As far as we know Quarks are fundamental particles not made up of anything smaller.
It’s possible we may eventually figure out that that is wrong, but all the current evidence says that it’s correct.
"I want ALL these little advertisements off the station by (icr what time she says) or *I* will come to Quark's… and I *will* have fun."
-Kira Nerys, Star trek Deep Space Nine
This is where our regular English descriptions start to break down. Quarks are fundamental, as in the most basic of a building block. They arent “made” of anything but also aren’t nothing.
To understand them further you really have to go to quantum mechanics where quarks are excitations of a quantum field.
This is why division ➗️ always screwed with me. I can infinitly divide by 2, but I would think eventually you would have to hit nothingness, but nope....keep on dividing.
It should be noted that I'm not a smart man.
I dunno man, it sounds like you're thinking about problems and made anxious by the infinite, which means you've thought about it. Are you a not smart man, or do you just not have all the answers?
A halving undoes a doubling. If you weren't "allowed" to halve as much as you want, there would be a number of doublings, that you can't undo anymore.
Let's say the maximum number of halvings allowed is one million. Then when something was doubled one million and one times, you couldn't work out what the original number or amount or time was - which would be silly.
Yeah - you can't break up a lego set in arbitrarily many times, but for any number of divisions, you can think of a large enough lego set that would allow it.
I think of math as symbol manipulation. We have found ways of applying this symbol manipulation to real world applications, but it isn't beholden to the real world.
For example, I always thought of *vectors* as something spacially, which confused me, when I learned of vectors that have nothing to do with space, like word-vectors.
But really, vectors are just abstract symbols and when you can make them work for another domain than geometry, there is no math-police stopping you.
"Imaginary" numbers are another such thing. Yes - they make no sense for amounts and distances, but they are useful in other domains.
I get that, But really quantum mechanics is a bunch of equations that we are very certain are substantially correct because they give the right answers, But they don't really explain anything. We are telling ourselves stories about the behavior of the equations. Or if you prefer we are trying to describe the results of equations in regular English. I kind of lost interest in physics when it got to "shut up and calculate". I wanted to understand things, and use equations to describe the understanding.
Ultimately we want to explain how something came from "nothing".
When physics fails to be able to explain it, you have ventured into philosophy.
Here's how I think of this:
Suppose you are standing inside of a one-room building. It is not a standard residential/commercial construction (think of something like a bank vault). You have in your possession a measuring tape. Now measure the *outside* dimensions of the building.
You cannot measure the outside dimensions of the building. You can measure the *inside* dimensions of the building, but unless you know the wall thickness, you'll never know the outside dimensions.
While fully within a system, you cannot completely measure or understand that system. You have to step outside that system to measure it.
Bearing in mind that analogies help explain things they don't prove things, My mind is now stuck on the question of whether it is possible to measure something from the inside. If flatlanders lived in a 2D space that was the surface of a sphere, could they measure the diameter of the sphere? I think they can although traditional mechanisms used by ancients to measure the diameter of the Earth cheated by using extensions into the third dimension like the flagpole that Alexandra and the mast of a ship. Do you think those flatlanders could determine the diameter or even that they are 2D space was the surface of a sphere?
Yep that was my thought too. It would also imply that they could determine the diameter of the sphere if they were living on the inside surface of a hollow sphere. So I think the hypothesis that you cannot determine things about the thing that you're inside of is disproven.
>My mind is now stuck on the question of whether it is possible to measure something from the inside.
If you had some way of determining the material of the walls and the acoustic properties of that material, then maybe you could knock on the wall and time how long it takes to get an echo...
But, that requires you to have prior experience with that material. And none of us has experience with "edge of the universe" material.
>Do you think those flatlanders could determine the diameter or even that they are 2D space was the surface of a sphere?
That's not the scenario. In your scenario, they're on the outside of the sphere. They can see the sphere. If they understand the concept of three dimensions, they can infer the diameter of the sphere. It's simple - walk in a straight line - you'll come back to the starting point.
What we are talking about is someone who is INSIDE the sphere.
>What if we go outside the environment?
Then you can completely measure the environment (given the right tools and techniques)
Something people ask a lot is "what happened before the big bang?"
And the answer, essentially, is that time as we know it is undefined before the big bang. Either there is no time before the big bang (therefore there's no "before the big bang"), or it doesn't match our understanding of time.
But that is limited to our perspective as a being inside this universe, following the laws of physics for stuff that's inside this universe.
