> Each neutron in an atomic nucleus is made up of three elementary particles called quarks.
Well and tons and tons of virtual particles popping in and out of existance. Only a little over 1% the mass of a neutron is the three quarks normally listed.
Well and tons and tons of virtual particles popping in and out of existance. Only a little over 1% the mass of a neutron is the three quarks normally listed.
A virtual "particle" is really more of a "disturbance" in a field: think splashing in a pool vs a wave. And in the context of the contents of a proton, imagine trying to differentiate a well-behaved 1hz wave from the other noise in the liquid, when the liquid is in a blender.
edit to add:
To recover the local/global variable analogy, imagine the compiler was continuously recompling the code based, inlining (or undoing that inlining), hoisting variables out of loops (or inserting them back), and trying to determine where a particular temporary value for calculation is being stored. Again, it's not a _great_ analogy; because I have a hard time determining how understanding the analogy would lead you to correct conclusions about virtual particles, but yeah.
They're two different kind of object that come out of the equations, and they happily interract or turn into each other sometimes.
But Virtual Particle doesn't mean they're not real, and also doesn't mean they're particles :)
Disclaimer: I'm ignorant, and this is my summary of Matt Strassler off the top of my head. Mistakes are mine.
Source: https://profmattstrassler.com/2011/10/10/virtual-particles-n...
Pardon my layman ignorance. When the particles pop in and out of existence, how does mass manage to remain the same? Or does mass keep changing and is not fixed quantity but rather a range?
And what do come out of, and where do they go?
Gluons pop up out of nothing to carry this energy that struggling bound quarks have and add up into nothing passing their energy back to quarks.
If you pump in even more energy into this system (for example by smashing something into it) even something like new quark-antiquark pair can pop up into existence and one of the original quarks might fly off away with one of the new particles to form a separate meson. The other particle from the created pair stays and changes the identity of three quark particle so it's no longer a neutron but some other three quark particle.
The energy that is present withing the system of bound components must be something else.
Do you have a source for this?