The electron, the proton and the quark are all entities within the realm of particle hence quantum physics. All three carry electrical charge. All three have mass. After those observations, things get interesting, or messy, depending on your point of view.
An electron has a negative charge exactly equal and opposite to that of a proton. Note: the charge is exactly equal, even though the proton has a far greater mass than the electron (some 2000 times heavier in fact, not that there has to be of necessity any relationship between mass and charge).
Now that’s strange since the electron is a fundamental particle but the positively charged proton is a composite particle, made up of a trio of quarks (as it the neutron with no net charge). The proton has two quarks each with a positive 2/3rds charge (up quark) and one quark with a negative 1/3rd charge (down quark) for an overall balance of one positive charge. (The neutron on the other hand has one up quark with a positive 2/3rds charge and two down quarks each with a negative 1/3rd charge, for an overall balance of zero charge – neither positive nor negative.)
Now you might suggest that an electron might be a fusion of a trio of down quarks, each with a negative 1/3rd charge, except the electron, again, isn’t a composite particle, and the mass is all wrong for that scenario. If an electron were a composite of a trio of down quarks, each with a minus 1/3rd charge, the electron would be thirty times more massive than it is – not something particle physicists would fail to take notice of.
Further, the force particle that governs the electron is the photon; that which governs the quarks inside the proton and the neutron is the gluon, which further differentiates the two things – quarks and electrons. In any event, if you could have a composite particle of a trio of negative 1/3rd down quarks, if that were the case, and it is the case, and it’s called the Negative Delta, you’d also need a composite particle that’s the fusion of a trio of positive 2/3rds up quarks for an overall charge of plus two. To the best of my knowledge there is only one such critter in the particle zoo and it’s called the Doubly Positive Delta. I’m sure you’ve never heard of these Delta particles, which goes to show how much bearing or impact they have on life, the Universe, and everything.
In case you were wondering, there would be an anti-quark of minus 2/3rds charge, and an anti-quark of a positive 1/3rd charge, to yield an anti-proton and an anti-neutron. The anti-proton would of course have an equal and opposite charge to the anti-electron (which has a formal name – the positron). So things are equally as mysterious in the realm of the anti-world.
Question: How do you get 1/3rd or 2/3rds of an electric charge in any event? Of course one could just multiply by three and that does away with the fractions, but that doesn’t resolve the larger issues, like for that matter, what exactly is electric charge and how does it come to be?
Presumably quarks inside of protons and neutrons, and electrons, could have taken on any old values of charge, separate and apart, but didn’t. Why? Is this evidence for a Multiverse (where anything that can happen does happen in all possible combinations); intelligent design (which does not of necessity imply a deity – just a creator, or a programmer); or just a coincidence?
Why is it so? What does it mean? Equal and opposite charges between the proton and the electron would just seem to be one of Mother Nature’s little mysteries.
But something else is odd here. The proton, as noted above, is 2000 times more massive than the electron, but if you weigh up the trio of quarks* that make up the proton, the proton should only come in at roughly 20 times that of an electron. That’s 100 times too small. So where does the other 1980 bits of mass come from? Well the gluon that holds the proton’s (and the neutron’s) quarks together, like the electron’s photon and gravity’s (theoretical or hypothetical) graviton, have no rest mass that add to the total. But the internal jiggling of the quarks and their gluon companions does add a bit more mass to the proton. Remember that motion equals energy which equals mass. Finally, that leaves the vacuum energy to fill the remaining gap.
Vacuum energy: what’s that? There’s no such state as zero energy, so there’s energy around even where you don’t expect it – like in a vacuum. If you have a finite amount of energy in a finite volume, you cannot dilute that amount of energy such that you end up with no energy present. That’s a violation of fundamental conservation laws. So this vacuum energy is present everywhere and experimentally confirmed so that’s not an issue to be debated. The next bit is to recall that Einstein’s famous equation relates the equality between energy and mass. Mass can be converted to energy and energy can be converted to mass. So this vacuum energy can produce what’s known as virtual particles, which exist for nanoseconds (actually way less than that) before recombining, going poof, and returning to the environment again as energy.