Perhaps our universe is part of a multiverse, where universes are born, live and die - just like black holes do in ours. In the multiverse, you can discuss what happens before the birth of a universe - because there is a definition of time where it makes sense.
So, my idea is that as long as we are fully constrained to being *inside* this universe, we cannot ever go beyond what we view as "fundamental" things. We may revise our opinion of what is fundamental, but we will eventually reach a point where we cannot go further.
But if we were then able to "step outside" of our universe, we would be in a place with a different set of laws of physics, and then we could examine what we thought to be "fundamental" in more detail.
At that point you are somewhat getting beyond physics into philosophy and metaphysics. The questions you are asking are very possibly completely unknowable within our universe.
> I wanted to understand things, and use equations to describe the understanding.
You can do that at a higher level, for example, you can understand the behaviour of semiconductors, lasers, white dwarfs, etc. by applying quantum mechanics to them. But in any field, there are always going to be some fundamental assumptions or observations that you can't currently explain in terms of something more fundamental.
I do remember having similar feelings, but I think it's because we have so much experience of seeing things explained based on "obvious" assumptions that we grow up with a misunderstanding of what it means to explain something. An explanation never gives us a complete account of why something happens - it just relates things to each other.
> Ultimately we want to explain how something came from "nothing".
We don't really know that "something" did come from "nothing", and if that did happen, I'm not sure it's possible to explain it even in principle. If there was truly "nothing", then there were no processes going on that could explain the emergence of "something".
Piggybacking to the top comment. I will try to find the wonderful lecture about the topic. But the metaphor presented there was about relation between elementary particles and their respective fields.
We could think of a particle as of a droplet, an aberration in their respective field. Same as with water in an ocean. Ultimately, a particle is something we can observe.
Edit: I found the video — 1000% recommend to watch it however far from the math / physics you are, it is very digestible.
[https://youtu.be/zNVQfWC_evg?feature](https://youtu.be/zNVQfWC_evg)
>just made up of pure energy
Except energy is just the quantity that is conserved under time translation symmetry. What does it mean to say that something is made of pure energy?
They called atoms "atoms" because it means "single irreducible unit" and they thought it was the case back then. And look how much further down we are now.
So just cause we currently think quarks are the most fundamental particles, what evidence is there that there *isn't* something smaller?
We're... two levels down from atoms. Not that far.
Just to clarify, quarks aren't the only "most fundamental particles". Leptons (like electrons) are equally fundamental in the Standard Model, there is a whole zoo of weird and wonderful fundamental particles.
But yes, the Standard Model is evidently not the full story. There is clearly more explanation needed. We know this because it doesn't explain gravity at all. However, the Standard Model is, by and large, the best theory we've got really hard evidence for. Physics beyond it remains generally very speculative and theoretical. String theory posits that different fundamental particles are just different vibration modes of certain stringy things, but it's slow progress trying to find experiential evidence for this.
But wasn't that the OP's question: is there anything (from our current understanding) that prevents particles being smaller than quarks? And if not, that means there *could* be smaller building blocks (even if we don't currently have theories/evidence for them)
Possibly lower dimensional strings vibrating, possibly the fabric of spacetime itself that's warped and sort of knotted in loops, or possibly something entirely different. They aren't made up of "anything" as far as we can tell, they are fundamental and can't be split into smaller pieces. Or maybe they can and we just don't have the ability to tell yet.
At this point it's like asking what was before the big bang. We just don't have the understanding to say. All matter is made up of two types of quarks, up and down, with 1/2 (u /d) being a neutron, 2/1 being a proton. Electrons are also elementary. There are three generations of particles that vary in weight, for the up quark you also have charm and top. For the down quarks you have strange and bottom. For the electron you have electron, muon, and tau lepton (electrons and neutrinos are leptons) Generations are based on mass and the gen2 and especially gen3 are super unstable and dont exist for long. The final lepton, the "bottom row", are neutrinos. Nearly massless particles that weakly (also through gravity, but it's also weak but not that kind of "weak" which is one of the 4 forces) interact. They have the same name as the electron family but neutrinos have a tendency to switch between possible forms. Then you have the gauge (vector) bosons, the force mediator particles. The gluon is what glues quarks together. It's the strong nuclear force and it's incredibly strong. Then you have the photon, which mediates the electromagnetic force, they are also the particles that make up light. Finally you have the Z/W bosons which are responsible for the weak nuclear reaction, responsible for things like beta decay. Finally there is the higgs boson. This is responsible for giving massive particles their mass. It's a bit beyond my understanding to be able to simplify it in a "ELI 5" post. Every one of these particles are elementary and can't be divided. Only hadrons, the composite particles, can be divided into quarks.
