Matt McIrvin wrote:t00fri wrote:If it was possible to model the "femto-universe" (of size ~ proton diameter ~ 1 fermi = 10^(-15) meter), clearly it would be fascinating to travel in Celestia manner among the quarks of a proton or other 'hadrons', land on a 'beauty' quark and watch a gluon 'raise' at the horizon;-)...
But, unfortunately, this is the domain of highly complex quantum phenomena. We are working fulltime;-) to understand them eventually...
Bye Fridger
It might be interesting just to give a sense of the scale-- as in the old educational film "Powers of Ten". But it would have to be pretty intensely metaphorical, since things on that scale move around in a strange quantum-mechanical manner that would be hard to model using traditional object rendering.
(And for some of these objects, nobody knows how big they are-- or even if they have an extended size at all! Nobody has ever been able to find any internal structure or spatial extension to quarks and electrons, unless you count the size of their wave functions, which is another thing entirely-- and that comes right back to the central problem...)
While the fundamental concepts of quantum mechanics are believed to remain valid in the 'femto-universe', there the dynamics is described by (highly non-perturbative) quantum field theory (Quantum Chromo Dynamics, QCD). The most striking feature being 'confinement', i.e. quarks and gluons cannot 'leave' the femto-universe: when their mutual separation /increases/, the strength of the so-called 'color' force between them increases /indefinitely/. In order to kick one of these guys out of the proton you would need /infinite/ energy.
This is most unlike celestial bodies that experience mutual gravitational forces, the strength of which /decreases/ with increasing distance...While gravitational forces are truly /long range/, the strong 'color' forces are only experienced /within/ sizes of the femto-universe. While quarks (and gluons) carry 'color' charge, i.e. they exist in 'red', 'green' and 'blue' varieties, the proton -- consisting of 3 (RGB) quarks -- is 'white'. Clearly, 'color' is just a name and NOT connected to /real/ color;-)...
About the best intuitive picture of what is going on at the scale of about 1 fermi among gluons and quarks is a close analogy to /super conductivity/ as formulated long ago by Nobel price winner Gerard 't Hooft.
Quarks are structure-less point particles only if looked at with very good resolution, i.e. at distances much smaller than 1 fermi. This is experimentally done at my laboratory.
If looked at with a 'microscope' whose resolution is of the order of the 'femto-universe' itself, quarks appear surrounded with a dense 'cloud' of gluons and thus appear like extended objects.
And so on...
Bye Fridger
