Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for trying to explain. It's all still largely beyond me TBH.

But more idiot's questions if you have any thoughts....

My understanding was that particle accelerators were being used to try and deconstruct matter, to do for want of a better word "fission" by smashing things together and seeing what smaller bits came out - by analogy to mass spectrometry.

What seems to be going on now is that we're trying to make new particles. Have we switched to a sort of "fusion" - to see if smashing things together will get them to stick in bigger configurations?

Have all the most fundamental bits (quarks?) been found now? Can we prove that those are irreducible?

chreers

View on HN

Essentially, you smash particles together. When you do so, they will give off a bunch of energy.

That energy forms into a bunch of particles, each of which will then decay into less esoteric particles.

We have no proof (and it's probably impossible to do so), that anything we've found is fundamental.

> We have no proof (and it's probably impossible to do so), that anything we've found is fundamental.

This is a good statement.

I've seen many online state that quarks are fundamental.

There is no way we can make such a definitive statement.

Quarks may be not be fundamental.

What would it take to actually prove that they are? I did miss the "impossible" above when first posting this -- but pretend it isn't?

it would require being able to generate a high enough energy beam

But using current accelerator technology it would require an accelerator many times the size of the earth, _many_.

I use to work at a particle accelerator, part time, when i was in college. Fun fact i once confirmed Einsteins photoelectric effect using a high energy x-ray beam, a copper target, and high voltage.

This is the problem String theorists have.

We will never, in the lifetime of anybody who guesses we ever existed, be able to build an accelerator powerful enough to check whether it is right about gravity. So, they potter and try to show this or that family of variations (among 10^500 imagined) does or doesn't contradict details of the Standard Model we have most confidence in.

> We have no proof (and it's probably impossible to do so), that anything we've found is fundamental.

this entire discussion is fully outside of my knowledge wheelhouse but why should we believe that the universe is anything less than infinitely fractal at the micro scale? like you said, how would we even know if something is fundamental?

> why should we believe that the universe is anything less than infinitely fractal at the micro scale

And what basis does that claim rest on

sheer intuition based upon the adage "you don't know what you don't know", repeated incorrect assumptions that we've finally discovered fundamental building blocks of reality, and lack of capacity for imagination (sorry—I tried!) for what the discovery of absolutely positively provably fundamental building blocks of reality could even potentially look like

I disagree. Not that you're wrong but that you're right.

???

> repeated incorrect assumptions that we've finally discovered fundamental building blocks of reality

Physics has had the other problem for a while now - they know the current theory is wrong, but they can't find any evidence to disprove it, and it's wasting generations of scientists and particle accelerators to do it.

The Planck constant isn't infinite.

How do we even know that the universe has fundamental particles?

It may not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunk_(mereology)

That sent me down a fascinating rabbit whole on Wikipedia. Thank you!

The Planck constant appears fundamental.

If information is physically fundamental, the fundamental "particle" would be some sort of bit. Planck's constant could be that bit.

All other particles would be derivative, and their being caused by some base rules.

Physics will only be complete when fully explained in terms of information, regardless of the physical reality of information. The two aspects of explanation are 1. the rules and 2. what are the bits? Perhaps both those things are one.

Perhaps bits are not fundamental and quaternary bits are, but that would still implicate information as fundamental.

In our basest theory QFT, no particle is fundamental because they're actually "fields" - but those fields are fundamental so that doesn't answer your question. We just think they're fundamental because we don't have enough evidence to construct anything better than the Standard Model.

It's not possible to do better than that, though, because you can't prove a negative statement like "there are no more fundamental particles". Even if we understood the laws of physics completely, they could always change on us. It's all up to the guy who owns the universe simulator.

But doesn't fundamentality in fields imply something quite different than fundamentality in parts (particles)?

I sense that the next step in physics and ontology can only happen when we have created a new linguistic approach to capture the 'fundamental' idea here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com