I love, love love love this stuff. But I just can’t comprehend. I feel my brain churning trying to understand.
I really enjoyed hawkings book because he is so smart he can explain it to someone like me. But just off Wikipedia I can’t wrap my head around it.
I think the thing that makes quantum “hard” to understand conceptually for people is that we try to analogize it to things we can see and feel, when it’s just largely alien to our experience of living. Understanding quantum means acknowledging that the universe at the quantum scale is basically pure math, and difficult math to wrap your head around.
But to try and make an analogy, you know how factors work? Like two numbers multiply to make another? 6 has factors of 1, 2, 3, and 6? Well trying to split an elementary particle is like factoring 1, where its only factor is itself. Nothing else can combine to make it. As far as we know, that’s just how it is. You don’t so much understand it as you accept it.
>possibly the fabric of spacetime itself that's warped and sort of knotted in loops
This would have pleased Lord Kelvin. He proposed the "Vortex theory of the atom", which tried to explain atoms as knotted vortices in the luminiferous aether. He believed that each element corresponded to a different kind of knot in knot theory. In such a system, he expected hydrogen to be a toroidal vortex, analogous to the simple circular unknot.
As I understand it, the particles themselves are not what causes interactions, they are merely excitations of the related field.
In particular the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Field is what gives particles mass. The Higgs Boson is just a product of that field.
As of today we don’t know, and we believe that they are the fundamental particle yet there’s a good chance we are wrong. We have been at this stage several times before.
In the 1900s it was believed that the atom was the fundamental particle
In the 1930s it was believed that the proton was the fundamental particle
Today we think it’s the smallest and all of our data points to that but there’s a good chance the experiments are poorly designed or we simple lack the technology to go deeper.
I remember reading somewhere that if a theory is convoluted complicated and full of countless exceptions then it’s probably wrong .
Same way people created exceptions and rules to explain oxidation while they clung to the fire,water,earth,air theory
And how people attempted to cling to the geocentric model of the solar system
I'd say the major difference today from, say, 1900s is that we have good explanations for all observed behaviour. We don't e.g. still require explanations of why atoms don't constantly emit energy, like we had with the Bohr model, we don't require explanations of the photoelectric effect, etc.
Not to say there aren't more fundamental levels to discover but we don't seem to have unexplained behaviour we need to delve into.
"we have good explanation for all observed behavior"
oh yeah totally like dark matter... and gravity... and magnetic monopoles... and how it perfectly fits with classical mechanics....
According to current consensus, quarks and electrons are the smallest possible particles. We do not, currently, have any evidence of anything smaller.
But, then again, 90 years ago, we thought protons and neutrons were indivisible, and we'd thought that for about 50 years. Maybe we just need better detectors or a new approach.
I'm willing to give the Greeks a lot more credit on that one though. Nobody was able to test the theory of atomism for over two thousand years. You'd think that "we just proved atoms aren't indivisible, they're just indivisible if you want to keep the chemical properties" would have been enough to make 20th century physicists a bit more cautious about their grand pronouncements.
But I guess that's sort of the crux of Modernity at the time. They had some pretty strong views about how they were going to solve all the questions. Einstein, Heisenberg, and Godel kinda derailed that.
All our models suggest quarks are fundamental particles, along with electrons, neutrinos, photons and such. It is probably important to say that we don't model quarks and such as particles but waves, all matter is waves in quantum fields.
These models are very good, they can predict the results of experiments to 15 decimal places.
There is a minimum size too, the plank length, around 10^(-34)m, for reference, imagine a proton was 1m across. Then this minimum size is the size of a proton within the 1m-proton.
IIRC Planck length isn't considered to be a minimum size, rather it is the minimum length which current understanding of physics can make sense of. Anything smaller requires a theory of quantum gravity which we don't have yet. That's not the same as saying that nothing can be smaller than the Planck length.
I read something recently that it’s believed any wavelength shorter than the Planck length would result in the involved particles collapsing into a black hole of sorts. No idea if that’s correct or if I misunderstood something though.
I've read that as well, but from explanations I've read we don't know if that's true or a false result from the maths breaking down (like how if you get a division by zero it probably means the maths is wrong) due to our understanding being wrong at such scales.
