/kg2 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."
And so the post I responded too said these constants are totally RANDOM / ARBITRARY.
But they cannot be otherwise the universe wouldn't work (as far as we know).
The measurements or units we use to express these are arbitrary-- but the constants themselves are DERIVED from the system we call the universe. Without them the system wouldn't work.
Is this really so controversial?
The first thing to point out here is that the
is not
It is quite inaccurate to say this. The correct way to phrase this is that the speed of light is 1/sqrt(permeability * permittivity) of the medium through which the light is traveling.
For a perfect vacuum, these two properties of that vacuum give a result as specified above. For other specified medium, you will get a different value, which could be greater than or less than the above figure.
Little technicalities matter in such cases, as it opens up the discussion. Part of that discussion is that solar space or interstellar space or intergalactic space will have distributions of matter that can alter what the speed of light is away from the assumed perfect vacuum speed of light.
Simple assumptions such as perfect vacuum are quite likely to affect how accurate our models of the universe are. The problem for us is that we are here and not out there making actual on location measurements of the permittivity and permeability of the relevant regions. The assumptions made in our models can come back and bite us in the long term.
Now as for the models we use currently for proton and neutron structure, there are assumptions here that could well be misleading us even though our models appear to work. There are alternate models available (since at least the early 20th century) which have, as far as I know, not been investigated with any detailed effort. Now, of course, it doesn't mean that these alternatives are actually viable, but we don't really know at this time.
Another important point is that other things besides light (for instance, gravitational influence) travel at the speed of light.
It's actually the speed of causality / information transfer.
Or, there's some more fundamental rule that's being followed that we haven't discovered yet that explains these numbers.
Physicists have been searching for the Grand Unified Theory since forever, and so far, no real luck. The closest is something i'm not too familiar with called M-theory (which is a derivative(?) of string theory).
Because they are mathematical models built to describe a thing and thus their entire purpose as a concept is to add up “neatly”
I'm getting very strong "angels on a pinhead" vibes from this
With the minute difference that we do not have experimental validation for Angels dancing on a pinhead whereas there is a massive amount of experimental validation for the standard model.
I thought he meant "angles on a pinhead".
Now you're talkin' tri-angular!
https://cidu.info/2022/05/06/thats-a-cute-angle/
Right angles are wrong angles! Death to th' T-square!
https://comicskingdom.com/zippy-the-pinhead/2023-07-02
Thank you for your contribution, my fellow Pynchon Enjoyer
So you're saying that all we need to do is experimentally validate the number of angels dancing on a pinhead?
Measure the area of a pinhead, divide by cross-sectional area of an angel. Easy peasy.
Division by zero error.
No, these are models with simple, testable properties. You can't wave away the fundamental charges as something somebody made up to make the models nice, conspiracy theories don't work when there is a simply observable truth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_formulation_of_...
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.
My layman understanding is that charge is not fundamental. It derives from something called weak hypercharge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_hypercharge
Because that is the universe we live in. We don't know where the universal constants come from, if they are random, or selected. Science can't really answer the question of "why", it only does "how".
Could be a bit of anthropic principle at play. Universes where things don't work out with some stability might not support chemistry, and biology is especially finicky chemistry.
Ok probably a dumb take but: doesn’t that “stable forms become more common over time” principle also apply to protons purely by principle of them being in opposition to electrons? Ie the field that coalesces into the quarks we see today because those quarks can ultimately form atoms.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_symmetry
How does 2/3 - 1/3 not sum to 1/3? 2-1 is 1, right? What am I missing?
2 up quarks, so 2/3 * 2 -> 4/3. And then 4/3 - 1/3 = 3/3 = 1
Ah ha, I thought it was 1/3 per quark. Thanks.
Thanks I wondered the same
Ah right, so basically its just a convenience notation? We could as well say that proton has 3 and electron is -3 charge?
OP's article has a full paragraph dedicated saying that "The proton is much more than three quarks"
If the universe is old, then how do you expect atoms to exist if this was not the case?
Couldn'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?
How would we ever distinguish what half-a-proton is in a universe where all protons ever are _always_ paired off?
Presumably 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?)
You 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.
We 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.
Sure. 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.
A proton, electron, and a neutron walk into a bar…
After about 15 minutes, the neutron has changed into another proton and electron, so bar now has a bigger party on its hands.
How do they split the bill?
I like your explanation.
What are you referring to with this?
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.
And 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.
So, PBS Space Time did a video on this “fine tuned universe” theory and it, like all of their videos, is great. The concept seems to be that in an unbalanced universe, life couldn’t form, and we’d be incapable of having this conversation. So, either there are infinite universes and we exist as a result of being in the right one, or there’s one universe and we exist as a result of the one we’re in being right. Either way, we’re pretty lucky.
https://youtu.be/YmOVoIpaPrc
AKA the "anthropic principle."
AKA “God did it” with a sciencey sounding name. An answer which explains nothing, predicts nothing, satisfies no curiosity, and closes the book on any further questions.
The anthropic principle is actually the opposite - it's an objection to the fine-tuning argument that says something roughly like "well, of course the universe is configured in a way that allows us to be around. if it wasn't, we wouldn't be around to discuss it. thus, there is no need to appeal to an intelligent designer of the universe to explain its fine-tuned nature."
That aside, with respect to saying an intelligent designer designed the universe ("God did it"):
Well, it explains why the universe is fine-tuned, if you buy the argument.
Yep, just like any other answer to the question, since it's a metaphysical question rather than a scientific one.
It offers an explanation.
No more than any other answer does.
No it doesn't. Goddidit is not an explanation.
Nope, not like any other answer. Like Satandidit.
No it doesn't. Goddidit is not an explanation.
No, not like other answers. Science never closes the book on further questions.
I suspect you're reading into my comment more than what I intended to say.
In the context of fine-tuning arguments for God, we really are just arguing that an intelligent designer designed the universe. In isolation, this doesn't necessarily commit us to some mainstream religion, and in this context, God is just the intelligent designer of the universe, nothing more (though proponents of the arguments will go on, through other arguments, to ascribe more properties to this thing).
I don't know why it wouldn't be. Suppose I kept pulling a card from a deck and showing it to you. Every single time, it was the ace of spades. Why is this? Well, one pretty good explanation is that I know where the ace of spades is in the deck and I'm intentionally picking that card out and showing it to you. That is, there is intelligence/intentionality that explains this event. You would probably consider this as an explanation. The fine-tuning argument's conclusion is just as much of an explanation.
I don't know what you mean to say here. Satandidit doesn't predict anything either.
This isn't a scientific question though. This is a question about why the fundamental constants of nature are what they are. This is a question beyond the domain of science. Elsewhere in this thread, someone linked a video of Feynman (an atheist) on "why" questions and how at some point they have to bottom out - and at this point, science cannot provide the answers.
Besides, this doesn't close the book on further questions. We can still ask, "what kind of existence is this intelligent designer?", "why does this intelligent designer exist?", etc. And of course, questions that are normally under the domain of science are still under the domain of science.
Saying "because God did it" as an answer to any question has the same value as saying "because pixel cooked the music". If you want to consider those two groups of words "explanations" go for it. They are grammatically correct, and if they satisfy the curious mind they are good enough.
You keep insisting that 'anthropic principle' = 'god did it' when it's anything but. It's like you don't even read to the replies to your comments.
It's not uncommon now for people to use comment sections to deliver lectures, they already know what they want to say, they break it into multiple parts and they just paste it in assuming that other people will happily provide the right kind of conjugations. Good to point it out.
The same ascertainable to humans value perhaps, but if one assumes they are necessarily completely equal (there is no God, in fact) you would typically want evidence. But this is only typically, some things in science don't need proof.
I consider the person to whom you are responding a troll, because they are taking a hard line stance, using abrupt terms, shutting down discussion, and putting much less effort into things than you are.
