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The Proton Just Got Smaller
inflame writes "A new paper published in Nature has said that the proton may be smaller than we previously thought. The article states 'The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care. But the new measurements could mean that there is a gap in existing theories of quantum mechanics. "It's a very serious discrepancy," says Ingo Sick, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who has tried to reconcile the finding with four decades of previous measurements. "There is really something seriously wrong someplace."' Would this indicate new physics if proven?"
Obviously, these people never heard of the "Squeezer" from John Varley's Red Thunder.
Living With a Nerd
Will this prove previous laws of physics are flawed?
... and now this! These scientists have no shame!
I swear !!
are they saying that the consequences of this information are, dare I say it, negative?
"His name was James Damore."
I think I'm going to name all of my children 'Ingo Sick'. What an awesome name.
"'The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care"
Does this sentence bother any one else? Just me?
Just remember, dear protons:
Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is Physics, and a powerful ally it is.
Have they tried re-doing the math in Base 13?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This paragraph from TFA has the most salient information:
4% sure does seem significant. But more interesting is that the measurement is thought to be much more precise because of the method of measurement. Doesn't it seem more likely that it's just not possible to get an accurate measurement with the electron -- like measuring a grape with a yardstick instead of a micrometer?
And of course, there's that stupid cat-in-a-box thing... you can't measure something without affecting it, so maybe muons interact in some strange (lol) way with protons that doesn't happen (or happens differently) with electrons. But as a non-physicist, even throwing those terms out there puts me far outside my league.
Of course, these more prosaic explanations don't lead to nearly as many cool sci-fi plot threads. FTL drive powered by a process that squeezes protons to black hole density, perhaps? That would be awesome. Or, perhaps the expansion of the universe is actually reducing the size of subatomic particles -- so in a few billion years, all matter will simply wink out of existence. Or, there's a time dilation effect as well, so that time drags longer and longer, especially on Mondays.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
In fact, the correction is about 2% (from 0.8768(69) fm to 0.84184(67)fm; one femtometer is 10^{-15} metres). Yes, the absolute magnitude of the difference is small compared to everyday things, but that's meaningless. More importantly, this difference is more than 5 standard deviations, so this is unlikely to have happened by chance.
A hellaphysicist will be pretty mad is the proton is a hellometer smaller.
>> The Proton Just Got Smaller
The price is the same, the box is the same, but now there's less proton.
this is why i never listen to scientist.
they're always lying, and making me pissed.
fucking protons, how do they work?
THL phish sticks
or is it the taxpayers again?
The "Size" of a proton is so ridiculous, like the "size" of a magnetic field. What's the diameter of the earth's magnetosphere?
Blithering idiots. Thinking such backwards things like "matter is solid." Oh, yes, a proton is a tiny, tiny, microscopic pebble... not even. It's a concentrated, stabilized form of energy; vibrations moving in such a way as to hold them together coherently. That's why protons can combine with electrons to form neutrons, and neutrons can emit electrons to form protons (Beta decay).
Oh, yeah, an object with a bigger mass was able to dive deeper into the charge field of a proton. Good job, you got one singularity closer to another singularity than thought possible.
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A year ago one would have been labeled an amateur wannabe for even suggesting this. Now it's the new truth. Science is like that.
I shrunk the proton. The kids are fine, though.
Hey, I've been working on a new Proton Filter. Everything was going fine. Now I have to contact my Chinese factory engineers and retool for a smaller seive. Damn it all to hell. No one wants a proton filter that will let proton through. What am I going to do with 45k faulty proton filters?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
It's how many electrons you attract that are in orbit around your awesome self.
Besides, if you know the size, you don't know the wave. You can have one, but not both.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's more likely that our ability to measure has improved.
You're conclusions are only going to be as accurate as your ability to weigh, or measure.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Since a low energy muon usually decays into an electron and couple of neutrinos, it may not be a point particle like an electron. The calculation may not have accounted for this.
Since mass is a result of drag on the Higgs field, is also affected by the expansion of the field. Earlier measurements took place in an infinitesimally denser universe, producing infinitesimally more drag on the Higgs field. In a later universe, the field has become less dense due to expansion, so particles have less mass because they're dragging the Higgs field less. Viola! Can I have my Nobel Prize now? ;-)
"For my ally is the Strong Nuclear Force, and a powerful ally it is."
Student: Is it true that the foundation of the universe is paradox?
Master: Well, yes and no.
is already being detected to cause changes in the very fabric of our existence. See! More proof!
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Well seeing is believing, calculations can always be wrong ;) Show a real picture of a proton and I am convinced (please no photoshopping on that picture grrr).
Are we talking mass or volume?
And is it a perfect sphere, or does it bulge in the middle like the earth does. Protons have spin right? (Except when they are on O'Reilly's show I guess)
I knew the day would come when that pesky little Pentium FPU error would come back to haunt us.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
There's never a theoretical particle physicist when you need one. (Never thought I'd say that phrase)
Protons change size depending on which lepton they are "orbited" by.
cd
European?
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
You use the same scientists to weigh things that made the Intel Pentium.
they give the size of the proton in two or three diff units, and the diff in two or three units, but never have a simple explanation,old x femtometers, new y femtometers stupid mba journalists who don't know science
Would this indicate new physics if proven?
Maybe, but it would really shake up the scientific method...
I'm sure our wonderful technology has a margin of error that includes that small of an amount. Even if the equipment and math are perfect, I figured they used something oh-so-predictable and constant like gravity to measure it It turns out they didn't when you read the article but be sure to read this little part:
"and since the 1960s physicists have made hundreds of measurements of the proton's size with staggering accuracy. The most recent estimates..."