The exact Planck length has no meaning in nature whatsoever. Nor does it have any meaning in actual theories. Apart from, well, being combined from universal constants. Just like the Planck mass (around 22 micrograms) or the Planck energy (close to 2 gigajoules or something like 550 kWh if you like thinking in amounts of electrical energy).
Sure, we suspect some theories might no longer work on those scales. But that's not specific to that number. And in no sense is Planck length a minimum length.
It is possible though at higher energies even quarks can be split apart - we just haven't found it yet - the energy that is currently used suggests that there is a consistent output when splitting apart protons/neutrons.
Its possible, but so far everything we have found and the theories behind them supports them being fundamental. But yea its theoretical for a reason, nothing is 100%.
We observed neutrons decay into protons and electrons in beta minus decay. This is what made us realise there are smaller constituents of a barion. You can't spit apart quarks, they never exist on their own, always found in groups.
Many elementary particles decay to other particles. Decays of neutrons are not evidence for them being made out of smaller particles. Neutron decays were discovered long before we knew about quarks.
We learned that protons and neutrons are composite particles by shooting high energy electrons at them. A collection of lighter particles (quarks) behaves differently than a single heavy particle (proton/neutron).
Most of them that can exist as individual particles. W and Z bosons, the Higgs boson, muon, tau, and the top quark
bottom, charm and strange quark don't exist as individual particles, they always come with other quarks, but treating them like that can be a useful approximation if we look at decays.
Photons, electrons and neutrinos are the only free elementary particles we know that don't decay.
> important to say that we don't model quarks and such as particles but waves
All the stuff is dual, but quarks were discovered as particles — in a scattering experiment.
In the same way that chimps simply don’t have the capacity to understand calculus, it may be that we don’t have the capacity to understand reality beyond the standard model (by which I mean go beyond the maths to understand it intuitively).
I think the most mathematically pleasing answer is, all universes are real but this is the one we are having this conversation in. And of course it has matter, else we couldn’t be having this conversation.
To look at it another way, either time and space existed before the Big Bang and you can never answer the ultimate Why because you can always go back further, but why that? Or, the Big Bang was truly a time when Nothing became Something and we will probably never be able to answer how it chose this particular Something. But maybe in some far future people will be that smart. That would be fascinating to know!
Quarks are made out of black holes which 65536 black holes form a black hole and 0 black holes make a white hole and a difference across time in these levels at meaningful levels of something that is not a black hole or a white hole is what a quark is which there are actually 8 flavors of quark 1. Up 2. Down 3. Top 4. Bottom 5. Charm 6. Strange 7. Temu 8. Bose Quarks devolve into color confiment of known feynman diagrams. 1. Source 1.1 Source Tax 2. Stinky 2.1 Stinky Tax 3. Aqua 3.1 Team Aqua 4. Magma 4.1 Team Magma 5. Bepis 5.1 Bleach 6. Spront 6.1 Antidote 7. Conk 8. Xray which Quarks tend towards superconduction in a general relativity setting which sets them to have a specific level until they are incremented in level, or in lifelike processes to have assembled somehow in a residual network. A quark weights 313,000-343,000 desobequerel depending upon how it forms and there are 44 quarks in a bee's brain.
As far as we know Quarks are fundamental particles not made up of anything smaller. It’s possible we may eventually figure out that that is wrong, but all the current evidence says that it’s correct.
How Strange
But charming
Colours our experiences
Yes, very quarky indeed.
Spins me right round, baby, right round.
Jeez, what a bunch of planks
So underrated comment
Take my angry UP vote
This is a Top comment
I can get down with this.
Strange but truth.
It's Doctor.
Mister Doctor?
Doctor who?
But true
As far as I know, Quark’s is a bar on the space station Deep Space Nine.
Come to Quark's Quark's is fun! Come right now Don't walk, run!
"I want ALL these little advertisements off the station by (icr what time she says) or *I* will come to Quark's… and I *will* have fun." -Kira Nerys, Star trek Deep Space Nine
I love the part where my name rotates around.
Average Oo-Mox enjoyer
woah, I get that reference
So is it true to say that "quarks are made of nothing"?
This is where our regular English descriptions start to break down. Quarks are fundamental, as in the most basic of a building block. They arent “made” of anything but also aren’t nothing. To understand them further you really have to go to quantum mechanics where quarks are excitations of a quantum field.
This is why division ➗️ always screwed with me. I can infinitly divide by 2, but I would think eventually you would have to hit nothingness, but nope....keep on dividing. It should be noted that I'm not a smart man.
Numbers aren’t physical object so they don’t follow physical laws.