That said, I agree with you roughly. I think suggesting an intelligent design as a possibility is not "shutting down curiosity". A scientific mind can entertain higher forms of power and look into it.
Accepting the possibility of a creator is not equivalent to blind devotion to one of the many existing faiths.
What caused your comment above to appear on HN?
Because youdidit.
That's not an explanation?
There are different kinds of explanations according to different measures, but all explanation is about identifying the causes of things. "You did it" identifies the agent, the efficient cause. I can, of course, explain how the agent (you) effected the cause, but youdidit is still an explanation, even if it isn't the kind you are interested in hearing.
+ "Just for us" ^^
e.g. Earth is the only place where life could have formed. We have yet to set foot on even 1 another planet but we are pretty sure we are alone in the entire damn Universe.
This is an incredible misunderstanding of the Anthropic principle. It has nothing to do with god, it does not suggest that life could only exist on Earth, and it does not suggest that we are alone in the universe.
If anything it's an argument against Intelligent Design. E.g. life is the statistical result of a vast universe (or multiverse) of permutations - some of which are not conducive to life, and some of which are. And when life looks out and says "wow it's uncanny how perfect this place is, there must be a divine hand at work" - it's only observational bias that makes it appear that way. Because life could only exist to make such observations in regions of the universe which are suitable for life.
But on the other hand it also prevents one from saying "we exist, therefore intelligent life must be commonplace".
i.e. the puddle thinking how fortunate it is that the ditch it is in is the perfect size for it.
Which law of the universe guarantees the satisfaction of your curiosity again ?
the anthropic principle is why we find ourselves in such an unlikely place (a habitable planet) instead of somewhere that can’t support life. it’s not an argument for god.
it’s not entirely trivial. if someone says “god did it” because we find ourselves on earth not mars the anthropic principle is a better explanation.
My favorite version of the anthropic principle is one where you say that ALL of the universes exist -- with all possible values of arbitrary constants. We just observe this one because we're alive here (and most of the others are not habitable).
The Anthropic Principle explains why you are asking the question, not why the proton has that charge. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection
I can’t get behind all these fine tuning arguments. Who’s to say what life might form if the proton had a charge of 1.01e or if the fine structure constant was 1/138? Something about the line of reasoning that there is a multiverse and we just happen to live in favorable conditions reminds me of Pascal’s wager. It doesn’t do anything other than unfalsifiably assure the wagerer that they are important
Which fine tuning arguments are you referring to?
As I understand it, 'fine tuning' is simply a fact of the universe: that the fundamental constants have values that allow for the emergence of complexity, and that even slight changes to those values would lead to homogeneous and featureless universe. I don't have the physics background to demonstrate this for myself, but I believe it.
To then reason from that fact to the existence of a multiverse or the existence of God is an extra step that one need not take, but not taking either of those steps doesn't invalidate the appearance that the fundamental constants of the universe were fine tuned for the production of complexity/life.
Ok here’s the problem. What hubris does it take to assume the fundamental constants could be changed? Just because they appear in math equations doesn’t mean they can be twiddled and tweaked like programming variables. We have no prior knowledge or justification to believe any constants have been “tuned”, because we have no justification in suggesting other possible values.
We could just as easily say that life on earth was “tuned” to make ”intelligent life” evolve, but we don’t have any other 4 billion year test runs of earth to see what else might have evolved. In the same way we have no data at all about the phase space of other possible universes, their constants, or how their physics would play out on cosmological timescales.
It’s not that it isn’t fun to think about. It’s just that it is unscientific.
I think I could've phrased my comment better.
I'm not assuming the constants can be changed; axiomatically, they cannot, because they're fundamental constants of the universe. I'm also not assuming that some agent was around to do the tuning. In its basic form 'fine tuning' just means that if one of the values were even slightly different we wouldn't have anything like the universe we see today, including life. The values of the constants appear as if they were tuned.
It's interesting you bring up evolution, because before that theory came about intelligent design was a reasonable assumption in trying to explain how well-adapted organisms seemed to be to their environments. It was as if someone had designed them for their roles! As it turns out the theory of evolution satisfactorily explains why organisms exhibit the appearance of design.
In a similar way the fundamental constants exhibit the appearance of having been precisely set. It's hard to imagine a scientific theory getting 'behind' the constants the way evolution was able to get 'behind' the appearance of organisms...
This is a hallmark of a chaotic system. It's not impossible but the chances of sitting exactly on such an unstable point seems very low. It seems more likely that the constants are some optimum in a basin of attraction, a stable point in some higher order dynamic system.
They're constants but are they fundamental? There are a lot (19?) of free parameters in the Standard Model. We determine them experimentally. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some deeper explanation that results in those values. We just don't know what it is yet.
You're not entirely wrong that it's unscientific, I think we're answering metaphysical questions. (It seems like questions of "why" ends up unerringly in either metaphysics or religion at some point.)
That said, I believe the chain of logic (haven't watched the PBS video yet) is simply that were these fine-tuned constants to take any other value, there wouldn't be intelligent life to observe them. If the values were to be anything outside a narrow range, they would remain unobservable by entities within that hypothetical universe, and because we are making an observation we are implicitly sampling from the distribution of observable values. It's a Bayesian metaphysical argument?
That sounds like it presumes a multiverse, but I don't think you need an infinite number of universes or a god for that to be true... that said, it does purport to explain how fine-tuning doesn't violate certain (metaphysical?) principles of science that call for "naturalness" (which a friend once told me boils down to "all unitless constants should be either 1 or 0 otherwise it's inelegant" or something): the fine structure constant is what it is because otherwise nothing would exist to observe that it was 1/139 or 42 or whatever.
I hope this is even slightly more satisfying to read than it was to write.
Your comment was an excellent synthesis of the discussion that preceded it - thank you.
Nothing says that they couldn't be changed, but then there's the question of _why_ they can't be changed. What forced them to be the values they are? Some of them appear to be free, so are they?
Those constants are a feature of our models. We don’t actually know whether the constants themselves are part of reality, or whether they are just there so our models can approximate our observations.
The point is, there might be a mismatch between our model and the underlying reality. There could be an unknown deeper structure to reality which explained why those values appear to us as “fine tuned”.
I will add that, from a classical theological point of view, watchmaker type arguments are considered quite weak [0].
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/03/thomism-versus-desi...
I think it's the other way around, it's because we are complex reasoning forms of life that we must observe fine tuning of physical constants, necessary for the emergence of complexity.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_Bias
I also came up with my own variation of the anthropic principle:
- 1. Extend the anthropic principle beyond physical connstant. Include factors such as the goldilock zone from planetology, the symbiogenetic origin of eukaryotic cells, the presence of the moon, etc ...
- 2. Rethink the "anthropic situation" as a collection of coincidences. It doesn't directly "select for" observers, but for the right coincidences that allow them to exists.
Two paths open for us from here:
- 3.1. Either God (or whatever phenomenon can explain the presence of the right coincidences) exists and we were dealt with the right set of coincidences.
- 3.2. Or alternatively, this collection of coincidences was built up by a random sampling process. If this is the case, then we should expect this collection to contain *superfluous* coincidences that have no impact on the existence of observers. Imagine you lost the key to your house and someone cuts a key at random from a bit of metal, which luckily turns out to unlock your door. This key has more chances to feature superfluous, redundant notches, than to be an exact copy of the original key.
----
This brings a counterpoint to the cognitive perspective on pattern recognition and could be used to challenge or refine our understanding of why we perceive certain phenomena as 'coincidences' (for instance why the Moon/Sun ratios are the same for both their diameters and distances to the Earth, which allows us to observe quasi-perfect eclipses). This superfluous anthropic principle, in this case, suggests that these perceived coincidences might have an actual basis in the physical properties and probabilistic events of the universe. In other words, it is because God doesn't exist that we can see 'meaningful' coincidences "hinting" at its existence (from the perspective of magical thought).