Oops, they made a typo. They should have said estimates twice but they accidentally called it a measurement in the first sentence. That's right, SURPRISE, they're estimating.
This is yet again an example of how exciting stupidity is published and real science is ignored. Which would you publish or report on in the news? There's a discrepency so the measuring must be a little off OR there's a discrepency so all we know about physics is wrong and everything is turned upside down and the sky is falling! It's just like how people who say dark matter must be regular matter that isn't emitting or reflecting detectable radiation get ignored and people who say dark matter is a mysterious, interdimensional, quantum, magic substance get an hour long special on TV because that sounds more interesting.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
This will lead to the Great Debate, and Scientists the world over will be faced with a challenging decision: whether to reclassify these particles as a "Dwarf Proton". Or, possibly, simply "Kuiper-belt Protons".
The prior glory days of the positively-charged Proton's full status as a subatomic particle are over. The Proton will soon be relegated to the back-room annex containing exhibits for miscellaneous classes of odds and ends, fragments and freaks of the Standard Model, like the protino, the strange-quark, and the hapnion, in the Museum of Subatomic Physics, instead of the Main Hall of subatomic particles, where crowds of spectators will see the great favorites like the Neutron, and the Electron, and even the Positron.
But we should not feel so sad for the poor Proton. At least they haven't turned it into some form of "string". Yet.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
a "gap" in existing theories...??
LOL sounds more like there are "gaps" in existing atomic nuclei!
So what does size actually mean for a proton. For macro scale objects we measure with some physical item that has an electrostatic interaction with the item being measured. Previously all the measurements were being made using an electron. The new measurement is using a muon. Seems like they just redefined what "size" means, i.e. muon based vs electron based. What am I missing?
Yes but every time I try to see it your way, I get a headache.
This is just caused by evaporation, which is caused by Global Warming. As the universe is heated up by all those SUV's, the poor protron is forced to sit around in its underwear and sweat heavily just to keep cool. Most of the loss is probably just the loss of most of its clothes.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
My name is Ingo Sick. You cast doubt on the Standard Model. Prepare to die!
When we get physics stories like this, the jokes outnumber the people who deal with or even understand it. Hi Matt! (Can I get an upmod for not treating IT and CS as the same thing?)
All I need now is 30 years worth of hundreds of mathematical physicists, and this hypothesis of mine will be just as good as String Theory. But if I'm right, nobody will be around to see it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
...when science says they know something it means they know it provisionally. Think how long the weight of a Proton has been "settled science". And now? Not so settled. Think about some other things people might talk about as "settled science".
This is not a knock on science, science is supposed to consider everything it knows provisionally and test it constantly. What it is a knock on is people who fail to consider the provisional nature of scientific knowledge when it comes to setting social and government policy.
There is another sentence that doesn't make sense either,
"Would this indicate new physics if proven?"
Physics doesn't get "proven", mathematics gets proven. It's akin to proving reality - it doesn't make sense. AFAIK, the cornerstone of physics is the experiment. If the experiment shows something, then that's it. There is no debate except maybe about the procedure employed. There is never argument if something is "real" - it's right there.
If the proton is shown to be smaller than what QM predicts, then the universe is basically showing that QM is not complete and there *must be* new physics and that's a *huge* result. Frankly, I don't think the submitter really understands either how physics works or how science works.
From the abstract,
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7303/full/nature09250.html
And that's a *huge* result. 5 standard deviations is not a little change - something doesn't add up.
I lost 4% of my body weight in just one week, but it was just .0000000040 megatons, so not significant
First the Neutrino has mass, then they can't find the Higgs Boson and now
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_theory
Heim theory also calculated the mass of the proton as greater than measured previously!
BOHR-ING!
And I thought the universe was expanding
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
They've been banging around for a dozen billion years or so, and you expect them to have no wear? Ok, that particular one is a couple of attometres off spec, but stars still work and galaxies haven't exploded. The dark matter leaks a bit but that's easy to fix. Besides, nobody will notice if you use electrons like everyone else.
On whether thy used Excel to do their calculations. The difference they report in the article is very near where the IEEE 754 specification (and hence Excel) stops, ie. 10^-15 digits of precision. See here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/78113.
I thought we were supposed to choose the prefix so that the number was between 1 and 999.9999999999? If so, then it shouldn't be specified as 0.87 femtometres, but instead as 870 attometres. The difference is about 30 attometres. That sounds so much bigger than the 0.000 ... 003 millimetres the journalist quoted. :-)
I think 30 attometres is more readable (although I'll accept 30 x 10**-18 metres as easier for those who can't find their Google with both hands...)
I've been saying this for years...
what a relief, now in light of this new information, what's the definition of an obese person?
We have protons inside of use, those protons were being measured wrong, right?
What actually happens is that you get 4.16p % more protons :P
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
God here. I just upgraded the universe server to PhysicsOS 1.1. Some users may notice a change in proton size due to the new quantum mechanics engine, but unless your working with the OS directly, this shouldn't be a problem for you.
The Internet has given stupid people the resources of intelligent people.
... would be quite a feat. You'd have to overcome an enormous amount of EM repulsion. Close-packed would likely be close enough for strong force effects to come into play, but without some neutrons present, not sufficient to hold the protons together in a "nucleus". I guess what I'm saying is that either you have a really thick-walled liter bottle, or else you're talking about a really diffuse "gas" of protons. You'd probably want to keep your bottle in a hard vacuum, too, because a litter of dense-packed protons is going to be carrying a LOT of coulombs - it would suck all the electrons out of anything it came in contact with.
If you're talking about hydrogen atoms, that's another story, but even if you managed to make a liter of metallic hydrogen, that's a lot less protons - hydrogen atoms are a LOT bigger than bare protons.