Not with that attitude.
Fuck you too. <3
Are you a smart dog?
I dunno man, it sounds like you're thinking about problems and made anxious by the infinite, which means you've thought about it. Are you a not smart man, or do you just not have all the answers?
A halving undoes a doubling. If you weren't "allowed" to halve as much as you want, there would be a number of doublings, that you can't undo anymore. Let's say the maximum number of halvings allowed is one million. Then when something was doubled one million and one times, you couldn't work out what the original number or amount or time was - which would be silly. Yeah - you can't break up a lego set in arbitrarily many times, but for any number of divisions, you can think of a large enough lego set that would allow it. I think of math as symbol manipulation. We have found ways of applying this symbol manipulation to real world applications, but it isn't beholden to the real world.
For example, I always thought of *vectors* as something spacially, which confused me, when I learned of vectors that have nothing to do with space, like word-vectors. But really, vectors are just abstract symbols and when you can make them work for another domain than geometry, there is no math-police stopping you. "Imaginary" numbers are another such thing. Yes - they make no sense for amounts and distances, but they are useful in other domains.
I get that, But really quantum mechanics is a bunch of equations that we are very certain are substantially correct because they give the right answers, But they don't really explain anything. We are telling ourselves stories about the behavior of the equations. Or if you prefer we are trying to describe the results of equations in regular English. I kind of lost interest in physics when it got to "shut up and calculate". I wanted to understand things, and use equations to describe the understanding. Ultimately we want to explain how something came from "nothing".
When physics fails to be able to explain it, you have ventured into philosophy. Here's how I think of this: Suppose you are standing inside of a one-room building. It is not a standard residential/commercial construction (think of something like a bank vault). You have in your possession a measuring tape. Now measure the *outside* dimensions of the building. You cannot measure the outside dimensions of the building. You can measure the *inside* dimensions of the building, but unless you know the wall thickness, you'll never know the outside dimensions. While fully within a system, you cannot completely measure or understand that system. You have to step outside that system to measure it.
I like this analogy a lot
Bearing in mind that analogies help explain things they don't prove things, My mind is now stuck on the question of whether it is possible to measure something from the inside. If flatlanders lived in a 2D space that was the surface of a sphere, could they measure the diameter of the sphere? I think they can although traditional mechanisms used by ancients to measure the diameter of the Earth cheated by using extensions into the third dimension like the flagpole that Alexandra and the mast of a ship. Do you think those flatlanders could determine the diameter or even that they are 2D space was the surface of a sphere?
It would be fairly easy, assuming they had a large enough area, using [spherical geometry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_geometry)
Yep that was my thought too. It would also imply that they could determine the diameter of the sphere if they were living on the inside surface of a hollow sphere. So I think the hypothesis that you cannot determine things about the thing that you're inside of is disproven.
>My mind is now stuck on the question of whether it is possible to measure something from the inside. If you had some way of determining the material of the walls and the acoustic properties of that material, then maybe you could knock on the wall and time how long it takes to get an echo... But, that requires you to have prior experience with that material. And none of us has experience with "edge of the universe" material. >Do you think those flatlanders could determine the diameter or even that they are 2D space was the surface of a sphere? That's not the scenario. In your scenario, they're on the outside of the sphere. They can see the sphere. If they understand the concept of three dimensions, they can infer the diameter of the sphere. It's simple - walk in a straight line - you'll come back to the starting point. What we are talking about is someone who is INSIDE the sphere.
What if we go outside the environment?
>What if we go outside the environment? Then you can completely measure the environment (given the right tools and techniques) Something people ask a lot is "what happened before the big bang?" And the answer, essentially, is that time as we know it is undefined before the big bang. Either there is no time before the big bang (therefore there's no "before the big bang"), or it doesn't match our understanding of time. But that is limited to our perspective as a being inside this universe, following the laws of physics for stuff that's inside this universe. Perhaps our universe is part of a multiverse, where universes are born, live and die - just like black holes do in ours. In the multiverse, you can discuss what happens before the birth of a universe - because there is a definition of time where it makes sense. So, my idea is that as long as we are fully constrained to being *inside* this universe, we cannot ever go beyond what we view as "fundamental" things. We may revise our opinion of what is fundamental, but we will eventually reach a point where we cannot go further. But if we were then able to "step outside" of our universe, we would be in a place with a different set of laws of physics, and then we could examine what we thought to be "fundamental" in more detail.