A couple of the constants it's easy (for a real physicist, not for me) to prove there's no interesting structure to the universe anymore if they vary even a little. Like, no molecules are possible.
So there's a question there for why the values are so exactly set, or if something forces them to be the value they are.
The anthropic principle (that if the universe weren't suitable, we wouldn't be here to know) always struck me more of reasoning that we're _not_ special.
"no molecules are possible" does not imply "absolutely nothing forms a structured dynamic", the thought experiment ceases prematurely if it stops there, partly because the structural makeup is not yet well enough known to consider those outcomes. the claim of a completely uninteresting outcome approximating true nothing is empirically unlikely. abstractions tend to fall over far faster than reality does
I strongly dislike PBS Space Time, but I find it hard to explain why. I might also be just too dumb to get it. It's just the feeling of the goal not being the "listener gaining understanding", but rather "expressing how confusing and complicated it is".
The channel is definitely not targeted for the lay person.
A counter example, Derek from Veritasium, he did a phd in physics education and it shows. Some of his videos are complex in content, but dumbed down so most people can understand.
I enjoy PBS space time and listening to Matt O’Dowd, but I understand at the most 20-40% of what is covered on the videos. It is frustrating because I like the topics being discussed.
I'm not convinced. When he talks about things I understand, he does so in a way that I still find frustratingly convoluted. In these cases, it's not for a lack of education. It probably just means that this style of presenting topics just isn't for me, which is completely fine. Diversity in free education is great and commendable.
But I think you touch on the part that I think is the reason why. Because PBS tries to dumb things down, but instead of doing it like Derek does, which adds clarity, PBS does it by "mystifying" it. Probably tickles someone's itch, but I find it annoying.
Take the video posted, for example. It starts out immediately with thumbnail "Life = Multiverse?". If it really was for the niche audience, that title is remarkably dumb, although understandable for the same reasons clickbait titles work. Perhaps PBS meant to present the question whether one leads to or suggests the other? "Life ⇝ Multiverse?" would better express that. Though, the thought process of how multiverse and the anthropic principle go together is: "Multiverse ⇝ Life?".
The video starts out by expressing three statements, related to the Anthropic Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle). Had they instead worded those statements as to be correct, it would be a very nice way of introducing the topic.
This is how it is presented:
"Life exists in our universe" ⇝ "Our universe is capable of producing and sustaining life". Which is fine. We understand what producing and sustaining life is, because it is really just the first statement with some added anthropomorphism.
The next one, which is the whole point of the "hook" for the video, and is probably intended to be a little bit cheeky, except that he keeps a straight face, so, unless you know enough, it'll probably just misinform you.
"Okay. Let's try one final uncontroversial statement. Therefore, there are countless universes".
Well, no. Multiverse theory is one way to explain the unlikeliness of the physical constants working out the way they "conveniently" do in our universe. But this logical inference is not an "uncontroversial statement". It doesn't qualify, yet it is dumbed down to suggest it does. I'm sure that the following "Hm", and look to the side, is meant to express this. What do I know. But I'm not particularly amused or impressed.
So, so far, we've seen the thumbnail, and the first three sentences before the intro video rolls. And, it's been 1. Inaccurate information in thumbnail, 2. incorrect logical inference 3. false conclusion.
I can probably continue the video, but this is why I dislike PBS so much. It doesn't really try to dumb things down. It just IMO, fails to communicate science well.
Yeah, your confusion there is like being confused from the use of a literary device. The intent was exactly to illustrate why the implication 'life -> multiverse' may be problematic.
It was communicated just fine, I think you should continue watching?
Are you sure you got the argument I'm presenting? You did quickly make an edit to avoid a rather rude remark.
My point is that their use of literary devices, as you put it, are often misleading if not flat out wrong. The listener needs to he able identify them as such, and I don't think that's a good way to communicate science.
It doesn't mean that PBS is bad. Note that I have made no such statement. I'm just saying that I dislike it, and tried to be constructive as to why. If this offended you, like your initial remark might suggest, perhaps you are reading too much into it.
I did want to avoid implying that videos are harder to understand if you find nonverbal cues hard to understand, but sure. That would genuinely be a reason to avoid PBS videos and that's fine.
The point is their use of the literary device here was not misleading nor 'flat wrong'. It is serving as a jumping off point from the video title 'Does Life Need a Multiverse to Exist?'. You may argue that such a question is ill posed, but then state your argument properly.
Read: they are NOT talking about the anthropic principle here. You are probably confused because you are trying to shoehorn this into discussion when the video is not even talking about this yet. Yes the anthropic principle is cogent to the video but not until later.
Sounds like we agree then.
The difference in opinion is that I don't consider literary devices to validate incorrect or misleading statements. Which is why I dislike PBS. You do, and that's fine. To each their own.
You are not only confused because they are using a literary device, you are _primarily_ confused because you think they are talking about the anthropic principle, when they are not.
Anyways. I am sure you have your reasons for disliking PBS. Just that the reason you've given here is incoherent, for reasons I understand (trying to make a point quickly etc). No worries.
You seem very hung up on my incorrect assumption as to what extent the video was about the anthropic principle or not. I have not watched it, nor do I intend to, and I am happy with being wrong about it. That said, it also isn't relevant to my dislike of PBS, or arguments presented. I just happened to click and take a peek at this particular video, to see if I could pinpoint the kind of stuff that I have come to associate with them. I didn't need to watch very long to find examples. Examples, that you can take at face value, in it's own isolated context, which makes it completely irrelevant what you are hung up on, and suggesting I am confused by.
So, I'll make it simple.
"LIFE = MULTIVERSE?", is... a very dumb statement. It can function as a clickbait, but I'm assuming that PBS wants to suggest a relationship of inference. Why start out with possibly giving someone a wrong idea/concept? Now, this isn't a big deal. I just took a peek, and the first thing I saw was rather dumb. So, that's what I'll mention.
Secondly is the sequence of statements, that are explicitly stated as "uncontroversial" in the inference between them.
They are:
"Life exists in our universe" ⇝ "Our universe is capable of producing and sustaining life" ⇝ "there are countless universes".
I'm taking these at face value. Third inference is invalid for more than one reason. Yet, it is presented as nothing but. You consider that a literary device. I can only think of two possible explanations for why: 1. You consider it OK to be incorrect and misleading when it is used as a literary device. 2. You do not understand why it is an invalid inference.
Either is fine by me. However, I'm not really confused. This... shouldn't be confusing. The only thing I've stated as a personal opinion here, is that I dislike PBS for being misleading and incorrect, as a literary device. You suggested that they weren't being misleading or incorrect, because there is a "hint hint, nudge nudge" that it might be ironic. So, my person opinion is: well, that's pretty fucking annoying. Hence my conclusion. Which is why I'll just stick to Derek and the likes who can manage to dumb things down to my level. Everyone is happy.
PS: .. and in case you might argue this; it also doesn't matter what they explain later on, if that's why you mentioned I should watch on. There is no "uncontroversial" series of arguments that will reach the logical conclusion "there are countless universes". It's just one of several ways to reason about why life, and the laws of physics, happen to allow something otherwise improbable. Which is what I'm assuming they will get to, but again, I have no intentions of watching it.
Derek tackles easier subjects than PBS space.
It’s like a listicle that tells you every best coffee machine in 2024 is a valid purchase to the right kind of consumer when you’re looking for the best one.
There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that the defining constants of our universe are pulled from some uniform distribution though, which is the underlying assumption here. When you put it that way, that's a pretty strange and specific claim to make.
I don't think the claim requires a uniform distribution, just that the values come from some possible distribution (of any shape). With enough (or infinite) shots on goal, you're gonna get all combinations of them.
The question "why these values of constants instead of others?" sort of presupposes that other values are possible. If you instead believe that the values are fixed, then your answer is just "because that's the only value that's possible."
