Protons - "Fundamental Particles"?

It wasn't before a couple of days back, that I've discovered protons as "Fundamental Particles" by my chemistry school notes. Well, are they fundamental at all?

Well, as of the 21st century, they're not. First proposed by Murray Glenn Mann in the 1960s, quarks have transformed our picture of the very small. Protons and neutrons were no longer elementary, and we had a theoretical picture of quarks within protons and neutrons, alias hadrons. Like any other fermion, quarks are believed to have half integer spins, and hence by Spin-Statistics theorem, they obey the Exclusion Principle.

Fermions are divided to 3 "generations", serialized as I, II, and III. However, quarks of generation II and III are heavy enough to instantaneously decay to their much stable counter-parts, quarks of generation I - up (u) & down (d). The stability of this generation of quarks (& leptons) account for matter being composed of electrons, protons and neutron, which are inturn composed of these quarks (i.e protons and neutrons), or they themselves belong to the generation (i.e electron). A proton is composed of 2 up quarks, and a down quark, while a neutron is all about 2 down quarks and a up quark.

Furthermore, quarks also have "colors", or "color charge". "Color" here is nothing like what we classically interpret it, because quarks are way too smaller than the possible wavelenght of corresponding visible light. As Hawking describes, it's just when physicists these days no longer turn to the greeks for names! All hadrons ought to have "white" color charge, which can be obtained as: red + blue + green or anti-red + anti-blue + anti-green, or red/blue/green + anti-red/blue/green, where anti-red, anti-red, and anti-blue are corresponding anti-properties of red, blue and green. Okay, enough of RGB; all protons and neutrons are composed of a red, green, and blue quarks, and that's about it.

Can quarks exist unconfined in space? They can, under impossibly crunchy extremes (during the quark epoch: see below). Otherwise they're taken care of by asymotic freedom; the further they are to drift apart, stronger the strength of their bind, (which is apparently caused by bosons called "gluons"). There are other approaches to the problem, to include those of quantum gravity. Quarks are believed to be bound by either something like a "string" (which is apparently not related to the string theory), or quantized force field lines. Then came the principle of duality, to claim that "strings" and "field lines" are just 2 different ways of looking at the same thing. Voila! They were unified and further interpreted to form Loop Quantum Gravity, a brand new perception of space at the fundamental level, or the Planck scale.

Infact, the theory of Big Bang lays a deal on quarks. It defines a "quark epoch", when the electroweak symmetry (i.e the symmetry between the weak and electromagnetic forces) was eliminated. The temperature was high enough to not let hadrons form. Quarks existed unconfined in space, until the hadron epoch, when particles like protons and neutrons formed.

Whatever may it be, protons ARE NOT elementary.

The Spurt of Time

I had once humorously postulated, "Time runs slower in the presence of a boring teacher", and I'm pretty sure that all of you would agree. As for my intention then, it's was all about amusing a couple of classmates, and nothing pretty much else. Perhaps, today is when I discover it's more than an amusing joke; it comes with its own story to tell.



We know that nothing transcends light when it comes to velocity, as proposed by Einstein's relativity. A wide number of verified mathematical formulae and theories is an open testimony to its success. But it was not where we stopped. We took it a step forward, to logically propose that time "travels" at the speed of light. It's the reason we don't see a dead star 13 billion light years away, even though they are, in a sense, history. The time of it's death has just not "reached" us. Simple as it seems, or is it?



Then came the "arrow", or rather, the "arrows of time", to count for time's unidirectional propagation; very much unlike light. If time is considered a vector, it can have one, and only one direction no matter the polarity of C & P symmetry, though the relative magnitude is governed by relativistic phenomena.

Consider the arrows of time mentioned afore. Stephan Hawking defines 3 arrows of time in his bestseller, A Brief History of Time, namely the thermodynamic arrow, physcological arrow, and finally the cosmological arrow.



Thermodynamic arrow is considered to exist in direction where enthropy, or randomness increases with time. It's somewhat to resemble Murphy's law: "Everything tends to go wrong!". A crude, but lively illustration would be a glass falling off a slab. It shatters to pieces, to represent enthropy. Back in time, the glass in it's pristine form can represent order. No matter where we exist, we'll always see a glass breaking, rather than it rebuilding on its own. That is, the backflow of enthropy in time is void, which seems very comparable to the arrow of time. I would hold relativity to govern the magnitude of this arrow.

The next in line is the physcological arrow of time. It's the direction we feel the time progressing. I would not pretend to be capable of elaborately explaining this, but one thing we could say with certainity is that it's directed the same way the thermodynamic arrow is. This is the reason why we always see a glass in it's pristine form before we see it broken. Now a question, as it may arise, does this arrow of time harbor a magnitude? If it does, is it independently assorted, or does it bear connections with the thermodynamic arrow of time?



My answer to the first question would be a big yes, as the first lines of this post goes. However, I don't really like the idea that this magnitude of this arrow is related to its thermodynamic counterpart. Again, the example of time "running" slow in the presence of a boring teacher illustrates this. There's nothing wrong with the relative magnitude of the thermodynamic arrow, but it's the physcological arrow of time under change. Analogously, when propagating at relativistic velocities, it's the thermodynamic arrow to slow down, but NOT the physcological one, as everything goes just "normal" with himself and his local surroundings. However, thing's not moving at his speed may seem wierd and simply, crazy! [Time dilation & Lorentz Contraction is what I'm talking about]. This simply implies that the physcological arrow of time is static. Even though the direction of the physcological arrow depends upon the thermodynamic arrow's, magnitude is mutually dynamic. That is, if that booooring teacher is to hop right into your spacecraft which takes you for excursions at relativistic speeds, and just if the teacher is boring enough, the physcological arrow of time in terms of magnitude may just coincide with the thermodynamic arrow!

The last arrow we have is the cosmological arrow of time. I don't really think there can be perceivable change in magnitude for this arrow, since it involves the entire cosmos at its scale. Law of conservation of collective energy & mass would imply that all the fluctuations in this arrow in terms of magnitude would simply "cancel" each other out. As for now, I can't really decide if the cosmological arrow is unidirectional. However, Hawking consider's the "expansion" of the universe as the determinant of the direction of the arrow of cosmological time.

It's all around us. It's all within us. Yet, all we know is that it's something that exists. Is it just a mind game? Not really...