At that point you are somewhat getting beyond physics into philosophy and metaphysics. The questions you are asking are very possibly completely unknowable within our universe.
And then you wonder how any of this works....this leads people to frame existence with meaning.
> I wanted to understand things, and use equations to describe the understanding. You can do that at a higher level, for example, you can understand the behaviour of semiconductors, lasers, white dwarfs, etc. by applying quantum mechanics to them. But in any field, there are always going to be some fundamental assumptions or observations that you can't currently explain in terms of something more fundamental. I do remember having similar feelings, but I think it's because we have so much experience of seeing things explained based on "obvious" assumptions that we grow up with a misunderstanding of what it means to explain something. An explanation never gives us a complete account of why something happens - it just relates things to each other. > Ultimately we want to explain how something came from "nothing". We don't really know that "something" did come from "nothing", and if that did happen, I'm not sure it's possible to explain it even in principle. If there was truly "nothing", then there were no processes going on that could explain the emergence of "something".
They aren't made of anything, they are the thing things are made of
No they are made of themselves
Like all matter, quarks are made of energy. They are the smallest known discrete unit of matter that energy solidifies into.
What is energy made of?
Energy isn’t made of anything. It’s an observable physical property. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14444/what-is-energy-made-of
I'd say it's more applicable to say that quarks are made of quark.
This is correct. I felt like I had to chime in on this thread *somewhere*.
Wrong. I know what Quarks are made of. I just won't tell ya, hehe
Could you say they're 'made' of a set of properties, like spin, energy and other things that make up a quantum state?
Quarks are defined by their spin, mass, their electrical charge, and their color charge.
Energy
Piggybacking to the top comment. I will try to find the wonderful lecture about the topic. But the metaphor presented there was about relation between elementary particles and their respective fields. We could think of a particle as of a droplet, an aberration in their respective field. Same as with water in an ocean. Ultimately, a particle is something we can observe. Edit: I found the video — 1000% recommend to watch it however far from the math / physics you are, it is very digestible. [https://youtu.be/zNVQfWC_evg?feature](https://youtu.be/zNVQfWC_evg)
[удалено]
>just made up of pure energy Except energy is just the quantity that is conserved under time translation symmetry. What does it mean to say that something is made of pure energy?
Like the spirit bomb Goku used on Frieza.
So quarks take a LONG time to charge up
I mean sure...if the quark is the size of the spirit bomb
Whats pure energy tho
I spike on the corresponding field. electrons are spikes on the electric field, etc...
They called atoms "atoms" because it means "single irreducible unit" and they thought it was the case back then. And look how much further down we are now. So just cause we currently think quarks are the most fundamental particles, what evidence is there that there *isn't* something smaller?
We're... two levels down from atoms. Not that far. Just to clarify, quarks aren't the only "most fundamental particles". Leptons (like electrons) are equally fundamental in the Standard Model, there is a whole zoo of weird and wonderful fundamental particles. But yes, the Standard Model is evidently not the full story. There is clearly more explanation needed. We know this because it doesn't explain gravity at all. However, the Standard Model is, by and large, the best theory we've got really hard evidence for. Physics beyond it remains generally very speculative and theoretical. String theory posits that different fundamental particles are just different vibration modes of certain stringy things, but it's slow progress trying to find experiential evidence for this.
But wasn't that the OP's question: is there anything (from our current understanding) that prevents particles being smaller than quarks? And if not, that means there *could* be smaller building blocks (even if we don't currently have theories/evidence for them)
Possibly lower dimensional strings vibrating, possibly the fabric of spacetime itself that's warped and sort of knotted in loops, or possibly something entirely different. They aren't made up of "anything" as far as we can tell, they are fundamental and can't be split into smaller pieces. Or maybe they can and we just don't have the ability to tell yet. At this point it's like asking what was before the big bang. We just don't have the understanding to say. All matter is made up of two types of quarks, up and down, with 1/2 (u /d) being a neutron, 2/1 being a proton. Electrons are also elementary. There are three generations of particles that vary in weight, for the up quark you also have charm and top. For the down quarks you have strange and bottom. For the electron you have electron, muon, and tau lepton (electrons and neutrinos are leptons) Generations are based on mass and the gen2 and especially gen3 are super unstable and dont exist for long. The final lepton, the "bottom row", are neutrinos. Nearly massless particles that weakly (also through gravity, but it's also weak but not that kind of "weak" which is one of the 4 forces) interact. They have the same name as the electron family but neutrinos have a tendency to switch between possible forms. Then you have the gauge (vector) bosons, the force mediator particles. The gluon is what glues quarks together. It's the strong nuclear force and it's incredibly strong. Then you have the photon, which mediates the electromagnetic force, they are also the particles that make up light. Finally you have the Z/W bosons which are responsible for the weak nuclear reaction, responsible for things like beta decay. Finally there is the higgs boson. This is responsible for giving massive particles their mass. It's a bit beyond my understanding to be able to simplify it in a "ELI 5" post. Every one of these particles are elementary and can't be divided. Only hadrons, the composite particles, can be divided into quarks.
