🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 23 Mar 1997 05:00:12 -0500, Chris Wagner
<wagnerc@ucunix.san.uc.edu> wrote:

>> Now, we may be accustomed to think of an electron as just a little ball
>> whirling around a nucleus like a planet orbits a star. But, that's just a
>> convenient portrayal. Can you imagine it, these things have mass, but no
>> volume?!? Boggles the mind, doesn't it? But that's just something we have
>> to get used to in Quantum physics.

>It seems perfectly logical to me...  Consider this analogy:  What is 
>the volume of a black hole?  It is a quantum singularity, it has
>*zero* volume.  But its *effective* volume is the radius of its
>event horizon.  This very intuitivly transfers to all subatomic
>particles.  They can all be thought of as quantum singularities of
>*fixed* mass.  Therefore they don't blow up in mass and size like
>a black hole.  

Ah, but there's more to it than that, which I didn't mention previously.
It's now also thought that the very concept of mass itself has a very
smallest particle associated with it. For example, an electron and a proton
have the exact same amount of electric charge (but in opposite directions),
however, an electron is about 2000 times less massive than a proton. Same
magnitude of electric charge, but a very different amount of mass. Now,
there's no explanation for this yet. How can such a tiny particle be the
equal of a much larger particle when it comes to electric charge? We just
know it to be true, but we have no idea why. 

It is postulated that the entire universe is bathed in an as yet undetected
field called the Higgs field. And the particles that make up this field are
known as the Higgs boson; the Higgs boson is thought to be the very
smallest particle of mass in the universe. So it looks like mass is not so
much a basic inextricable property of matter as just yet another type of
particle that matter particles attract. So the matter particle known as an
electron attracts much fewer Higgs bosons than a proton would; and
particles like photons attract no Higgs bosons at all therefore they are
massless.  Once we discover our first Higgs boson experimentally, then we
will start work on a theory that explains how many Higgs boson can be
expected to be attracted by individual particles, and therefore we will
know the nature of mass. It should be noted that mass is mass, it doesn't
matter if a particle is matter or if it is antimatter, it still attracts
the same amount of mass (i.e. the same amount of Higgs bosons). 

The reason I brought this up is because you were starting to picture quarks
and leptons as some sort of mini-blackholes, because they were
dimensionless. However, in order to have blackholes, you need a
concentration of the Higgs field, which attracts more Higgs bosons, which
makes the Higgs field even stronger, etc. That's not the case here, each
particle attracts whatever number of Higgs bosons it was predestined to
attract, and no more than that.

Oh, and BTW, I believe that the Higgs field is somehow attached to the time
dimension. The field moves with the time dimension, but it doesn't care
about the space dimensions. Because our matter particles attracted to this
Higgs field, and this Higgs field is attracted to time, we get washed along
with the tide of the Higgs field and therefore we get washed along by time.
If we were massless, we'd all be travelling at the speed of light all of
the time, and we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between time or
space, because it would all be the same. But because we have mass, we have
an awareness of a certain dimension (time) as something different from the
other dimensions.

					Yousuf Khan
--
Yousuf J. Khan
ykhan@achilles.net
Ottawa, Ont, Canada
Nation's capital