Slashdot Mirror
How Pentaquarks May Lead To the Discovery of New Fundamental Physics
StartsWithABang writes: Over 100 years ago, Rutherford's gold foil experiment discovered the atomic nucleus. At higher energies, we can split that nucleus apart into protons and neutrons, and at still higher ones, into individual quarks and gluons. But these quarks and gluons can combine in amazing ways: not just into mesons and baryons, but into exotic states like tetraquarks, pentaquarks and even glueballs. As the LHC brings these states from theory to reality, here's what we're poised to learn, and probe, by pushing the limits of quantum chromodynamics.
At higher energies, we can split that nucleus apart into protons and neutrons, and at still higher ones, into individual quarks
In one sense that seems to be something you really can't do. The force between free quarks increases with distance to about 10,000N, then remains constant (no, I have no idea how this makes any sense, but it's what I read). Any force sufficient to tear two quarks apart is sufficient to generate new quarks which then bind with the "free" quarks. So you never see quarks by themselves.
IANAP, though. Does the above really mean that if you had two free quarks separated by a kilometre or a light year, that there would still be that constant 10,000N force between them?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"They might just be eigenvalues of particle properties, nice to calculate on, but not necessarily anything real in themselves."
Well that describes the proton surely? Prior to 'deep inelastic scattering' experiment, the proton was believed to a fundamental particle and QM was applied and QM believers referred to the proton being detected as at a position. That "the proton is everywhere till we detect it at a location and that fixes its location" nonsense*.
Post DIS, we know that its not fundamental, rather made of sub-particles, hypothesized as Quarks (to fit observed data) and later added to to better fit observed data. So the proton was never 'at' the detected location, it was only *detected* to be at that location by the effect of these quarks on the detector. i.e. a proton is " not necessarily anything real in themselves" as you put it.
So much for QM.
Quarks are IMHO too complex a model and given every particle exists with an anti-particle and the only difference is the charge, then you're better off looking for just two particles, a + and a -. But that's just my opinion.
* Because its a way to explain a conflict in physics: single indivisible particles, that jump around randomly based on probabilistic math. But the basic model is comic, it assumes something special about *our* detection of the particle different from its interaction with every other piece of matter it interacts with. Of course there is nothing special about 'our' detection. Thus the model is flawed.
The probalistic maths is from observation, so the indivisible particle must be the flaw, and that's already been shown with a proton. i.e. QM is just a flock of starlings seen through a detector that can only see the flock.