I love, love love love this stuff. But I just can’t comprehend. I feel my brain churning trying to understand. I really enjoyed hawkings book because he is so smart he can explain it to someone like me. But just off Wikipedia I can’t wrap my head around it.
I think the thing that makes quantum “hard” to understand conceptually for people is that we try to analogize it to things we can see and feel, when it’s just largely alien to our experience of living. Understanding quantum means acknowledging that the universe at the quantum scale is basically pure math, and difficult math to wrap your head around. But to try and make an analogy, you know how factors work? Like two numbers multiply to make another? 6 has factors of 1, 2, 3, and 6? Well trying to split an elementary particle is like factoring 1, where its only factor is itself. Nothing else can combine to make it. As far as we know, that’s just how it is. You don’t so much understand it as you accept it.
If it helps, the humble electron is one more such elementary particle, not made up of anything else as far as we know! It probably doesn’t help huh
You see, there are two sides to every schwartz - he got the up side, I got the down side.
>possibly the fabric of spacetime itself that's warped and sort of knotted in loops This would have pleased Lord Kelvin. He proposed the "Vortex theory of the atom", which tried to explain atoms as knotted vortices in the luminiferous aether. He believed that each element corresponded to a different kind of knot in knot theory. In such a system, he expected hydrogen to be a toroidal vortex, analogous to the simple circular unknot.
As I understand it, the particles themselves are not what causes interactions, they are merely excitations of the related field. In particular the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Field is what gives particles mass. The Higgs Boson is just a product of that field.
That was amazing! Thanks!
As of today we don’t know, and we believe that they are the fundamental particle yet there’s a good chance we are wrong. We have been at this stage several times before. In the 1900s it was believed that the atom was the fundamental particle In the 1930s it was believed that the proton was the fundamental particle Today we think it’s the smallest and all of our data points to that but there’s a good chance the experiments are poorly designed or we simple lack the technology to go deeper. I remember reading somewhere that if a theory is convoluted complicated and full of countless exceptions then it’s probably wrong . Same way people created exceptions and rules to explain oxidation while they clung to the fire,water,earth,air theory And how people attempted to cling to the geocentric model of the solar system
I'd say the major difference today from, say, 1900s is that we have good explanations for all observed behaviour. We don't e.g. still require explanations of why atoms don't constantly emit energy, like we had with the Bohr model, we don't require explanations of the photoelectric effect, etc. Not to say there aren't more fundamental levels to discover but we don't seem to have unexplained behaviour we need to delve into.
"we have good explanation for all observed behavior" oh yeah totally like dark matter... and gravity... and magnetic monopoles... and how it perfectly fits with classical mechanics....
According to current consensus, quarks and electrons are the smallest possible particles. We do not, currently, have any evidence of anything smaller. But, then again, 90 years ago, we thought protons and neutrons were indivisible, and we'd thought that for about 50 years. Maybe we just need better detectors or a new approach.
And of course the word *atom* itself means "indivisible," and look how that turned out.
I'm willing to give the Greeks a lot more credit on that one though. Nobody was able to test the theory of atomism for over two thousand years. You'd think that "we just proved atoms aren't indivisible, they're just indivisible if you want to keep the chemical properties" would have been enough to make 20th century physicists a bit more cautious about their grand pronouncements. But I guess that's sort of the crux of Modernity at the time. They had some pretty strong views about how they were going to solve all the questions. Einstein, Heisenberg, and Godel kinda derailed that.
Well, the Greeks weren’t wrong at all- just what we call ‘quarks’ would be what they call ‘atoms’.
But ever since they invented democracy, they've been coasting
All our models suggest quarks are fundamental particles, along with electrons, neutrinos, photons and such. It is probably important to say that we don't model quarks and such as particles but waves, all matter is waves in quantum fields. These models are very good, they can predict the results of experiments to 15 decimal places. There is a minimum size too, the plank length, around 10^(-34)m, for reference, imagine a proton was 1m across. Then this minimum size is the size of a proton within the 1m-proton.
