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Asked by r3vilo to Andrew, Daniel, Hayley, Natalia, Peta on 24 Nov 2011.
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Andrew Cairns answered on 18 Nov 2011:
You may need to wait for one of the particle physicists to answer, but I was once told that everything is just made up of little packets of energy. Which is pretty cool?
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Daniel Scully answered on 18 Nov 2011:
They aren’t really spheres like we often draw them.
Protons and Neutrons don’t have a well defined size – it varies depending on how you choose to measure it, and when you look even closer you find they’re not single particles after all…
One way of measuring the size is from the charge: you can bounce electrons off a proton and define the size of the proton as the closest any electron gets. Of course, that size varies with how fast the electrons are going.
If you have very high energy electrons, travelling very fast, you can start to look inside it…
Really protons and neutrons are made up of three smaller particles called Quarks. These are constantly jiggling around and it’s impossible to catch one on its own.
If you look really closely you’ll also see the quarks constantly swapping particles called “gluons” between each other.
So the closer you look, the more structure you see, and really a proton or neutron is a mass of lots of smaller jiggling particles… definitely not one solid thing.
Having said that, thinking of them as a solid particle works very well when you’re understanding how atoms work.
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Hayley Smith answered on 18 Nov 2011:
Often it’s easier to describe protons and neutrons as small spheres. However, both of these particles consist of quarks, 3 quarks in a proton and 3 quarks in a neutron. Electrons on the other hand can’t be subdivided anyfurther – they are known as fundamental particles.
A physicist called DeBroglie has a rather cool hypothesis “deBroglie Hypothesis” which suggests that nature exhibits “wave-particle duality” which means that you can describe things as particles, or as waves. The extent to which the “wave-like nature” is present is dependent on how fast things are going and how heavy they are. For this reason physicists often refer to electrons in both terms and there are models of electron-wave behaviour. In quantum physics people describe the “wave-function” of particles and define the probabilities of where they will exist.
It’s not my area of expertise, and it hurts my head, but I do find it all rather cool, yet perplexing!
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Peta Foster answered on 24 Nov 2011:
I agree with Daniel and Hayley here… a lot of what we are taught in school is a simplified version of how things are and it is easier to think of the protons and neutrons as being ball like particles but actually they are make up of smaller quarks and a lot of charge carriers of what is known as the strong force, as daniel called gluons.
Also the way a electromagnetic wave is shown in book i think can be a bit misleading too since the magnetic field is a lot weaker than the electric field but this is never shown.
Another great question 😀
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