Re: Could the 'missing dimensions' be quarks?

Posted by rtharbaugh on September 14, 2003 at 18:35:19:

In Reply to: Re: Could the 'missing dimensions' be quarks? posted by DickT on September 14, 2003 at 13:43:39:

Yes, of course you are correct, as usual. I was searching for an interesting image, and cork rhymes with quarks, and there is a hurricane current on the Atlantic horizon, so it just sort of came together. However, my thought was not so far off base. Even a photon that is small enough to penetrate a proton would still have to have overcome the confinement energy of the quark, which is a lot to expect from a photon. Maybe lots of photons in harmony could do the trick. Has anyone studied the decay rate of protons under photon bombardment? Maybe focused lasers or masers? Most of the studies I have heard about have to do with protons and neutrinos and the missing solar neutrino problem.

My reading has led me to believe that quarks are held together very strongly, but have lots of freedom to move around within their confinement volume, so I presume most energetic interactions would just knock them around without freeing them from confinement.

Anyway all of this is particle theory, not string theory, and I have come to suspect that we will have to abandon the idea of particles somewhere along the line. Of course string theory or any other theory should be required to reduce to particle theory at appropriate scales, but from the arguments ongoing about the size and shape of such things as electrons and even protons, I suspect we have already reached the scale where good old matter can no longer be thought of in terms of hard surfaced objects.

My own current quest, haveing finally read Smolin, is to get a better understanding of background independence, which perhaps doesn't mean exactly what I thought it did. I was thinking last night about dimensions, how some views of events seem frozen, (bacground dependent?) while other views seem to possess the qualities of change and motion. Newton's work benefited from freeze-frame analysis, where an object in motion was thought of as possessing instantaneous vector position and momentum in any part of its trajectory.

Smolin seems to be saying that GR is background independent because it changes over time, but that seems less than satisfactory. Surely it has more to do with GR haveing no preferred frame of reference? Is a preferred frame of reference the background in question?

I am also almost through reading Kepler's Conjecture, and the discussion there of lattice solutions and lattice-free solutions seems to be parallel, if not the same. Could it be that the background in question is a lattice? And freedom from the lattice is the same as independence from the background?

Of course my line of thought in the dimensional model I have presented on this board seems to be directed toward the structure of the background, but it is not so frozen as it might seem from the presentation so far. The Kepler stack can be extended to infinity, but the question of confinement changes the argument to one of the quality of surfaces. What happens to the surface of a confined Kepler stack? Many of the arguments taken to this point have to do with spheres packed in boxes, but what about spheres packed in spheres? I raised this question a while ago but no one has taken it up, except Sol thought it would make an interesting sculpture.

My point is that if we construct aggregates of Planck spheres they tend to fill space in the Kepler stack, but then if confined in a sphere (or a spheroid, but that is a complication for the future)surface effects become the main feature. There should be a definable relationship between the radius of the supersphere, R, and the radii of the fill spheres, r, that would cause some ratios of R/r to be more stable than others. Some ratios will have much more freedom of position on their surfaces than others.

Perhaps the ones with more freedome will actually be more stable, since the more local freedom, the less likely that a sphere will be dislodged rather that merely relocating on the surface.

Got to go. Best regards.

Thanks,

Richard T. Harbaugh

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Follow Ups: (Reload page to see most recent)

• Re: Could the 'missing dimensions' be quarks? -- DickT 9/15/03 (20)
  • Re: Could the 'missing dimensions' be quarks? -- pelastration 9/15/03 (0)
  • Quark to Quark Measure -- sol 9/15/03 (18)
    • Re: Quark to Quark Measure -- DickT 9/15/03 (2)
      • Re: Quark to Quark Measure -- sol 9/15/03 (1)
        • Re: Quark to Quark Measure -- DickT 9/15/03 (0)
    • Dimension is Relative to Energy -- sol 9/15/03 (14)
      • Re: Dimension is Relative to Energy -- DickT 9/15/03 (13)
        • Dimension is Relative to Metric Points:) -- sol 9/15/03 (12)
          • Re: Dimension is Relative to Metric Points:) -- DickT 9/15/03 (9)
            • solar wind, heliosphere, plasmas, etc -- lanecove 9/16/03 (8)
              • Re: solar wind, heliosphere, plasmas, etc -- rtharbaugh 9/16/03 (4)
                • X-rays from the dark side of the Moon -- lanecove 9/17/03 (2)
                  • X-rays from the dark side of consciousness -- rtharbaugh 9/17/03 (1)
                    • Re: X-rays from the dark side of consciousness -- lanecove 9/17/03 (0)
                • here is the link -- rtharbaugh 9/16/03 (0)
              • Discrete versus Continuity? -- sol 9/16/03 (2)
                • Re: Discrete versus Continuity? -- lanecove 9/16/03 (0)
                • Geometry is Better then Topology? -- sol 9/16/03 (0)
          • Gmn = - 8pG/c2Tmn(From Gravity to supergravity) -- sol 9/15/03 (1)
            • Re: Gmn = - 8pG/c2Tmn(From Gravity to supergravity) -- DickT 9/15/03 (0)

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