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Protons Aren't round

Posted by chrisd on from the go-figure dept.

drox writes "USA Today reports that protons are ovoid rather than spherical, as most of us learned in school." In related news, thousands of high school science labs have thrown out a bunch of little plastic balls.

1 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Junk Post by rjh · · Score: 3, Informative

    In the article it said quarks travel at around ninety percent of the speed of light. So, tell you what, let's compute just how much more massive those quarks are. Fire up your LISP interpreter. We're taking a trip into Mathemagicland.

    In LISP notation...

    (defun relativistic-mass (m v) (/ m (sqrt (- 1 (/ (* v v) 1)))))

    (relativistic-mass 1 .9)
    2.294157


    ... So as you can tell, relativity tells us that at ninety percent of c, an object is only going to have two and a quarter times its normal mass. I don't see how you come up with the notion that "if the quarks are traveling relativistically, then the proton's mass must be near-infinite, thus quarks aren't traveling relativistically". If anything, your science is just as much junk as the USA Today article you're blasting.