In my last post I presented a rough guess on the structure of quarks. I also showed an illustration of the quarks in proton, just before the structure is ripped apart into its individual quarks. I tried to be careful in having twice the number of loops in the two up quarks in comparison to the single down quark. I also presented them with opposite twists (clockwise and counterclockwise) to illustrate the different signs (plus and minus) of the charge.
However, I completely forgot about the mass. Down quark has a mass of 4.7 MeV/c², while the up quark has a mass of 2.2 MeV/c², despite having twice the charge of the down quark. This means that the down quark, despite having half the turns of the up quark, should have over twice its length. In a proton the three quarks would look something roughly like this:
Here the long, very stretched, helix is the up quark, while the compact helices are the two down quarks.
So, is this what a proton looks like? Not exactly. This is a rough snapshot illustration of what a proton might look like when observed under conditions that allow for the detection of quarks. The number of loops in a helix is picked rather arbitrarily, just to illustrate the concept, as are most of the other features. The only slightly ‘true’ part of the picture are the length ratios and the ratios of the numbers of loops.
Except, I forgot something. It is inevitable that the double-helical knotting of the loops in proton means that all of the quarks are also double-helices. Like This:
The issue of quarks is still a risky business for me. This is the problem of trying to figure out something new, when there’s a whole lot of study already on the topic. You can fail in two very different ways. One is to not try. To succumb to what Douglas Adams called Somebody else’s problem field. Assume that you can’t handle the problem and hope that somebody else will. Or you descend into the crank territory, where you invent an alternative form of physics. As far as I understand it, to overcome these two extremes, I must allow myself for a while to be the crank and come up with something novel, but almost immediately after that I try to debunk myself.
So, definitely at the moment I’m still in the crank territory, where I can be massively wrong. The premise of what I say could be completely misguided. But that’s not a problem yet. Just as long as I understand that I don’t know enough to evaluate how close I am to the truth, I’ll be alright. I won’t be trying to submit this for peer review, or spam anyone’s mailbox with this.
The only one to see these musings is you, my dear reader. Although, if my blog ever becomes popular, there could be quite a few of you readers.
And on a final note, I only now read the crank paper that I put a link to. It both refers to a crank theory of springs made of smaller springs (just as in this post) and to the string theory. From the piece:
Wertheim calls a 2003 conference on string theory and cosmology "by far the most surreal physics event I have ever been to." She likens it to "a sugar-fueled children’s birthday party or the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party," with each presenter floating speculations that everyone else considered to be "unsupported by evidence and based entirely on arbitrary assumptions." Far from fringe figures, the attendees included Stephen Hawking of Cambridge, Brian Greene of Columbia, Lisa Randall of Harvard and other stars of modern physics.
As far as my quark theory is concerned, I stand guilty as charged. It isn’t yet very strongly supported by evidence (or at least I don’t know of the evidence) and it is based on plenty of assumptions.
Comments