Yeah, gladly. If you believe that magnetism is real, then the same logic works to prove that quarks are real. If you don't believe that magnetism is real, I don't really know what more to say.
You cannot claim "magnetism is real even though we cannot see it but quarks are not real because we cannot see them" without fundamentally breaking down your own argument. Either it's irrelevant to a thing's existance whether or not we can "see" it (which gives us modern science) or only things we can see are real (which would bring us back to even before primitive religion, as even primitive human beings understood that things you couldn't see were still there)
We have observed quarks interacting with the real world. We can make predictions based on their existance, and they come true. They are "real" for any scientific definition of the word "real". If their observance breaks any other law of physics (which, according to Hakurei they don't, and she usually knows what she's talking about) then this simply points out that the other law is wrong. Because regardless of whether "quarks" are real or their theory is sound, we have still made an observation that breaks a physical law.
"Gladly?" Jesus H. Christ!! Show me where I said quarks aren't real, or magnetism isn't real. I said one cannot
SEE electromagnetic fields or quarks. You can observe the interactions, but you can't actually see them. And I never said a word about any theory being wrong either. Do all you critics just read the heading and not read the whole paragraph? Like you said: "They are real for any scientific definition of the word real." They still can't be seen.
Quarks are the current "best fit" theory for what we think we know about the neutrons, protons, and other mesons. They are just as "real" as point-like particles can be.
Might be something inside the quarks, but right now, the energies required to figure them out are beyond today's technology.
According to Super String Thoery, quarks will be found to be made of tiny vibrational modes of energy, folds in 11 dimensional space-time. But whether this fits the data better remains to be seen.
How do scientists know the existence of Quarks in protons and neutrons? And how do they know they are fundamental particles?
A:
,That's a tough question to answer since
no one has actually seen a real isolated quarkyou can't see an isolated quark because the color force does not let them go, and the energy required to separate them produces quark-antiquark pairs long before they are far enough apart to observe separately.
One kind of visualization of quark confinement is called the "bag model". One visualizes the quarks as contained in an elastic bag which allows the quarks to move freely around, as long as you don't try to pull them further apart. But if you try to pull a quark out, the bag stretches and resists.
Another way of looking at quark confinement is expressed by Rohlf. "When we try to pull a quark out of a proton, for example by striking the quark with another energetic particle, the quark experiences a potential energy barrier from the strong interaction that increases with distance." As the example of alpha decay demonstrates, having a barrier higher than the particle energy does not prevent the escape of the particle - quantum mechanical tunneling gives a finite probability for a 6 MeV alpha particle to get through a 30 MeV high energy barrier.
But the energy barrier for the alpha particle is thin enough for tunneling to be effective. In the case of the barrier facing the quark, the energy barrier does not drop off with distance, but in fact increases.
In 1977, an experimental group at Fermilab led by Leon Lederman discovered a new resonance at 9.4 GeV/c^2 which was interpreted as a bottom-antibottom quark pair and called the Upsilon meson. From this experiment, the mass of the bottom quark is implied to be about 5 GeV/c^2. The reaction being studied was
where N was a copper or platinum nucleus. The spectrometer had a muon-pair mass resolution of about 2%, which allowed them to measure an excess of events at 9.4 GeV/c^2. This resonance has been subsequently studied at other accelerators with a detailed investigation of the bound states of the bottom-antibottom meson.
Next! :roll: Solitary