Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Getting up to speed on the proton + What happens if Carlo proves reality isn't real?

#1
C C Offline
Getting up to speed on the proton
https://www.anl.gov/article/getting-up-t...the-proton

RELEASE: Scientists develop groundbreaking theory for calculating what's happening inside a proton travelling at the speed of light.

For more than 2,000 years, scientists thought the atom was the smallest particle possible. Then, they discovered that it has a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons. After that, they found that the protons and neutrons themselves have a complex inner world full of quarks and antiquarks held together by a superglue-like force created by gluons.

"Protons along with neutrons constitute over 99 percent of the visible universe, meaning everything from galaxies and stars to us," said Yong Zhao -- a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. "Yet, there is still much we do not know about the rich inner life of protons or neutrons."

Zhao has co-authored a paper on an innovative method for calculating the quark and gluon structure of a proton travelling at the speed of light. The name of the team's creation is large-momentum effective theory, LaMET for short, which works jointly with a theory called lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD).

The proton is tiny -- about 100,000 times smaller than an atom, so physicists often model it as a point with no dimensions. But these new theories can predict what's happening within the speed-of-light proton as though it were a body of three dimensions.

The concept of momentum is vital to not only LaMET but physics in general. It equals the speed of an object times its mass.

More than a half century ago, Zhao explained, a simple quark model by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig uncovered some of the inner structure of the proton while at rest (no momentum). From that model, scientists pictured the proton as consisting of three quarks and predicted their essential properties, such as electric charge and spin.

Later experiments with protons accelerated to close to the speed of light demonstrated that the proton is even more complex than originally thought. For example, it contains uncountable particles that interact with one another -- not just three quarks bound by gluons. And the gluons can briefly turn into quark-antiquark pairs before they destroy each other and become a gluon again. Particle accelerators like that at DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory produced most of these results.

"When you accelerate the proton and collide it with a target, that's when the magic happens in terms of revealing its many mysteries," Zhao said.

About five years after the simple quark model rocked the physics community, a model proposed by Richard Feynman pictured the proton travelling at near the speed of light as a beam carrying an infinite number of quarks and gluons moving in the same direction. He called these particles "partons." His parton model has inspired physicists to define a set of quantities that describe the 3D proton structure. Researchers could then measure these quantities in experiments at particle accelerators.

Earlier calculations with the best available theory at the time (lattice QCD) produced some illuminating details about the distribution of quarks and gluons in the proton. But they had a serious shortcoming: They could not accurately distinguish between fast- and slow-moving partons.

The difficulty was that lattice QCD could only calculate the properties of the proton that do not depend on its momentum. But applying Feynman's parton model to lattice QCD requires knowing the properties of a proton with infinite momentum, which means that the proton particles must all be traveling at the speed of light. Partially filling that knowledge gap, LaMET provides a recipe for calculating the parton physics from lattice QCD for large but finite momentum.

"We have been developing and refining LaMET over the last eight years," said Zhao. "Our paper summarizes this work."

Running on supercomputers, lattice QCD calculations with LaMET are generating new and improved predictions about the structure of the speed-of-light proton. These predictions can then be put to the test in a new one-of-a-kind facility called the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). This facility is being built at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory.

"Our LaMET can also predict useful information about quantities that are extraordinarily difficult to measure," said Zhao. "And with powerful enough supercomputers, in some cases, our predictions could even be more precise than possible to measure at the EIC."

With deeper understanding of the 3D quark-gluon structure of matter using theory and EIC measurements, scientists are poised to reach a far more detailed picture of the proton. We will then be entering a new age of parton physics.


What happens if quantum physicists can prove reality isn’t real? (book)
https://thenextweb.com/news/what-happens...-isnt-real

EXCERPTS: . . . A god’s eye view. Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli recently published a book titled “Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution.”

In this book Rovelli argues that all of reality is relational. That means that, counter to what Sir Isaac Newton thought, if every object in the universe were to suddenly disappear there would not be an empty universe left behind.

If you take way the stars, black holes, planets, and everything else that exists, there’d be no space or time left. This isn’t necessarily a new theory, but with every technological advancement in our ability to understand the quantum universe we’re forced to reconsider our assumptions and theories.

If we assume there is no god’s eye view, no place by which an observer far enough removed can see the literal big picture, then we have to wonder what that means for the idea of an infinite universe.

Don’t we need reality to exist? No, not really. Existence is its own measure of proof. But reality, as we think we experience it, may be entirely subjective. [...] According to the theories that Rovelli’s book puts forth, all the “stuff” that makes up our universe is held together in relation to all the other stuff. So, sure, your desk exists. And the floor it sits on exists. And so does everything else that’s “touching” (for lack of a better word) via what we’ll colloquially call “quantum adjacency.”

What’s it all mean? [...] Theoretically, if we could zoom in past the muons and leptons and keep going deeper and deeper, we could reach a point where all objects in the universe are indistinguishable from each other because, at the quantum level, everything that exists is just a sea of nearly-identical subparticulate entities.

This version of reality would render the concepts of “space” and “time” pointless. Time would only exist as a construct by which we give meaning to our own observations. And those observations would merely be the classical side-effects of existing in a quantum universe.

So, in the grand scheme of things, it’s possible that our reality is little more than a fleeting, purposeless arrangement of molecules. Everything that encompasses our entire universe may be nothing more than a brief hallucination caused by a quantum vibration.

Of course, none of this appears to offer up an explanation for dark matter, radiation, black holes, time crystals and other interesting quantum affairs.

Perhaps quantum relativity is a passing fancy for the field of theoretical physics. But maybe, just maybe, it isn’t... (MORE - missing details)
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  'Light speed' electrons discovered for the 1st time, described by 4 dimensions C C 0 21 Mar 20, 2024 05:36 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article Swirling forces, crushing pressures measured in the proton + Do black holes explode? C C 0 12 Mar 15, 2024 06:25 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article The superconductor dispute + The real reason we can’t outpace light speed C C 0 75 Mar 28, 2023 08:18 AM
Last Post: C C
  Article At light speed, Einstein’s equations break down and "nothing makes sense" C C 11 374 Mar 23, 2023 02:24 PM
Last Post: Kornee
  Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ C C 1 227 Oct 27, 2022 04:09 AM
Last Post: Kornee
  Speed of light is anisotropic? + No math QM + The mathematics of consciousness C C 5 385 May 30, 2022 02:38 PM
Last Post: Kornee
  The strange glow of warp speed acceleration + "Machine scientists" distill raw data C C 9 248 May 26, 2022 07:52 AM
Last Post: Kornee
  Wave function isn't real + ‘Beyond-quantum’ equivalence principle + Lee Smolin int... C C 1 96 May 2, 2022 06:17 PM
Last Post: Ostronomos
  What is tritium paint? + Hibernation is getting weird thanks to climate change C C 1 63 Jan 31, 2022 04:07 AM
Last Post: Syne
  Virtual particles may be real particles out of phase with our reality + New adsp mode C C 0 74 Oct 28, 2021 09:35 PM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)