After my cool-looking guess with helium, I realized that I cannot progress in understanding the nature of the nuclear bond without understanding at least something of the nature of quarks.
Quarks are the elementary particles that you can split a proton or a neutron into. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should see the shape of a quark in a hydrogen atom, a neutron or in a proton, but you sure should be able to deduce something of their shape based on their properties.
If charge is the related to the secondary twist in the double-helical loop of dots, it shouldn’t be farfetched to assume that a quark can be considered a toroidal coil. And if there are three quarks both in protons and neutrons, these should be described as three interconnected loops.
The important thing to remember is that the mass of the three quarks that make up a proton is quite tiny in comparison to the mass of the proton. This should mean that while the charge (the number of loops) in proton matches that of the sum of the three quarks, the extra mass in a quark makes the individual loops much bigger in diameter.
And in a proton, there are two quarks with a charge of +2/3 and one with a charge of -1/3. As far as I see it, it should mean that the -1/3 quark has half the number of loops as the +2/3 quarks, as well as an opposite twist.
So, if the loops have an opposite twist, how come they won’t unravel, so there would be a charge of zero?
Well, they sort of do and sort of don’t. In a regular proton, not being pummeled in a particle accelerator, there shouldn’t be separate quarks, but the proton quasi-sphere:
However, this quasi-sphere doesn’t have zero charge.
But in an atom smasher, the proton can be made to collide, causing first the disproportionation into the three loops, and as far as I understand it, their subsequent release.
But these quark donuts definitely don’t like to be alone, so they fuse with other quarks to form protons (or neutrons).
So how confident am I that this describes quarks? Only moderately. I just know that a bit over a year ago I had absolutely no idea what a quark could be, but hazarded a guess nevertheless. I can honestly say that I wasn’t even wrong. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the concept of the quark.
And does this help me in understanding the nature of the nuclear bond? Not immediately. But it helps me with troubleshooting. If I try to explain my theory of quarks and I hit a brick wall, there’s a decent chance I’ve been all wrong. However, in the lucky situation that the theory seems to hold, I can progress a bit further. Naturally I have to tread carefully, because logic is a double-edged sword. If you logically progress from a false premise, you end up lost. As they say in the IT world garbage in, garbage out.
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