But no, it’s a WHOLE lot bigger than all that. There are hundreds of particles.
The part I keyed on, though, and which I cannot say I understand fully, and which I would likely need to read the math for to even approximate a good understanding (which won’t happen since I don’t do even Calculus, which is a regret of mine I will rectify some day), is something called quantum fluctuation and Renormalization.
As I understood the lecturer, the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle allows particles to be created from nothing. They can only be created for infinitesimally small amounts of time, and the larger they are, the smaller that amount of time, but this process is apparently continuous. We can’t take a picture of an atom, but it might be happening millions of times a second in every atom in the universe.
The math on this within a quantum level electromagnetic field is so difficult that physicists, rather than try and figure out what was actually happening, decided to take observed electrical charges for electrons and protons, and more or less “rig” the math backwards to get the result they wanted and needed, which is to say the observed quantities of +1 for Protons and -1 for Electrons.
But again this gets to the Quantum Vacuum, which I understand is normally derived a different way, although not having read the math, I am reduced to repeating my understandings of what the actual physicists have said.
This notion, that “there is enough energy in one square meter of ’empty’ space to boil every ocean on Earth”, as Richard Feynman put it, is in the middle of everything, literally. All physics depends on it. All physics assumes it. But they have no idea what it might mean for matter to appear and disappear spontaneously.
In the lectures he used the example of scientific progress by noting that Tyco Brahe created a large mass of raw data, Johannes Kepler created rules which described but did not explain it, and Newton created laws of physics from which Kepler’s rules could be derived. Now, we still don’t know how gravity works, so there are still large pieces missing, but this is the pattern.
At this moment, we observe that Heisenberg’s Uncertainly Principle “works” as an explanatory tool, but I am not at all sure we have even reached a Newtonian level of understanding of what it means for things to simply appear from nothing. How does that work? What does it say about our universe?
Can we even say matter exists, when what is visible, what is “above the surface” of the fluctuations, depends entirely on a substrate which is the opposite of solid, permanent, and “real”?
As the lecturer noted, there is no way to know the “real” charge of an electron or proton. It’s impossible. We can simply measure what’s left once the quantum fluctuations have been factored in and out.
This is very interesting work, and these are very interesting ideas.