Isn't that concept of "luck" as strange as considering us "lucky" for currently being? Non-existent things aren't in a lobby waiting to win a lottery. There was no choice; we came to exist, then considered ourselves. Whatever conditions create, does not imply luck for what is created.
No one who has replied to your question has got the right answer. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/21753/why-do-ele... has the right answer. There are multiple aspects to this argument, but essentially, the symmetries of your system force the charges in the Standard Model (quarks and leptons) to be the way they are due to gauge anomaly cancellation. If you believe in quark confinement, which is extremely well motivated, computationally, theoretically and experimentally, then the fact that the proton has exactly charge +1 follows naturally.
I am reading this as "it has to be this way, or the model does not hold", but it does not explain why. What causes it? Consistency of a model cannot be the ultimate reason, right?
Not a physisist, but "consistency with the model" doesn't mean "because that's how some arbitrary model says it should be".
It's more like: "Because we have arrived at a model that describes well most other aspect of those particles and their behavior, and has verified predictive power, and given the constrains and calculations based on that model, that's what its charge would be".
Still does not explain "why"
I just would like to point out that "why" is not a scientific question. Feynman mentions this quite a lot. The question "why" doesn't have answers in science. A question of "How" has a better chance of being answered in science.
I think that was a fairly idiosyncratic point of view of Feynman's. In actual scientific practice you can find hundreds of examples of published scientific papers that address 'why' questions. Here are a couple of completely random examples:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11207-009-9338-5
https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8174/4/3/63
They answer the why's with the same way @hansbo complained about not answering the why, e.g:
" We show that the symmetries of this non-commutative space unify the standard model of particle physics with (2) chiral gravity. The algebra of the octonionic space yields spinor states which can be identified with three generations of quarks and leptons. The geometry of the space implies quantisation of electric charge, and leads to a theoretical derivation of the mysterious mass ratios of quarks and the charged leptons. Quantum gravity is quantisation not only of the gravitational field, but also of the point structure of space-time."
It's not uncommon for a scientific paper to raise a question without fully answering it (science is hard). The point is that actual scientific practice does not appear to care about any distinction that can usefully be described as a distinction between 'how' and 'why' questions. You can keep asking 'but why?' ad infinitum and never arrive at a fully satisfying explanation. However, the same is also try of 'but how?' We will find no ultimate answers, but the questions that stimulate scientific research certainly seem to include 'why' questions.
"Why" is more of a philosophy question, pre-scientific or a-scientific if you like. Science question would be "How". Maybe not this particular Q, but having in mind that on every A-answer, one can again ask Q-question "Why". That's more philosophy not so much science, imo.
I don't think it explains "How" either, in this case.
There are causal links, but we always have axioms for which either there is no reasons, they are just how they are, or we don't know the reasons, we have just experimental evidence for them. At the end, the answer to "why" is always, because they are just how they are.
The 'why' is because 'it's what balances'
i.e. it's the only combination that works. A proton is a bunch of other particles that, when combined together, balance out an electron. The 'why' is 'because that's a stable configuration' in the same way that water at 25c is liquid not gas because the 'rules' of the local environment dictate that.
I mean, why do those particles exist at all? That's really what you're asking. Why do electrons exist, why do protons 'form' from subatomic particles to balance them out? Existential kinda question.
Exactly this. Or to put it another way we don't actually know how the rules of the universe work. So we can't follow a process of deductive reasoning that "why" follows from this or that implication.
Take quantum mechanics. This came out of observations that particles exhibited wave-like behaviour. Mathematics predicts certain things when you start to apply the wave equation. These are then experimentally verified and the model is shown to be pretty good, although it has some deficiencies like not fully linking up with relativity. There are some doubts in some areas of what it predicts as well from what I understand from talking to researchers.
As the article says the original model was that protons were fundamental particles: nothing smaller. This model held up for quite some time but then observational data demonstrated it was insufficient. Same with the three quark model. Knowing the various deficiencies we might go so far as to say "the model that a proton is a +1 charge is good enough" and use that because that works for many situations and that's as much as we need. Although of course, there are always scientists looking to complete the picture.
Science is the incremental acquisition of knowledge through observation and experimentation - and there's an awful lot we haven't figured out.
Perhaps 'because' if the consistency did not exist then the universe would fail to exist.
There was the Big Bang, but we do not know what caused the Big Bang. But the particular Big Bang that started our particular universe may not have been the only one to occur. There could have been multiple previous Big Bangs where the 'properties' of each of those created universes may not have had the same consistency as we experience, and the inconsistency(s) could have resulted in a 'collapse' or 'destruction' of those universes.
Whereas it was just a coincidence that our Big Bang got things 'right' for the universe to continue to develop.
We could simply be experiencing survivorship bias in/with our universe.
As someone who dabbles in philosophy, and to use its language, our existence is contingent (we, and our universe, do not have to exist):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency_(philosophy)
Thats interesting, what are the chances of another big bang, after our(the current one) big bang?
Could it happen while this universe is here?
I recently came into the concept of the great attractor; the mysterious force that our galaxy is hurtling towards. It is thought to be some supermass of star material and other things.
What if that supermass is another(the next?) big bang forming; energy just slides around some universe space banging off here and there, forever?
I don't know much about this of this of course.
But it does feel like you might have a point here. If everything is moving away from each other, things must have a center some where, and thats where this new big bang is forming?
I'm curious how the field that allows vibration exists instead of just pure nothing that isn't a field that doesn't allow vibration or bending or virtual particles etc. Heisenberg's principle seems contingent on the void of nothing being a field that can wobble.
Sadly (?) the word "nothing" seems to have become overloaded, so now—depending on who you talk to—you can have the word pointing to different concepts. See "seven types/levels of nothing":
* https://rlkuhn.com/wp-content/uploads/Closer-to-Truth-Essays...
* https://closertotruth.com/news/levels-of-nothing-by-robert-l...
Which leads to the wonderful question: why are there any contingent things? And: why are the contingent things that there are as complex as they are?
I don't know of any plausible naturalist explanation besides Many-Worlds. And that supposes for the sake of discussion that Many-Worlds is in fact naturalist.
I've heard an amusing conjecture that I'm not sure how much to take seriously unless there's a mind underlying the universe (like in simulation theory).
The void in its infinite time and endless space (the same as neither existing) became bored with itself, and in its attempt to destroy itself, split and created the universe we have now. Full of endless wonders and anomalies and beauty and travesty. All for the amusement of itself as one that remembers the abyssal void.
Isn't the primary experimental argument beta decay from that link? A nucleus can emit a positron, and observably loses nuclear charge equal to one positive electron.
So by a pretty simple inferrence you could conclude the proton has a positive in it, hence the charge (it of course isn't literally like this for other reasons though).
And since we also observe antiprotons, the opposite can clearly apply.
So a proton can emit a positron. Does that mean that the positron is somehow "part" of the proton? Does it mean that their wave functions interact in some specific way? Is there another reason?
Quantum physics has always bothered me, personally, since I find it difficult to understand reasons. Not philosophical reasons, I am fine with axioms and foundations to models, but rather intuitive reasons why it works a certain way. I know it is an extremely strong theory which makes unexpected, later confirmed, predictions, but there is a frustration that the only explanation to things is "math".
Sort of? But it's less "there is a particle doing things" and more "there's a probability field which can describe a particle doing something" (alongside a bunch of other probabilities it interacts with).
One of the ways you can calculate the probability of nuclear decay for example is to assume that the particle you expect to see is literally existent and trapped inside a potential well defined by the atomic nucleus and then calculate the probability it tunnels out of that to free space.