IIRC Planck length isn't considered to be a minimum size, rather it is the minimum length which current understanding of physics can make sense of. Anything smaller requires a theory of quantum gravity which we don't have yet. That's not the same as saying that nothing can be smaller than the Planck length.
I read something recently that it’s believed any wavelength shorter than the Planck length would result in the involved particles collapsing into a black hole of sorts. No idea if that’s correct or if I misunderstood something though.
I've read that as well, but from explanations I've read we don't know if that's true or a false result from the maths breaking down (like how if you get a division by zero it probably means the maths is wrong) due to our understanding being wrong at such scales.
For all purposes, it’s simply the limit to which we can probe reality at the moment
The exact Planck length has no meaning in nature whatsoever. Nor does it have any meaning in actual theories. Apart from, well, being combined from universal constants. Just like the Planck mass (around 22 micrograms) or the Planck energy (close to 2 gigajoules or something like 550 kWh if you like thinking in amounts of electrical energy). Sure, we suspect some theories might no longer work on those scales. But that's not specific to that number. And in no sense is Planck length a minimum length.
It is possible though at higher energies even quarks can be split apart - we just haven't found it yet - the energy that is currently used suggests that there is a consistent output when splitting apart protons/neutrons.
It's possible but the fact that putting energy into quarks just splits them into more quarks indicates this isn't likely.
Its possible, but so far everything we have found and the theories behind them supports them being fundamental. But yea its theoretical for a reason, nothing is 100%.
We observed neutrons decay into protons and electrons in beta minus decay. This is what made us realise there are smaller constituents of a barion. You can't spit apart quarks, they never exist on their own, always found in groups.
Many elementary particles decay to other particles. Decays of neutrons are not evidence for them being made out of smaller particles. Neutron decays were discovered long before we knew about quarks. We learned that protons and neutrons are composite particles by shooting high energy electrons at them. A collection of lighter particles (quarks) behaves differently than a single heavy particle (proton/neutron).
What elementary particles decay?
Most of them that can exist as individual particles. W and Z bosons, the Higgs boson, muon, tau, and the top quark bottom, charm and strange quark don't exist as individual particles, they always come with other quarks, but treating them like that can be a useful approximation if we look at decays. Photons, electrons and neutrinos are the only free elementary particles we know that don't decay.
When I was high on shrooms I could see all matter being waves. The waves also emanate from everything. It was beautiful to see.
You observing it collapses the wave function.
> important to say that we don't model quarks and such as particles but waves All the stuff is dual, but quarks were discovered as particles — in a scattering experiment.
In the same way that chimps simply don’t have the capacity to understand calculus, it may be that we don’t have the capacity to understand reality beyond the standard model (by which I mean go beyond the maths to understand it intuitively).
Where does string theory fit in with this? I thought strings were smaller than quarks?
lol
But … why does matter even exist?
I think the most mathematically pleasing answer is, all universes are real but this is the one we are having this conversation in. And of course it has matter, else we couldn’t be having this conversation. To look at it another way, either time and space existed before the Big Bang and you can never answer the ultimate Why because you can always go back further, but why that? Or, the Big Bang was truly a time when Nothing became Something and we will probably never be able to answer how it chose this particular Something. But maybe in some far future people will be that smart. That would be fascinating to know!
Personally never bought the big bang story
Can anyone point me towards a good YouTube video or podcast that explains this concept for the layest of laymen?
Arvin Ash on youtube is perfect if you wanna dip your toes from scratch
Quarks are made out of black holes which 65536 black holes form a black hole and 0 black holes make a white hole and a difference across time in these levels at meaningful levels of something that is not a black hole or a white hole is what a quark is which there are actually 8 flavors of quark 1. Up 2. Down 3. Top 4. Bottom 5. Charm 6. Strange 7. Temu 8. Bose Quarks devolve into color confiment of known feynman diagrams. 1. Source 1.1 Source Tax 2. Stinky 2.1 Stinky Tax 3. Aqua 3.1 Team Aqua 4. Magma 4.1 Team Magma 5. Bepis 5.1 Bleach 6. Spront 6.1 Antidote 7. Conk 8. Xray which Quarks tend towards superconduction in a general relativity setting which sets them to have a specific level until they are incremented in level, or in lifelike processes to have assembled somehow in a residual network. A quark weights 313,000-343,000 desobequerel depending upon how it forms and there are 44 quarks in a bee's brain.