Inside the Proton, the ‘most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’ (2022)

Neutrons are just as complex, they’re much harder to study though.

Where are you getting that implication? I didn't see anything in the article suggesting that neutrons were simple and I would share your skepticism if someone claimed they were. The fact that neutrons can spontaneously decay into protons (plus other stuff) suggests otherwise.

Neutrons decay into protons, so no.

I don't expect that to be the case, it's likely that the article simply focuses on the proton.

Non-physicst here. Hopefully someone can correct me or elaborate. My understanding is that what's being described is smaller scale decoherence inside the proton. Normally, the universe only asks protons the question: "are you a proton?" and it's like "Yep I'm a proton." (What's your baryon number? What's your charge? etc)

When we blast it with higher and higher energies, we're asking new questions: "What are the momenta of your quarks? What's your color field arrangement?" There are many possible answers to those questions and we're now starting to see the landscape of them.

So having different answers based on how you look is really answering different questions, just like asking an electron: What's your momentum? What's your location?

Do you find pretentious language enthralling too?

It's a pop sci magazine, of course they use language like that. Actual academic papers are different.

I get what you’re saying, but the measurements are real. In some sense they are the truth.

In the article this refers to the finding that the quark is more complex than three valence quarks.

The measurements indicating that the three-quark-model is incomplete are overwhelmingly conclusive, so some degree of certainty in the language is warranted in my view.

Not sure what this has to do with the article, it just seems like a nitpick. What did science do to you?

> processes over objects

this is correct, waves are a product of pressures, so, are emergent also, the real question is, where does the pressure originate

One thing I've always wondered about is why crazy people are always fixated on quantum physics and then vague musical terms like "resonances".

LLMs do the same thing when they develop psychosis* except GPT also starts talking about "recursion" and Claude starts trying to enter nirvana.

* historical term "going Rampant"

> Recently, GPT informed me that the strong force is really a tiny after-effect of the "QCD force" Maybe you should not take everything GPT tells you at face value? I have no idea what this QCD force is supposed to be. The strong force is _the_ force of QCD. The Standard Model still considers the electromagnetic, weak and strong force. The description of the weak and EM force can be unified into the electroweak force and there are theories that try to also unify it with the strong force and even gravity, but there are issues on the theory side and no clear evidence on the experimental side as to which direction is the correct one.

The Standard Model and General Relativity are still our most successful theories. It is clear that they don't tell the whole picture, but (annoyingly?) it is not clear at all where this is going.

Just for dark matter there are probably a dozen proposed hypothetical particles, but so far we have found none. But maybe it's something completely different...

I think physics has felt pretty incomplete since the confirmation of qm non-locality in the 60s.

> 25 years ago it seemed like physics was mostly complete, and the only remaining work was exploring the corner cases and polishing out all the imperfections. It doesn't feel that way anymore!

Physicists thought the same thing c. 1900, but then one of the "corner cases" turned into the ultraviolet catastrophe[1]. The consequences of the solution to that problem kept the whole field busy for a good part of the 20th century.

I'm highly skeptical of the idea that physics is anywhere near complete. The relative success of our technology gives us the illusory impression that we're almost done, but it's not obvious that physics even has a single, complete description that we can describe. We assume it does for convenience, in the same way that we assume the laws are constant everywhere in spacetime. I view this as both exciting and terrifying, but mostly exciting.

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

> Recently, GPT informed me that the strong force is really a tiny after-effect of the "QCD force"

This is kind of just semantics. QCD describes both the force binding quarks inside protons and neutrons, and the residual force binding protons and neutrons. This is all part of the Standard Model, which has been essentially unchanged for the last 50 years. The big theoretical challenge is to incorporate gravity into this picture, but this is an almost impossible thing to explore experimentally because gravity is very weak compared to the other 3 forces. That's why the Standard Model is so successful, even though it doesn't incorporated gravity.

You might enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...

> 25 years ago it seemed like physics was mostly complete, and the only remaining work was exploring the corner cases and polishing out all the imperfections

Around 125 years ago, many thought the same about physics, that physics is mostly complete and it just explaining and finishing some edge cases and polishing all our measurements. There was just two things that were a little bit puzzling, the "looming clouds" over physics (per Kelvin description) will later lead to both Quantum Theory and Theory of relativity (Black body radiation and Michelson–Morley experiment) and the fundamental change of our understanding for physics after that.

So I would not take this position. Does this mean we are in a similar moment? maybe, who knows?

> The confusing part is that modern physics is so unbelievably successful and useful for technology - if the underlying theory was way off, how could the tech work?

Who says "way" off? It's not complete to explain everything, but it explains a lot correctly enough to use it for calculations, predictions and practical effects. Same way Newton was and remains useful, and how people have been using maths and technology to solve problems for a long time since before Newton was born.

"QCD force" is the same thing as the "strong" force. There is no reason whatsoever to invent any new name.

There are several hierarchical levels at which the strong interaction and the electromagnetic interaction bind the components of matter.

The electromagnetic interaction attempts to neutralize the electric charge. To a first approximation this is achieved in atoms. The residual forces caused by imperfect neutralization bind atoms in molecules. Even between molecules there remain some even weaker residual attraction forces, which are the Van der Waals forces, which are thus at the third hierarchical level.

For the strong interaction, there are only 2 hierarchical levels, approximate charge neutralization is achieved in nucleons, which are bound by residual attractive forces into nuclei.

So the forces between the nucleons of a nucleus correspond to the inter-atomic forces from inside a molecule, not to the Van der Waals forces between molecules.

It's complex in a physicist's sense of the word: the equations are hopelessly complicated to solve even in very simple cases. This means it's hard to build intuition or describe in simple terms.

Quantum chromodynamics is actually pretty similar to Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. The big difference is that unlike photos, gluons interact with each other. This means goodbye to linear equations and simple planewave solutions. One can't even solve the equations in empty space.

My non-physicist but curious-about-the-topic take is similar. Things at the quantum level are not "complex" in the systems-theory sense. They couldn't be, I think, since we're dealing with the most basic constituents of the universe. They are mysterious, confusing, wildly counterintuitive... but they are fundamental. The most basic stuff there is.

The study of these things, on the other hand, is genuinely complex and difficult. But that's epistemology, not ontology.

Neutrons turn spontaneously into protons, which is called beta decay, and which happens in any nucleus with too many neutrons. This includes the free neutrons, which decay into protons in minutes.

Neutrons and protons differ in their composition, a neutron being made of 2 d quarks + 1 u quark, while a proton is made of 1 d quark + 2 u quarks, much in the same way as a nucleus of tritium differs from a nucleus of helium 3, the former being made of 2 neutrons + 1 proton, while the latter is made of 1 neutron + 2 protons.

For the strong interactions, nucleons (i.e. protons and neutrons) and nuclei are analogous to what atoms and molecules are for the electromagnetic interaction.

The strong interaction attempts to neutralize the hadronic charge (a.k.a. color charge), while the electromagnetic interaction attempts to neutralize the electric charge.

To a first approximation, the hadronic charge is neutralized in nucleons and the electric charge is neutralized in atoms.

However, because of the movement of quarks inside of a nucleon and of the electrons inside an atom, the neutralization of the charge is imperfect and there remain some residual forces of attraction, respectively strong and electromagnetic, which bind the nucleons into nuclei and the atoms into molecules.