The thing is "why" does get pretty anthropic: protons match electrons because we observe them to, and then on top of that we observe nuclear decay causing the conversion of a proton to a neutron + a positron (within the limits of our instruments) - so our model predicts that these are in fact the same value, and we keep measuring to check that they converge in that direction (it would be a big deal, for example, if we discovered this wasn't the case - every physicist would love to find out that proton charge and electron charge are actually slightly different).
A photon turns into a (virtual) electron-positron pair. Does it mean that the photon consists of these particles?
Whenever you're asking for an explanation this deep in the ontology stack, you need to think about what kind of explanation would be satisfying to you, and whether you can reasonably expect intuitive answers in domains that lie far outside of your everyday experience. Human brains aren't built to grasp this stuff intuitively.
At a certain point, the reason we like some particular wacky physical model is always going to be "it has the best combination of explanatory power and simplicity"
A thing can be explained with its constituent parts or explained by a parallel analogy. If you don't understand the constituent parts or the analogy or there are neither of these. You won't understand it.
“The model does not hold” === “existence wouldn’t be possible”. We found atomic particles, then did some more experiments and found quarks within the atomic particles. The quarks appear to be complex but predictable subsets of the particles. So “why do those subsets add to 1” invites a tautology, because the whole reason we found them in the first place is that they add up to exactly one, and therefor can be part of atoms.
It’s like asking why the left engine of an aircraft happens to emit the same amount of thrust as the right engine; if that wasn’t the case, there wouldn’t be a plane to talk about in the first place, just an art piece or a flaming crash.
Which epistemic foundation in which your "why" question is answered do you consider as acceptable for you?
Which answer on physicsexchange is the right one? The top scored ?
The top scored is just the answer liked best. The fact that it refers to proton decay and quantum gravity, both hypotheses which, as plausible as they might be, are not experimentally testable at this time, renders in my mind the confidence of the answer questionable.
The top answer has multiple reasons. The one I am referring to in particular is this section: "I should point out that if you believe that the standard model matter is complete, then anomaly cancellation requires that the charge of the proton is equal to the charge of the positron, because there is instanton mediated proton decay as discovered by t'Hooft, and this is something we might concievable soon observe in accelerators. So in order to make the charge of the proton slightly different from the electron, you can't modify parameters in the standard model, you need to add a heck of a lot of unobserved nearly massless fermions with tiny U(1) charge." It makes no reference to quantum gravity.
Wait, proton decay was proven?
No one knows. That's part of the great mystery.
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.
That's a variation on the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Maybe a kind of observer bias. If the universe weren't seemingly-perfectly balanced to allow emergent complexity in matter, we wouldn't be here to point out how seemingly-perfect it seems. (If you subscribe to a multiverse interpretation, perhaps most of the infinitely many other possible universes are dead and void.)
An interesting point.
How about the universe kept starting and collapsing/crashing in an infinite loop until by chance the electron and the proton had the exact charge and the universe as it is now could go beyong the initial stage and could continue?
( Ok this feels like a trial an error of somebody playing universe ).
How about the universe that quantum-emerges in a truly random sequence of quasistates which disintegrate immediately, and once in a while it happens to be the state that includes "your" "memory" of the previous ones. I mean chronologically from your perspective, they don't even have to appear in order.
By an amazing coincidence, this particular "frameset" is logically consistent and pretty boring, so you have no intergalactic empires, no magic, and no job.
If perception emerged directly from chaos like that, wouldn't you expect to perceive chaos, rather than a rich world built upon billions of years of evolutionary history?
I don't think there's "rather than" in this idea. You surely will perceive every state that is perceivable at all, but time and continuity have no meaning here. Specific history is just an image that always exists only for an instant. Eventually that universe might enumerate all states, so they'd form all sorts of sequences, but that's coincidental.
Sure, such a universe would create all states, but if perception from chaos were possible, then there would be overwhelmingly more chaotic states to perceive than sensible ones, so you would expect to find yourself perceiving chaos.
I think perception cannot exist without a robust evolutionary history to build upon, which is why you perceive something sensible.
It depends on what we see as "perception". Imagine in our regular universe model, the "perceptor" quickly switched between all creatures just like a CPU core switches between all busy processes. That wouldn't invalidate any of the creatures/processes "experience" and wouldn't mix them (ignoring cache, processes aren't that isolated really). All these processes are transient states of the same physical CPU core.
Back to the chaotic universe, the "perceptor" switches between the states, every state is a complete picture. Yes it does see more chaotic states, but they don't leak into each other, including through expectations. There's no memory outside of a state that it could accumulate and experience continuously. Eons of state changes pass between two attoseconds, but there's no way to remember.
That's what I mean by perception. In-frameset perception obviously has to be continuous to make (or not make) sense.
That would still make the human brain an exceptionally rare state, compared to all the other chaotic states the perceptor perceives.
This particular human brain refuses to believe that the perceptor perceives anything when selecting a chaotic state. If you'd like to hear chaos' opinion on the matter, please pound on your keyboard for a while.
Essentially dust theory from Permutation City. I've thought about this a lot.
I could see why a charge imbalance prevents life from forming, but why would it also collapse the entire universe?
Sssshhhh, you’ll summon all the simulation people out of the woodwork!
This made me think - is a concept like most even defined for infinity?
Not a mathematician, but if there's a computable limit, then why not? E.g. most integers aren't powers of 2, cause lim(n to inf: n / 2^n) = 0
Probably a cheeky response but certainly!
We can say most positive integers are greater than 5. Or most real numbers are irrational. Half of all integers are even — even though there's just as many of both!
I'm not very sympathetic to the view that we're very lucky to be in this universe. That said, there is an interesting response to the anthropic principle response, which I'll mention here just because I think it's interesting to think about what's wrong with this objection:
Suppose you and I were living in a totalitarian state. The state decides that you and I are to be put to death. They drag us into a field, and a shooting squad of several marksmen surrounds us. They all fire - but miraculously, every single one of them misses us.
I then turn to you and say, "Wow, the odds that all of those bullets missed us by sheer chance are so incredibly low. Clearly, it wasn't by chance - they must have coordinated to ensure they missed us, intentionally."
You then turn to me and say, "No, that's silly. It's simply that if any of the bullets had hit us, we wouldn't be around to talk about it."
Your line of reasoning here doesn't seem to be very compelling. Why?
It is however, not an unreasonable one. The main problem with the anthropic principle is if you use it to justify adding free parameters to models which don't otherwise have any physical meaning, and then tune them so they correct out the problems, wave your hands and say "it must be this way because if cannot be any other".
Yes, could be the anthropic principal.
On the topic of the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’:
Imagine that physics is like Microsoft COM (or C++ pure virtual function tables), so there's a base IUnknown interface, hiding innumerably different possible concrete implementation classes, that can expose arbitrarily many other abstract interfaces, so you can call iUnknown->QueryInterface(uuid, &otherInterface) to ask for other interfaces like IAtom, IElectron, IProton, IQuark, IParticle, and IWave, and there are also many other obscure higher level dynamic and reflective interfaces like IDispatch, ITypeInfo, and IPersist, just waiting to be discovered and exploited, if only we knew the right uuid to ask for.
And then physics research boils down to QueryInterfacing objects with random uuids, and when that succeeds in finding new interfaces, calling their random functions with random arguments to see what happens. That's probably what the black hole supercomputer at the center of the galaxy is doing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975257
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593432
Then I’ll ask why can’t you use protons as electricity?
Who says you can't?
Who says we don't always use it?
Not sure, but Protons are ~1800x more massive than electrons even though they have the same electric charge, so it seems like they would need 1800x more energy to move them.
Power in an electric circuit is Watts, which is current in Amperes times voltage. Amperes are one Coulomb or 6.241509x10^18 electric charges per second flowing through a conductor. So a fixed amount of power (Watts) moves a known amount of charges. If we were sometimes moving protons instead of electrons, maybe we’d notice three orders of magnitude difference in quantity of charges in different experiments?
