My post for today will again be a short one. Based on my last post’s realization that the extra mass in a proton must come from the elongation of the individual turns of a quark at rest, I realized that my old picture was quite misleading. While its general concept was correct, it seemed to imply that the double helical twist in a proton is very loose before it’s broken into quarks.
This loose twist made the presented structure seem a bit counterintuitive. There didn’t seem to be a good reason for why the structure looked the way it did.
So, I just made a new image that was otherwise almost identical to the initial post, but instead of using loose double-helices, I made them tight like in my previous post:
This image conveys that the structure is tight and stretched to where it’s at by some sort of event. And getting quarks out of protons isn’t that easy. The idea was presented in 1964, but it took until 1968 to observe them experimentally.
It just might be that if I dig just a bit deeper, I might even be able to write a manuscript on the Theory of Quarks. I think if I’m to do that, the next concept I have to understand a bit deeper is spin. Of course I’ve known of spin for over twenty years, but more in the vague quantum mechanical sense. It’s actually one of the central features of one of the most important tools I used to use, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. But as a chemist, you never really need to understand the physics behind your tools at properly deep level. But now I do.
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