Just when you think you have everything figured out, measured, and weighed, someone comes along to point out an error. That’s what seems to have occurred with regard to the proton. Yeah. The proton, that tiny thing in the center of an atom, the one with the positive charge.
Protons are little, smaller than one of those semisweet chocolate morsels moms put in chocolate chip cookies. For a while, we thought we had a handle on their size, a measurement in femtometers (a millionth of a millionth of a millimeter). However, some prankster must have put petroleum jelly on that handle. The newest measurement differs by 4% from the old measurement. That’s not much in femtometers, of course, but scale it up to you. If you are an Albanian woman of average height, you’re 161.8 cm tall (five-foot-three and a half). A difference of four percent makes you either 6.472 centimeters taller or shorter (or about two and a half inches). Depending on whether that’s taller or shorter, that would put you either at the height of an average Italian woman or at the average height of a Malaysian woman.*
Now measuring the radius of the charge of a proton isn’t something to which most people might aspire—probably because it’s a bit more complicated than what one can do in a garage or in a high school physics class. The measurement was done by people at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching. (Yeah. People get paid to do that) Anyway, Randolf Pohl and his colleagues made the tiny measurement with tweezers or lasers or something.
Surely, if money was spent on the project by a max-plancker at a prestigious institute, there must be some significance we can understand.
Well, if you remember your periodic table, you’ll recall that hydrogen, the simplest element has only one proton. It also happens to be the element that quantum physicists know the most about. But, hey, you don’t have to trust me in this. The author of the report on the new measurement, writing for MaxPlanckResearch, says, “Since it consists of just one proton and one electron, it is…the atom that they can describe best in mathematical terms. In other atoms with more electrons, they have to rely on approximations. That’s why they use hydrogen to test their theories, and also why many groups around the world are constantly competing to see who can characterize this atom more and more accurately…They don’t do this out of a sporting ambition but because, in doing so, they have continually made fundamental discoveries—quantum electrodynamics (QED), for instance” (50).** If physicists don’t have a handle on what it is that they are measuring, doesn’t that do something to their so-called Standard Model? Doesn’t that mean that there might be something missing, possibly an unknown entity hiding in the proton charge?
There’s a lesson in this somewhere. Oh! Yes. I remember. Notice how most of us have a habit of measuring others just once. We don’t refine our measurements except under circumstances that force us to reconsider not only our measurement, but also the very way we measure. Most of us most of the time accept our initial measurements as final.*** And we don’t look for something that might lie within the people we measure, some unknown quantity (or quality).
Now imagine that you live not in the macro world of big stuff, including big organisms we call people, but rather in the micro world, nay, the femto world. You are surrounded by protons, and you see that making a measurement is difficult because contrary to what you learned in elementary school, protons aren’t some little round balls made of protonstuff. You can’t play catch with them. You realize that now on that scale of existence you see that what you are measuring is a charge and that even though you can’t see inside the charge, you suspect that there are other “things.” Those are the quarks that no one has ever seen in isolation. So, what are you measuring? Something that seems less pin-downable than you originally thought? Something even as shifting as waves on the surface of the sea, “things” that you see apparently as some morphing crest that changes just as you are trying to measure it?
The protons that we believe we have accurately measured are the people of this world. What if your measurement of one is off by just four percent? Would that make a difference? Would you recalibrate? What if your measurement were off by more than four percent? You know that’s possible, don’t you?
If we can’t be absolutely certain about our judgment of a proton at the core of the simplest element, why are we so certain about our judgment of a person?
*Or, at least that’s what Wikipedia writes: See List of average human height worldwide, online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_average_human_height_worldwide
**https://www.mpg.de/7531136/W002_Physics-Astronomy_046-053.pdf
***This appears to be particularly true with regard to public personalities of all stripes.
Protons are little, smaller than one of those semisweet chocolate morsels moms put in chocolate chip cookies. For a while, we thought we had a handle on their size, a measurement in femtometers (a millionth of a millionth of a millimeter). However, some prankster must have put petroleum jelly on that handle. The newest measurement differs by 4% from the old measurement. That’s not much in femtometers, of course, but scale it up to you. If you are an Albanian woman of average height, you’re 161.8 cm tall (five-foot-three and a half). A difference of four percent makes you either 6.472 centimeters taller or shorter (or about two and a half inches). Depending on whether that’s taller or shorter, that would put you either at the height of an average Italian woman or at the average height of a Malaysian woman.*
Now measuring the radius of the charge of a proton isn’t something to which most people might aspire—probably because it’s a bit more complicated than what one can do in a garage or in a high school physics class. The measurement was done by people at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching. (Yeah. People get paid to do that) Anyway, Randolf Pohl and his colleagues made the tiny measurement with tweezers or lasers or something.
Surely, if money was spent on the project by a max-plancker at a prestigious institute, there must be some significance we can understand.
Well, if you remember your periodic table, you’ll recall that hydrogen, the simplest element has only one proton. It also happens to be the element that quantum physicists know the most about. But, hey, you don’t have to trust me in this. The author of the report on the new measurement, writing for MaxPlanckResearch, says, “Since it consists of just one proton and one electron, it is…the atom that they can describe best in mathematical terms. In other atoms with more electrons, they have to rely on approximations. That’s why they use hydrogen to test their theories, and also why many groups around the world are constantly competing to see who can characterize this atom more and more accurately…They don’t do this out of a sporting ambition but because, in doing so, they have continually made fundamental discoveries—quantum electrodynamics (QED), for instance” (50).** If physicists don’t have a handle on what it is that they are measuring, doesn’t that do something to their so-called Standard Model? Doesn’t that mean that there might be something missing, possibly an unknown entity hiding in the proton charge?
There’s a lesson in this somewhere. Oh! Yes. I remember. Notice how most of us have a habit of measuring others just once. We don’t refine our measurements except under circumstances that force us to reconsider not only our measurement, but also the very way we measure. Most of us most of the time accept our initial measurements as final.*** And we don’t look for something that might lie within the people we measure, some unknown quantity (or quality).
Now imagine that you live not in the macro world of big stuff, including big organisms we call people, but rather in the micro world, nay, the femto world. You are surrounded by protons, and you see that making a measurement is difficult because contrary to what you learned in elementary school, protons aren’t some little round balls made of protonstuff. You can’t play catch with them. You realize that now on that scale of existence you see that what you are measuring is a charge and that even though you can’t see inside the charge, you suspect that there are other “things.” Those are the quarks that no one has ever seen in isolation. So, what are you measuring? Something that seems less pin-downable than you originally thought? Something even as shifting as waves on the surface of the sea, “things” that you see apparently as some morphing crest that changes just as you are trying to measure it?
The protons that we believe we have accurately measured are the people of this world. What if your measurement of one is off by just four percent? Would that make a difference? Would you recalibrate? What if your measurement were off by more than four percent? You know that’s possible, don’t you?
If we can’t be absolutely certain about our judgment of a proton at the core of the simplest element, why are we so certain about our judgment of a person?
*Or, at least that’s what Wikipedia writes: See List of average human height worldwide, online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_average_human_height_worldwide
**https://www.mpg.de/7531136/W002_Physics-Astronomy_046-053.pdf
***This appears to be particularly true with regard to public personalities of all stripes.
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