Electric Power isn't like a pipe and water wheel where you need a net flow of electrons. The work is done by the electric field, which is why we can have AC power where electrons don't have any net travel.
This also is why electric power flows along a wire at the speed of light, while electrons can only travel along a wire at the speed of a snail, or about 1 mm per second
One doesn't follow from the other. We can easily transport power by making things like a chain or a fluid move back and forth, without any net travel. In a setup with a loudspeaker and a microphone as just one example the air transfers energy from one to the other without any net movement. In those cases it's clearly the movement itself which transfers the energy. Therefore energy transport by AC is no proof for the need of an electric field for energy transport.
That's not say to there is no electric field, or to deny its role in power transfer. There certainly is an electric field. But that field is intimately tied to the electrons in the conductor, and power transfer is intimately tied to movement of those electrons and the way electrons repel each other stronger when they get closer together (or other charge carriers, but in typical conductors that means electrons). You can't have one without the other.
Indeed! My points was that you aren't consuming electron charge, like you consume kinetic energy of water flowing through a stereotypical waterwheel. That is to say, I was giving a example, not claiming a rule.
It is not yet proven that electrons need to flow from point A to point B to transfer electric energy. There is local movement but not in the sense that electrons are flowing through a hose to transfer power.
Protons are electricity. But slow. All acid/base reactions. Proton gradients and pumps in the biological cells all work on slow proton electricity.
the proton motive force powers us all
It is posible if you remove the wires.
In a CRT monitor, you have a ray of electrons that travel in vaccum and it is electricity outside wires. With a similar device, you can create a ray of protons and have also electricity with protons instead of electrons.
Another posibility is to use a water solution with acid. A part of the electricity is made of H+ that are just protons. (Actually, each proton is atached to a water molecule, so it's more like H2O+ than a plain H+.)
I'm triying to imagine a wire where protons can move. I don't think it's theoreticaly impossible, but they are mmuch heavier and bigger than electrons, so they it looks very difficult to find a material where they can move freely.
In solids (like metals and semiconductors) the atomic nuclei form stable structures (often crystals). Protons are bound to their nuclei, and the nuclei don’t move, so neither do the protons.
Electrons, on the other hand, can move between atoms, which allows them to form an electrical current.
There are special cases, but that’s the basic answer.
In the same vein, a neutron can decay into a proton, an electron and a neutrino (Beta decay), so in some sense the neutral neutron is the combination of an electron and proton. (A connection is there?)
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?
I also have a question. Why should any theoretical predictions be regarded as Science if there is no feasible way to test them?
I think you might need to define your terms more specifically/clearly to be able to get an answer to this.
There's always the layman vs scientists definition of true. Like I think most people would say we know gravity exists, but in actuality we don't really know what gravity is, but we can measure how objects behave and make useful predictions about our world and universe because of that, with it lining up with other stuff we think we know.
Sorta similarly there's the scientific definition of something like dark matter/dark energy where there useful for modeling stuff but unlike what the general public thinks nobody has actually been able to point to a physical object that is dark matter to my knowledge, it's dark because it's unseen, not because it's like chunks of black stuff we can't see.
I am going to get downvoted into oblivion again for asking this follow up question but that’s what I live for. What is the line between Physics, a scientific endeavor, and Metaphysics, a philosophical one?
Please set my transparency as high as you can. I totally deserve it. Let me fade into oblivion.
Broadly speaking, philosophers of science don't think there's a generic answer to what differentiates scientific inquiry from not-scientific (or pseudoscientific) inquiry. Popper put forward the criterion of falsifiability (if it's falsifiable, it's science, otherwise, it's not science), but after Kuhn and Feyerabend's arguments, philosophers generally drifted away from thinking there's some hard-and-fast rule to differentiate science and pseudoscience.
If you're interested in these issues, you might enjoy Chalmers' What is this Thing Called Science?, an introduction to the philosophy of science that addresses issues like these. Or a primary source like Feyerabend's Against Method, quite a fun read, though maybe not one that many philosophers of science today would give their full-throated endorsement of.
Metaphysics can answer Why questions while Physics is more concerned with How and What questions.
Physics is testable within the known laws of physics. Metaphysics is not.
As long as it's called a theory instead of fact, then why isn't it science. We might not have enough tech or information on being able to create the test.
Makes me wonder if the universe as a whole is electrically neutral. Someone should check!
It was a plasma of quarks and gluons first (these particles make up protons and neutrons and other unstable particles) which did cool down and become these particles. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe]
There is no reason to prefer any of the possible particles, but as all of them are unstable - minus the proton - they eventually decay to that state. (neutrons are not unstable in nuclei and such).
NB: this is quite simplistic and I skipped many details
Charge is quantized. You cannot have just any amount of electric charge. An electron has three elementary units of negative charge, quarks have -1 and 2. Whether it's a coincidence that proton and electron charge are of the same magnitude (and the neutron is neutral) is another question, but at the elementary level you don't have that much choice for what the charge of a particle is.
Wikipedia suggests the quarks that make up the proton have charge ⅔e and -⅓e
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_quark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_quark
Is it true that the quarks themselves, in isolation, have that charge? Or is it that combining quarks into a baryon or meson gives the resultant particle a charge according to a fixed ratio of the constituent quarks?
Gemini advanced says it’s the latter, because of color confinement. But I’d defer to a human expert
Quarks can not be alone, because of this confinement. What we see experimentally is that when we add energy to particles at some point they split into new particles and we never see a naked quarks.
We explain this by saying the quarks have a color charge and it must always be neutral. A single quark would be lets say red, but that's for some reason not possible. If we try to rip the quark out, it takes so much energy that this energy can be used to create another quark that results in a color neutral particle (red, antired)=meson, (red,green,blue)=baryon.
NB: this is a bit simplistic and other comments explain this quite in detail NB2: this color charge is just a name, its not an actual color
OP assigned -3 units of charge to the electron, so all works out.
The post you’re replying to seems to be taking ⅓e as the basic unit of charge.
But why is charge quantised?
In the Standard Model properties are defined as relationships within/between symmetry groups. There are only so many things you can do to/with/in a symmetry group, and that's where the quantisation comes from.
But... that's a mathematical metaphor applied to observations. It's a good fit, but it doesn't explain why it's those symmetry groups and not others, or why symmetry groups are a good fit at all.
There's likely some kind of fundamental mechanism that generates these symmetries, and no one knows what that is.
Resonance seems a candidate.
Information compression (edit sorry you said no one knows why the need to symmetry groups and I provided the answer).
Of course, the quarks had to go and be 1/3 or 2/3 of an e in charge. But they can never be observed isolated, so nature allows it.
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.
That just deflects the question one level down without explaining anything.
"Because it is" is not a helpful answer to "why?"
The question wasn't "why do protons have +1 charge", it was "why do protons have +1 charge, *considering electrons have -1 charge". The fact that possible charges are restricted to a few values is a much more satisfying answer to the latter than the former
Physics doesn't attempt to answer the question "why", it answers "how".
Richard Feynman addresses a similar "why" question in a great way in this interview[1], and how "why" questions are problematic in science.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA
You eventually have to take _something_ as given.
There’s a lot of levels to SOC. Which do you think is “because it is?”
If you’re asking why spin values are restricted, it’s in the spin-statistics theorem [1]. If you’re asking why spin causes charge, that’s SOC. There are lifetimes of understanding contained within those layers.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin–statistics_theorem
Children have the remarkable ability to see the world as it truly is, and so are able to ask the most profound questions. As adults, we learn to obfuscate our, ah, knowledge deficiencies in various ways, and so lose that ability over time. I'm of the opinion that great physicists are like children in being able to see through to the heart of the matter, and ask -- and answer -- questions that matter. This is certainly a theme you can see with Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, and others.
Why do I say this? Because GP's question was profound, and saying "it's because charge comes from spin" is the sort of obfuscatory answer I see most physicists give very, very often when they're faced with such questions.
