The unbearable lightness of being... Gravity.

[Lost_BMW]

Gene Vincent said:

So the compression and interaction of probabilities that would form a quark if there were sufficient energy added (in the form of heat) can only influence the behaviour of (say) a proton or the alpha particle of the FSC.

Do you mean literally (or ish!) the interaction of the probabilities, as you've described previously, or the interaction of the particles (or energy?) resulting from the realisation of the probabilities?

[Gene Vincent]

Literally the former.

[GokTweed]

Gene Vincent said:

Pobolycwm said:

I can understand why we can never seperate a quark to "see" it , but on what basis do quarks not exist? If we can see their effect does that not imply their existence ?

The standard model which is still 100% validated confirms their existence

Maths has gone off in some funny directions before, ie I am no great fan of brane or string theory.......but there again I am not a mathematician

Quarks cannot exist at all below many million degress C.

It is not that temperature anywhere in this cosmos.

So the compression and interaction of probabilities that would form a quark if there were sufficient energy added (in the form of heat) can only influence the behaviour of (say) a proton or the alpha particle of the FSC.

The standard model includes the above, it does not confirm their 'existence' just the material to form them if the conditions are right (very hot Cosmos).

Strings and Branes do have something to contribute but so far nothing like the promise they were once thought to hold.

At these scales particles no longer exist at all.

So what are protons and neutrons made of?

[Gene Vincent]

GokTweed said:

Gene Vincent said:

Pobolycwm said:

I can understand why we can never seperate a quark to "see" it , but on what basis do quarks not exist? If we can see their effect does that not imply their existence ?

The standard model which is still 100% validated confirms their existence

Maths has gone off in some funny directions before, ie I am no great fan of brane or string theory.......but there again I am not a mathematician

Quarks cannot exist at all below many million degress C.

It is not that temperature anywhere in this cosmos.

So the compression and interaction of probabilities that would form a quark if there were sufficient energy added (in the form of heat) can only influence the behaviour of (say) a proton or the alpha particle of the FSC.

The standard model includes the above, it does not confirm their 'existence' just the material to form them if the conditions are right (very hot Cosmos).

Strings and Branes do have something to contribute but so far nothing like the promise they were once thought to hold.

At these scales particles no longer exist at all.

So what are protons and neutrons made of?

That is in many ways a redundant term at this scale.

They are made (effectively) from remnants.

In modern parlance a 'quark' (in all its various forms) is the result of an original quark going cold.

The original quarks that were around in the early Cosmos were very dense and energetic particles, as a result of the inflation that occurred the Cosmos cooled from many millions of degrees C to its present cold environment.

As our Cosmos cooled this particle suffered from disintegration, shattering into millions of quark-like remnants, these remnants are what we call quarks today.

The heat was the energy that sustained the original particle and without that energy to bind it together it had to dissolve.

Now, nothing 'disappears' from this Cosmos and so the component parts had to resolve to a state that would allow them to return to being an original quark if the conditions changed, this meant that it had only one course open to it and it became nothing more than a wave function of compressed or amounted probabilities across the various quantum fields. It is very likely that they formed the quantum fields themselves to allow this.

So, in summary, the common usage of the word quark actually means something that holds attributes of a long dead particle that, as a result of cooling, may have caused this Cosmos to have form, mass and existence.

---

The 'student' answer to your question in the case of a proton is to say that it is made from 3 quarks, but that is really a deceit, not a nasty one just a rather convenient one.

After the 'student' answer there is the 'graduate' answer that they are made from thousands of bits of quarks that finally give rise to the attribute of there being 3 quarks.

However, the answer I have given above the line is the more full and accurate one.

I can go further and become more accurate, but that would be pointless.