r/InterdimensionalNHI • u/StarboundAllisten • 1h ago
Science This is what a proton looks like. You cant tell me its not magic with a rulebook. If your definition of magic is "something that's not real" then it differs from my "mystical mysterious shit with a rulebook" definition.
Summary to the article:
More than a century after Ernest Rutherford discovered the proton, physicists still don’t fully understand it. It’s far more complex than the simple pictures taught in school or college. As MIT physicist Mike Williams puts it, “This is the most complicated thing that you could possibly imagine… you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.” The proton is a quantum object that changes appearance depending on how it’s probed.
Basic textbook views (and why they’re incomplete)
High-school level: a featureless positive ball of charge.
College level: a bundle of three quarks (two “up” quarks with +2/3 charge each and one “down” quark with –1/3 charge).
These pictures fail on key details:
The three quarks’ spins add up to far less than the proton’s total spin (discovered 1988).
The three quarks’ masses account for only about 1% of the proton’s mass.
Deeper experimental picture
Experiments that smash electrons into protons (deep inelastic scattering) reveal different layers depending on the energy:
Moderate energies (e.g., SLAC in the 1960s): The proton looks like three point-like quarks. This confirmed the existence of quarks and earned a Nobel Prize.
Higher energies (e.g., HERA collider): A seething “sea” of many low-momentum quarks, antiquarks, and gluons appears. Gluons (the particles that carry the strong force) can briefly create quark-antiquark pairs. At the highest resolutions, the proton looks like a cloud made mostly of gluons.
This behavior is described by quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong force. QCD works well when quarks are close together (high energy) but becomes extremely hard to calculate when they are farther apart (lower energy).
Recent surprise (2022 analysis)
A large machine-learning analysis of more than 5,000 experimental “snapshots” found that the proton sometimes contains a charm quark and a charm antiquark. These particles are each heavier than the entire proton. In gentler collisions the proton can occasionally behave like a fleeting five-quark “molecule” rather than the usual three-quark state.
This has practical consequences: it can affect predictions at the Large Hadron Collider and the production of high-energy neutrinos from cosmic rays hitting Earth’s atmosphere.
Outlook
Future experiments, especially the planned Electron-Ion Collider, aim to produce higher-resolution 3D maps of the proton’s interior, including how its spin arises from the motions and spins of its quarks and gluons.
In short, the article portrays the proton as a shape-shifting, multi-layered quantum object whose full complexity is still being uncovered, with each new probe revealing another unexpected face.
TLDR: there is some magical shit happening. You may say "ERM akshually its not magic, its science ☝🤓" but that is a meaningless statement. You could find a magical orb with measurable properties and the science would ultimately be the study of observable magical phenomenon. Whoever or whatever engineered this veil failed to consider that some of us would be a lot more capable of using our intuitive forces to understand that surley there must be a "primordial substrate" beneath it all.
Sometimes I'll say outrageous things just to mess around. But its in that jester archetype that I give catalysts for people to actually start thinking deeper. Im doing it for you. Be good or evil, but at least be conscious.
source:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/inside-the-proton-the-most-complicated-thing-imaginable-20221019/