That's completely aside from the fact that "it's because charge comes from spin" is entirely incorrect. All charged particles have spin, but not all particles with the same spin and other similar properties are charged.
I never heard this. I'm almost sure it's wrong. Do you have a link?
First, I am not a physicist. That said, he's my attempt at an answer that satisfies me: Part of the reason is charge quantization. Neither could be some fractional charge. We also observe charge conservation and electromagnetic force laws as described by quantum electrodynamics (QED). These necessitate that the electron and proton charges be precisely balanced for the universe to function as it does.
But in fact, quarks are fractionally charged: +2/3 and -1/3.
For this to work, there have to be as many quarks in the proton as the denominator of the quark charge fraction. (And what mechanism forces that?)
And why should the charges on quarks be some nice low-number fraction of the charge on the electron? Why not sqrt(3) or something?
There exist "stable" exotic particles of that have non ordinary amounts of lower level quarks. https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/lhcb-discovers-long...
Maybe they might have non integer charge.
In QCD, they cannot. All Feynman diagram vertices involved in producing these things (in fact all QCD vertices period) only deal in integer charge units and never leave fractional charges floating around.
Ok, I see. Also pentaquarks all have integer charge.
I think this is more of a historical artifact rather than a fundamental measurement. In the Millikan oil drop experiment he was able to measure quantized units of charge by stripping a single electron from a drop [1], so much later when quarks are figured out they are proportional to the base unit of charge.
This is similar to how Ben Franklin, having no knowledge of elementary particles, defined the positive and negative polarity of electricity, so we have "electron holes" flowing from the positive end of a battery to the negative end in "conventional current." [2]
Edit to add: the electron's non-even charge numbers comes into light when you see that the charge is 1.602176634×10−19 Coulombs, where 1C/second= 1 ampere. If we were trying to come up with the definition of an ampere with nice base 10 numbers of electrons this would be much different.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment
[2] https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineerin...
There's also a anti-proton which has a negative charge. I think this is probably the smallest charge there is.
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.
The quarks that make up a proton (or neutron, etc) have charges that are multiples of 1/3 the electron charge. So in one sense that is the real unit charge. But because as far as we know quarks can never exist in isolation we can only ever see particles with multiples of the electronic charge.
The number assigned to charge is an arbitrary convention. You could assign quarks with full numbered charges, instead of fractions, but you'd have to rework and recalculate all of physics and chemistry to get the new values right, and that's just too much work.
No matter what arbitrary value you assign to the electric charge, quarks will always be 1/3 of that. That's the problem in question, not the absolute value.
So quarks have a charge of 2 or -1, and a two of the former and one of the latter make a proton, which therefore has charge 3. An electron is elementary, but also has charge 3. The question is: that seems like a weird coincidence, how come it's like that?
I'll take a shot at this. The "answer," such as it is, is symmetry. The electron belongs to a group called the leptons, which is to say they are lightweight. Leptons obey certain sorts of statistics and consist of the electron, the muon, the tau lepton, the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino, the tau neutrino, and their antiparticles. That's twelve in total.
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.
One problem with your explanation is that the muon and the tau (and the pion as a decay product of the tau) all decay into electrons, neutrinos and photons, which would suggest that neither muon or tau are fundamental.
This would put the fundamental leptons being only the electron (and its antiparticle) with the neutrino and the photon.
Such an idea would upset the "symmetry" model.
I never suggested that they are fundamental, and nobody said that the symmetry is perfect. In fact, the way the various symmetries break is what gives rise to all of this complexity and only raise more questions.
Also, photons are not leptons -- wrong spin for that. Which in turn can raise yet another axis for our funhouse of mirrors: fermions versus bosons.
This is hard to wrap my brain around but thank you for the explanation!
The fact that the proton has the same charge in absolute value as the electron is just a consequence of the fact that the 8 elementary particles at the lowest energy level, i.e. electron and its neutrino, the 3 up quarks and the 3 down quarks have charges that sum to zero in a 3-dimensional charge space.
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.
Can you please link to a picture of the 2 cubes?
Is this image another visualization of the same thing?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model.svg
We know that the electric charge is not fundamental, but a projection of the weak isospin and hypercharge after the Higgs field symmetry breaking. How are weak isospin and hypercharge related to the 2 cubes?
No, that figure is not it.
I do not remember now where to find a suitable figure, but these are the coordinates of the corners of the 2 cubes:
neutrino & antineutrino: (0,0,0)
electron: (-1,-1,-1)
positron: (1,1,1)
down quarks: (-1,0,0), (0,-1,0), (0,0,-1)
down antiquarks: (1,0,0), (0,1,0), (0,0,1)
up quarks: (1,1,0), (1,0,1), (0,1,1)
up antiquarks: (-1,-1,0), (-1,0,-1), (0,-1,-1)
The particle-antiparticle pairs have an inversion symmetry over the origin.
The quark triplets have a rotational symmetry of order 3 around the principal diagonal of the cubes that passes through the origin.
The weak isospin and the hypercharge are an alternative equivalent expression of the charges, but I prefer this picture as it is easier to understand and visualize. It also demonstrates the quantized nature of the charges that determine the strong and electromagnetic interactions, and that they are based on the same quantum, so they are not independent interactions. The also quantized spin must be added as a fourth value, to completely determine the weak interactions too.
The various sets of values that can be taken as charges are related by bijections (one-to-one correspondences), so which are taken as fundamental is a matter of convention.
In any case the chromodynamics is useful only for providing qualitative insights and for distinguishing things that are possible from those that are impossible. It is completely useless for computing quantities that are useful in practice.
As it is also obvious in the parent article, it is still impossible to compute the mass and the magnetic moment of the proton, much less for any more complex nuclei or hadrons.
Thanks!
Are there intermediate [electron,] charge states between + and - in superfluids and/or superconductors?
Is there superposition with electron charge states?
The typical model of superconductivity says that electrons in the material pair up to form a quasiparticle -- the "cooper pair" -- with new properties, namely not experiencing resistance. The original quantized charge of the electrons still adds up to the same amount.
Unlike protons an neutrons, electrons are considered elementary particles that can't be broken down any further, so their charge can not be "divided" into something less than 1.
Quantum Hall effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hall_effect :
Fractional quantum Hall effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_quantum_Hall_effect :
westurner.github .io/hnlog/#story-38139569 ctrl-f "quantum Hall", "hall effect" :
- "Electrical switching of the edge current chirality in quantum Hall insulators" (2023) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-023-01694-y ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38139569 )
But that's not elementary charge.
"Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’" (2024) https://www.quantamagazine.org/inside-the-proton-the-most-co... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39374020 :
So first off: charge is quantized. Glossing over some weird particles (like quarks) which can't exist by themselves an integer multiple of e as their charge.
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.
Oops, missed the edit window. That was supposed to be "Glossing over some weird particles (like quarks) which can't exist by themselves, all particles have a charge which is an integer multiple of e"
clearly related to measure (in the abstract sense) and harmonics of natural numbers. what has fascinated me for years has been the sense that we need to rebuild number up using complex numbers and harmonic measures. what we get are still numbers but no longer this monotonic sequence which is a ‘lazy’ or ‘simple minded’ way of ordering N. when ordered by harmonic measures of primes, N itself has structure (beyond a simple incrementing list) but the order is strictly limited to measures provided (rational) with the prime roots of the measure. (an example is the ‘primorial’ harmonic measure of {2, 3, 5} - think rings).
in these harmonic measures, ‘gaps’ between various levels naturally would arise from simple (x) op. For non-relative prime members, the mapping n x n is all over the place but for relative prime members, n x n always results in another relative prime in the ring, so, naturally those ‘lines’ are ‘stable’ and ‘in phase’ so ‘manifested’.
in other words, there is stuff in the R realm — in between ‘quanta’ — but we’re not allowed, capable, ever, of seeing or measureing it.[edit: as in they ‘exist’ in the same realm that (sqrt -1) i exists in — an unseen realm we call ‘imaginary’..]
