Of Quarks and Electrons

Wile I have been relatively vague about structures smaller than an atom, I was pulled down this rabbit hole almost by accident.

The things is that we know an incredible amount of subatomic theory on a mathematical level, but not on a physical level. But we don't know we don't know, because we think quantum mechanics says there is no classical physical representation

It's a Catch-22 situation: we know that quantum mechanics works in all measurable situations, so we know it true. If we interpret the wave function to be a true representation of reality, this means the uncertainty in the wave function to be a true phenomenon and not a mathematical limitation of the used tool.

If the true elementary particle in nature is a classical sphere of Planck length not following quantum mechanics, but rather quantum mechanics being an emergent property of their interactions, then the whole basis of physics have to be rewritten, but in a way where not a single experimental result can be ignored in the progress. Easier said than done. Or probably sounds just as difficult as it is...

I already have to simplest supramolecular orbital as a starting point, but what happens at the nucleus of the atom?

Now just a bit of mathematics in the form of sums. These are the relevant number relating to the mass of a hydrogen atom. The hydrogen atom consists of an electron and a proton, which in turn consists of two up quarks and one down quark. Due to quirks of physics, the mass of these particles isn't usually referred to as kilograms (or heaven forbid, pounds), but in a unit called MeV/c². An electron has a mass of ~0.511 MeV/c², whereas the proton has a mass of ~938.272 MeV/c². But here is the truly weird thing, an up quark has a mass of ~2.2 MeV/c² and the down quark has a mass of ~4.7 MeV/c². The mathematically astute person may have done the sums and ended up with a mass of 9.1 MeV/c². This is quite different from the ~938.272 MeV/c² for a proton. So something is surely wrong, right?

Well, not according to the current interpretation of quantum mechanics:

"As you noticed, the rest masses of two up quarks and a down quark don't add up to the rest mass of a proton. They only account for about 1% of the proton's mass. The other 99% comes from the energy that holds the quarks together inside the proton."

So no problem at all. You define the 99 % of the unaccounted mass as energy and you no longer have a problem. So what is this energy?

"In physics, energy (from Ancient Greek: ἐνέργεια, enérgeia, “activity”) is the quantitative property that is transferred to a body or to a physical system, recognizable in the performance of work and in the form of heat and light."

It was Albert Einstein, who introduced the concept that mass is energy, or E = mc². To be frank, this is the only equation that makes any sense. Any other definition of energy is so fluffy as to make no sense. So could we say that all energy is the kinetic energy of the Planck spheres? I would like to say so, but there's a small problem: kinetic energy is 1/2 mv², or 1/2 mc² in the case of the Planck spheres. I would say not bad, but this is just half of what we know there to be.

If I were to guess, I would say Energy is not necessarily an illusion, but a mathematical 'trick'. The fundamental 'force' is the momentum, or mc, of the planck Spheres. A single Planck sphere cannot have energy without context. Without force acting upon it, it moves in a straight line. If we want the Planck Sphere to veer off course, there must an adjacent Planck sphere pushing it off its linear course. Thus, the energy of the Planck sphere comes from the 'veering off'. The movement along each circular arc of the 3D orbital can be considered as rotation. And kinetic energy of a rotating system, Ek, is the sum of rotational energy (Er) and translational energy (Et).

Translational energy is 1/2 mv² and assuming the Planck sphere movement as a simple pendulum, the rotational energy is

So, the kinetic energy of orbiting Planck spheres is Ek = mc². Conversely, Planck spheres of a ring of light do not rotate, and thus they only have momentum, mc.

So, energy is just Planck spheres forced into orbit. Or more specifically, conventional mass is just Planck spheres forced into orbit. I am not being very unique in saying that light carries energy as momentum.

But, if the Planck spheres are not in orbit, then the conventional notation says that they have no mass. I would say this is lazy thinking, but if we define mass as Planck spheres forced into rotational movement, then so be it. I am not sure how helpful this is, but to some extent this is all language. If the mathematics adds up, we can call the mathematics whatever we wish. The problem arises when we think the language holds a deeper truth.

So what is force? Force is mass times acceleration, or F = ma. But on the scale of Planck spheres, nothing accelerates, as everything is always moving at the speed of light. Here we get to the tricky bit of force created by the veering the course of the Planck spheres and the conservation of momentum. We can use the image introduced a previous post to look at the veering trajectory of the Planck sphere. When the planck spheres are tightly packed into fast-moving string, the direction (or vector in math speak) of the trajectory of each sphere is different. In a three-dimensional space, the vecor comprises of three components: x, y and z. For now we asseme a 2-dimensional coordinate for simplicity. For sphere number 1 all of the speed is along the y axis, whereas from sphere 2 onwards, an increasing proportion of the speed is along the x axis. This means the distance along the y axis of spheres 1 and 3 decreases, whereas their distance along the x axis increases. This geometrical constraint forces the sphere 2 to move change its trajectory. But what makes the sphere 3 veer off its course? Spheres 2 and 4, is the obvious answer. As the orbital is a closed loop, just the presence of neighboring Planck spheres is sufficient to keep the orbital stable

So how does this relate to the molecular orbital? Well, the simple supramolecular orbital is kept in place by the pressure of surrounding supramolecular orbitals rotating around it. This is not what happens in atoms. In there, it is rather the quarks that maintain the molecular orbital. What are quarks? My intuition says that they are the orbital knotted into small loops at the intersection.

What these loops really look like an what properties they have is quite hard to say. However, the basic idea has to be that the loops have somehow knotted at the intersection. Again, my intuition says that the down quark are really two loops that for some reason are nearly unseparable, that maintain the two folded over sections of the orbital. Conversely, the two up quarks allow the orbitals to shift from one spherical shell to another.

In reality, I don't know whether even the up quark is just one loop or many. I also have suspecions of whether it is even relevant to say what mass a quark has: it might well be that when the loop is detached from the whole in a particle collider, the loop of the up quark can have a mass of 1.8-2.7 MeV, depending on the situation. Similarly, the released loop of the down quark can have a mass of 4.4-5.2 MeV.

As far as I see it, the electron, the quarks and the rest of the mass is just spread accross a single orbital and it seems pointless to say where the mass of the 'energy' goes. An electron is the 'quantum' of the orbital that can be detached and the quarks are the 'quanta' of the nucleus that can be detached. But when not detached, they are all just one orbital.

The loops in the animations above are exaggerated, as the length of the model is ca 74 pm (H-H bond), wherea the length of the loop is 0.43 am, where am refers to attometer, i.e. roughly 8 orders of magnitude smaller than the whole orbital. An it should go without saying that the thickness of the line in the image is exaggerated, as Planck length is a further 16 orders of magnitude smaller than the estimated upper limit for a quark.

There is also the possibility that no such loops exist in the core of the proton, but that the loops form only in the collisions where the quarks are detected. I.e. while quarks are real, they are more the middle fragments in the spaghetti mystery. A long strand of spaghetti cannot be broken in two pieces: there is always at least one smaller piece broken in the middle. It's possible that just like in spaghetti, there was only one strand in the beginning, the quark is just a property of 'atom smashing'. But this is still a thought.

I might need to revisit this post when I learn more, but this gives a decent idea what I currently think about quarks and electrons.

As a final statement, I give you my version of E = mc². It's

Or the momentum of a Planck sphere is its mass times the speed of light. As far as I know, there's nothing more fundamental than this.