What is the smallest possible thing in the universe?

[Gene Vincent]

I have stated this before and I thought explained it (not sure now) but it bears repeating, none of the fundamental particles have 'existence' in the way we as macro-human beings can readily relate to.

Everything exceptionally small or fundamental is a behavioural phenomenon, just as light is either a wave or an apparent particle, our experience is that things are one or the other, this is not so down there in the micro.

Duality is as much part of being that small as is just being that small.

Forget energies, they are an expenditure and some particles spend quickly, others less so, for this sort of expenditure don't think 'size' think duration at the till, they cash in their chips quickly, make a big splash and bugger off.

It is a good way of stabilising the micro world, these 'big spenders'... they imbue other 'particles' with attributes that allow them greater longevity.

A sort of sub-atomic 'trickle-down economics' scenario... in the end we get things that are real to us that don't suddenly go 'PHOOOOM' in our hands and blow us to fking bits!

(Fulminate of Mercury excepted...)

[hornet]

Baron Greenback said:

An attosecond is an incomprehensible quintillionith of a second. In other words it would take 15 million billion pulses of the size Chang's team achieved to equal one second.

The only way I can get my head round that sort of timescale is to assume that's the actual speed the universe operates at, and we only find it unfathomable because we've to operate on much longer intervals. Is chrono-anthropocentric a word? Should be

[dfen5]

Think how big the known universe is and then imagine that universe is actually a sub particle of one atom in the next scale of small. To put it another way, each atom in our body is a mass of universes.

Space is infinitely big, so who can prove that the particles scientists think are tiny are actaully massive, relatively speaking?

Edited by dfen5 on Sunday 9th September 10:14

[Gene Vincent]

dfen5 said:

Think how big the known universe is and then imagine that universe is actually a sub particle of one atom in the next scale of small. To put it another way, each atom in our body is a mass of universes.

Space is infinitely big, so who can prove that the particles scientists think are tiny are actaully massive, relatively speaking?

Edited by dfen5 on Sunday 9th September 10:14

Fortunately you are wrong in every respect.

Below a certain size, there are no particles, there is simply multiple probability fields that can and do coalesce into particles.

There are no 'universes in an particle' except in the sense they carry residual behaviour of the early Cosmos.

Massive... your use of 'massive' is important, even relatively we see nothing to suggest that each fundamental particle is in any way a further macrocosm.

Dismiss the idea from your head, it's a flight of fantasy, nothing wrong with that per se, but it has as little 'gravitas' as Religion.

[Simpo Two]

Gene Vincent said:

I have stated this before and I thought explained it (not sure now) but it bears repeating, none of the fundamental particles have 'existence' in the way we as macro-human beings can readily relate to.

It is curious to look at my computer montior and see it as a collection of probabilities that collectively take on the form of a solid object.

Perhaps the first step in ruling the universe is to overcome probabilities, with some kind of probability over-ride device. One could make good progress then I think.

[Gene Vincent]

Simpo Two said:

Gene Vincent said:

I have stated this before and I thought explained it (not sure now) but it bears repeating, none of the fundamental particles have 'existence' in the way we as macro-human beings can readily relate to.

It is curious to look at my computer montior and see it as a collection of probabilities that collectively take on the form of a solid object.

Perhaps the first step in ruling the universe is to overcome probabilities, with some kind of probability over-ride device. One could make good progress then I think.

It is just another step down the road that brought the general public (those that take an interest, that is) to accept that almost the entirety of an atom is empty space, yet it feels solid.

The same road earlier explained that things appear solid because of electro-static repulsion, you hand is mostly empty space and the keyboard it touches too, but because of the cohesion of the atoms to one another they repel invaders (your hand) and your fingers do the same.

The fields in QFT are individually just a set of probabilities of a form of perturbation in the uniform 'zero/one' of the field, I hate to mix metaphors as it causes confusion, but think of a fine wire that has a kink in it somewhere along its length and a corresponding one in a another field coincides with it, if these two fields are one Bose and One Dirac, then that perturbation combined is sufficient in excitation to form 'something' that transfigures to a collection of attributes we call a particle, if this happens enough times in a local area we might get a Nucleated combination and this might just form an atom.

In the early soup this happened on a extra-ordinary scale, some failed to coalesce, but everything we see as object did, the Dark Matter and the Dark Energy is likely to be bits that didn't quite coalesce enough to form our visible Cosmos, the 'Balanced Imbalance' is likely to be the most dominant cause of this Cosmos remaining stable for as long as it has.

There may well be a balance we have no sight of that was essential to this current stability.

The above is at root the reason many of us think the Cosmos had many 'false starts' we 'burnt off' the excess probabilities in failure, finally reaching something that we have now.

We will have to understand more of the results in the hope of tracking back how the maths changed in that first few gazillionths of a second.

[TheHeretic]

The smallest thing in the entire universe is the grub screw I dropped on the floor from my CB aerial.

[Simpo Two]

Gene Vincent said:

The same road earlier explained that things appear solid because of electro-static repulsion, you hand is mostly empty space and the keyboard it touches too, but because of the cohesion of the atoms to one another they repel invaders (your hand) and your fingers do the same.

I witnessed proof of this on Friday when a friend attempted to throw some fruit through the closed window of my boat. Glass repels fruit...

Gene Vincent said:

if these two fields are one Bose and One Dirac, then that perturbation combined is sufficient in excitation to form 'something' that transfigures to a collection of attributes we call a particle, if this happens enough times in a local area we might get a Nucleated combination and this might just form an atom.

Does this raise the possibility of some kind of 'plasma' that is neither energy nor matter, depending on how the probabilities come together?

TheHeretic said:

The smallest thing in the entire universe is the grub screw I dropped on the floor from my CB aerial.

Second place to the thing that went 'ping' and described a parabola when I disassembled my Seiko watch in 1979 to see how it worked. (I still have the watch and it still works, thanks to the surgeons at Seiko)