At the end of the day loads of these types of questions boil down to the anthropic principle. If it didn’t work out so that things could be stable, nothing would be asking the question.
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.
One issue I have with anthropic filter is that for some reason fundamental parameters fit into a tiny neat table. So out of the vastness of incredibly complex universes that boggle the minds of their creatures we ended up here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model_of_Element...
Maybe there’s an inverse relationship between complexity and the odds of it being stable. Universes with 500000 elementary particles might end up as entropy baths with no interesting structure.
Meanwhile those with too few might be “crystals” with no dynamism.
In all kinds of systems including computational models like cellular automata there exists a threshold known as the “edge of chaos” where among other interesting things universal computation becomes possible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_chaos
Maybe our universe is in such a zone. Not too simple for dynamic open ended phenomena, not too complex for order.
https://youtu.be/36GT2zI8lVA
Richard Feynman on why questions
That video really annoys me. He's right at one level but totally wrong at another. Yes, you have to explain everything in terms of things people can understand and if they don't know much you can't give a correct explanation... but also, if you actually try, people can understand a lot more than he's pretending they can. Not at a technical level, yeah, but intuitively, it is possible to get general understandings way beyond his attempts at answering that question.
For instance fundamental charges are a lot like positive and negatively-oriented vortices in a fluid, which when they touch cancel each other out and radiate energy away. They're not _exactly_ like that, but they're a lot like it, and that's a model people can understand without knowing the first thing about quantum field theory. Sure, you won't understand from that why like-charges repel each other, not really, but if you play with the analogy for a while it starts to seem why that might be true as well.
(See https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/09/24/samuel-becketts-guide-... for some pictures of this... I wish I had better though.)
Magnetism is quite a bit trickier to explain in this model but it can done with some work. In particular: a charge radiates little linear packets of energy just by existing; when one of these packets hits another charged particle it moves a tick closer or further away (based on +/-). A current/moving charge/magnetic dipole radiates away little spiraling packets of energy which are aligned in the plane orthogonal to the conventional magnetic field; when these hit another charged particle they get rotated a tick.
The issue with giving people an intuitive model that's not at the same level of complexity to the mathematical models, in my experience, is that a lot of people, including out-of-field experts then run with the intuitive model into bizarre territory and treat it as a prediction of the original tested theory. They reason correctly within the simplified world of the analogy but when it clashes with the real world, they dig down and reaffirm their preconceived notions.
On the other hand, I suppose they were never going to honour Cromwell's rule anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter.
I don't know the actual answer, but from my understanding of QFT the answer is going to be roughly this shape:
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.
Is there a reason why we say quarks have fractional charge instead of having just +-1 or +-2? And Then electron and proton would have -3 and +3?
That's purely by convention. It's just that we fist discovered electrons and protons and quarks with their fractional charges came in much later.
It’s even more complicated. The charge on the electron is partially screened by virtual positive charges emerging briefly from the vacuum, so what we measure is less than the actual charge.
But isn't the same thing going on for the proton?
(Of course, absent some good reason, one wouldn't expect the two screenings to exactly balance...)
Something...something...gauge theory.
Or perhaps -- it's a constant in the simulator source code.
Maybe it's so difficult because it's not a constant, but a magic number used in the code. (yeah, I'm dealing with lots of magic numbers in some code currently being worked on)
Why does light decay quadratically and not linearly? Why are the laws of physics algebraic at all? Why did the Big Bang happen? Ask enough why's and get to: we just don't know. Turtles all the way down.
The first one is well known. It's because it's radiating in three dimensions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
I believe the end of my physics textbook in college just said “be grateful that the charge on the electron is what it is because without it our universe wouldn’t exist if it was even slightly different” or something to that effect.
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.
Sorry that should say anthropic and not anthropomorphic haha. Too much time has elapsed to edit it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
Huh. It would make a lot more sense if the "complicated" proton was +3 and always paired with three "simple" -1 electrons. Maybe someday we'll find the electron is really three of some even more fundamental particle.
I'm not an expert, but e is the smallest possible charge, so you can't have a fraction of it, probably related to to Plank constant.
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...
Maybe think of it more simply, one precedes the other, this much positive charge in one place attracts negative charge of equal magnitude around it: if you send more electrons (and to be honest, talking of positive charge for a proton is a bit wrong: a positive charge being the absence of electrons... and electrons giving the "negative" charge as they add up), they'll detach and push away those that were already there.
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.
Maybe the proton is not complex but the process to probe it is. Proton is an aggregate of emergent phenomena like mass and its resultant properties. For a simplistic model assume that proton is a tetrahedron with energy wave generators at the vertices and how those waves interact with each other creates the emergent phenomena like mass, charge etc. It will be difficult to probe such a tetrahedron by just studying the properties of the waves and the peaks in those waves/interference which are perceived as particles by the probes.
Don’t take things described by physical models (proton, electron, the idea of “charge”, etc.) at too much of a face value.
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.
You would think that with my username, I should know the answer. But I have no clue
First-principles question from an ignorant thinker: why couldn't it be that the presence of +/-e in one of them is due to the subtraction of +/-e in the other? Do we know anything about the finer details of quarks and electrons beyond what we currently can resolve?
I think we simply observe the most stable states of existence which preclude asymmetry and all other states of matter have either gone extinct, or are so fickle that we can only observe them momentarily. So the deep truth behind why and what exists and what cannot is pretty straightforward.
I mean it's not that complicated to understand. e is just a physical constant. It's been measured as such, with varying degrees of precision. The creator is as lazy a programmer as we are. To make the math work, + and - are used.
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.
Because if it were any other way then you wouldn’t exist to sit there and ponder the question. That’s the unsatisfying answer.
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.
There’s a few good “particle zoo” videos out there for the building blocks.
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...
In a "grand unified theory" (which does not include gravity) the strong, electromagnetic and weak forces are unified into one gague theory. SU(5) is one choice. In these theories, the electron, quark and neurtinos fit together as if they were different versions of the same particle, just as in the standard model the up quark has three "colors". In these theories there is a well defined relation between the charges. You can lookup the SU(5) unified theory to see more. I would say these theories are widely believed, but we have not managed to put them all together yet.
This is called "charge quantization", and it is not definitively explained by modern theories. There are some very good arguments for it, to be sure, but I don't think they're quite case-closed, of-course-it-must-be-that-way good. It is related to C symmetry, as a discrete symmetry, which ties in to Lorenz invariance and all that, so there's that angle too.
One thing to note is that up and down quarks are separated by exactly one unit of charge (2/3 is 1 more than -1/3).
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.
Maybe that was a form of matter that was stable early in the history of time and matter, and so it survived, but others didn't?
Disclaimer: I am not a theoretical physicist (but I am an experimental one...).
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.
Electrons balance the nuclear charge by their distance from the nucleus. They’re not perfectly equal; the electrons move closer or farther to maintain balance with the nucleus. I think it’s called effective nuclear charge.
A simple answer could be that there is an elementary charge. No free particle can have less than this charge and charges are quantized in terms of this elementary charge.
This is in opposition to e.g. mass. There is no elementary mass, and so no particles need to have the same mass.
Not a physicist at all but I'd offer the following thoughts on the question of "why":
- 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
I don’t think this is a stupid thought at all. It’s a very good question and appreciate all the answers, it’s something I’ve wondered myself
How can you ask that and also claim to not be a smart person lmao
friendly suggestion, avoid describing yourself as "not a smart person". Research definitely shows that self-talk can have significant effects. I know this from my own life and experiences, but for the sake of writing this response I asked ChatGPT to look up some research to back me up:
"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 :)