Everywhere, anywhere, all the time, these virtual particles pop into and out of existence – your basic transformation of energy into matter (mass) and back to energy again. Again, matter and energy are two sides of the same coin. A little bit of mass can create a lot of energy as the atomic bomb; a lot of energy can create a tiny bit of mass, and virtual particles are tiny, so it doesn’t take much energy to manufacture them. As you might expect, it’s cheaper (uses less energy) to create virtual ‘ping pong balls’ than virtual ‘bowling balls’, and so you get way more of the lighter particles created than the heavier ones. Further, the heavier they are the quicker they go poof again. Not that it ultimately matters but these pop-in pop-out events transpire so quickly that not even the finest and most accurate of Olympic timers could measure their duration. Quantum’s vacuum energy’s virtual pop-in pop-out is all over in the blink of a blink of a blink of a blink (add some more blinks) of an eye.
Oh, one other thing to note, when the vacuum energy creates these virtual particles, they are created in pairs – matter-antimatter pairs to be precise. Now why, when virtual particles are created are they in that form? Matter-antimatter pairs are the only viable way of returning to the vacuum energy the energy that was ‘borrowed’ to create the particles in the first place. It’s like borrowing money from the bank. You’ve got to repay it. If the vacuum energy created, say a pair of electrons, well the energy debt couldn’t be repaid since two electrons can’t annihilate each other back to pure energy. The bank’s money wouldn’t be repaid and there’d be hell to pay instead!
This constant froth and bubble is commonly called quantum fluctuations or the quantum jitters. All that activity, those virtual matter-antimatter particles, completely accounts for the missing mass – the differential between the proton’s quarks’s mass and the proton’s mass. In a similar way, presumably all matter is more massive as a result of these quantum jitters that take place in the vacuum energy, jitters which even permeate the insides of protons and neutrons. So, and I hope you’re sitting down while reading this, a large part of your mass is due to the jittery happenings of the vacuum energy!
Given the above, I can’t help now but wonder what affect this constant froth and bubble, the quantum jitters, has on the biological body – your biological body. In theory, barring external agents like accidents, there is no real reason why we should age and die. Some diseases are obviously caused by outside agents like bacteria and viruses, but others have more mysterious origins. There are external agents like smoking, alcohol, radioactivity and ultraviolet light which can have detrimental effects. But if you exclude all nasty external agents, why would we age and ultimately snuff it?
The body, your body, my body, your pet’s body, is ultimately a composite of the fundamental particles that make up life, the universe and everything. These fundamental or elementary particles are subject to quantum phenomena. These particles have a volume for those phenomena to operate in. Even in space external to those particles, quantum phenomena operate all the time, anywhere and everywhere. The vacuum energy isn’t somewhere ‘out there’ in never-never-land. It’s everywhere including inside you from head to toe. Virtual particles are being created and destroyed inside you even as you read this, like it or not. All of this too-ing and fro-ing, the constant creation of virtual particles and hence their annihilation (literally a matter-antimatter annihilation) – energy to matter and matter back to energy – must have some sort of wear and tear on biological systems starting at the quantum or micro level and moving on up the line. If something goes wrong at the micro level, it has an obvious ripple effect on up that line to the macro level. Perhaps modern medicine should pay closer attention to quantum and particle physics!
There are probably multi hundreds of thousands of monographs exploring and explaining the workings and maladies of the human body from conception to ultimate demise; from the whole of physiology and anatomy down to the individual organ systems (i.e. – digestive system, respiratory system, nervous system, etc.); the individual organs (stomach, lungs, spinal cord); the tissues that comprise these; the cells that make up the tissues and the biochemistry that works its magic inside the cells. But I doubt if you’ll find in any medical library too many tomes on particle and quantum physics. Yet without particle and quantum physics there could be no cellular biochemistry on up to gross physiology and anatomy.
If all those quantum jitters, those now-you-see-them now-you-don’t virtual particles consisting of matter-antimatter annihilations inside you weren’t bad enough, the micro world isn’t quite through with you. You’re being bombarded 24/7/52 by millions of cosmic rays and neutrinos every second, though fortunately nearly all pass right through you as if you didn’t exist at all. However, the same can’t be said for those matter-antimatter annihilations. There’s no way I can see the creation and destruction of virtual particles (in matter-antimatter pairs) having any beneficial effect on your body, hence my postulating that these quantum jitters might have some, even if partial, effect on some diseases, infirmities, the ageing process, even ultimately death.
There’s no point is worrying about this for there’s not a damn thing you or anyone, not even your family doctor or a particle physicist, can do about it.
The one saving grace is that the virtual energy is 120 orders of magnitude less than theory predicts, otherwise you and the Universe would be ripped apart – well actually you and the Universe would never have formed in the first place.
*There is some degree of uncertainty in the exact mass of those various quarks because they cannot be weighed in isolation. However, the estimates are probably pretty close to the mark. The error bars aren’t that great.
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