7 hours ago
> The results suggested that in even higher-energy collisions, the proton would appear as a cloud made up almost entirely of gluons. The gluon dandelion is exactly what QCD predicts.
I find the proton as a gluon dandelion cloud enthralling
an hour ago
Do you find pretentious language enthralling too?
5 hours ago
8 hours ago
The implication of this framing is that neutrons are considerably simpler.
I find that rather surprising.
4 hours ago
Where are you getting that implication? I didn't see anything in the article suggesting that neutrons were simple and I would share your skepticism if someone claimed they were. The fact that neutrons can spontaneously decay into protons (plus other stuff) suggests otherwise.
an hour ago
The title implies it directly.
7 hours ago
Neutrons are just as complex, they’re much harder to study though.
4 hours ago
If it was possible to build a direct neutron accelerator/collider, I suspect we'd get some new physics pretty quickly.
Analysing hand-me-down neutron events from indirect collisions isn't quite as useful.
3 hours ago
At ISIS (Oxford neutron source)…
Spallation generation: High-energy protons (~800 MeV) hit a heavy target, releasing a wide spectrum of fast neutrons up to hundreds of MeV. These are then moderated down to useful energies for experiments.
It’s not the LHC, sure. But I don’t see any reason (apart from “why bother”) why they can’t do spallation in Geneva. OK maybe there’s a cooling problem…
3 hours ago
There absolutely are direct neutron experiments, but they are much lower energy and have a different focus, partly because neutrons being neutral means they’re very hard to accelerate.
There’s an ultra cold neutron source at Paul Scherrer that is used to measure if the neutron has an electric dipole moment. This is complementary to high energy experiments.
4 hours ago
Neutrons are not that different from protons. The decay from neutrons to protons is pretty well understood, and there’s no reason to think that the nature of quark/gluon interactions in a neutron are significantly different from those in a proton. What kind of new physics are you imagining we’d get?
Of course more experimental data is a good thing, but in this case it doesn’t seem obvious that it would lead to anything really new.
29 minutes ago
Why do you say they're "pretty well understood" when there's been a long-standing unresolved discrepancy between lifetime measurement techniques?
7 hours ago
I don't expect that to be the case, it's likely that the article simply focuses on the proton.
38 minutes ago
> We’ve incorporated their animations into our own attempt to unveil its secrets.
And like the proton, this statement is somehow heavier than the entire article. What an absolutely bizarre, arrogant choice of words.
2 hours ago
As an expert in air conditioning repair… a thing is a dynamically maintained waveform of interacting modes. The proton demonstrates that reality is resonance… music, not machinery… processes over objects. The universe isn’t built from particles, it’s built from oscillatory relations which remain stable. The first utterance set the constraint that selects the allowed oscillations that gave rise to structure from undifferentiated oscillatory potential.
2 hours ago
> processes over objects
this is correct, waves are a product of pressures, so, are emergent also, the real question is, where does the pressure originate
2 hours ago
Waves don’t come from pressure. Pressure comes from constrained waves… constraints prevent oscillatory relations from freely satisfying their phases. Pressure is a local manifestation of the same idea behind gravity. When many interacting modes lock into a persistent configuration, they impose constraints on nearby modes. To us on the inside it looks like curvature and attraction. But the comment section on HN is a bloodsport…
28 minutes ago
You're also trying to argue against a nonzero number of literal physicists who do this type of thinking for a living.
4 minutes ago
I’m sharing not arguing. This is the comment section of a website. I sold my autonomy for a wage doing other things, but I happily accept my affliction of contemplating the universe. Maybe it will spark something in the imagination of someone. Amateurs thinking is what led humanity to this point. I clearly stated my lack of domain expertise- but I reserve my right to unprofessionally question foundations and reject treating silence about first principles as intellectual virtue. I also accept, with grumbling, the downvotes.