But isn't this more of an observation than an absolute "Why"? Can you really know everything, or even a decent amount about a fundamental force until you have a better idea as to what causes it to occur?
I am not quite sure how to tackle this.
First, you can always, I always ask why. The question "What causes this" has never a final answer.
You ask "Why ?", I answer "Because of this", you ask "Why because of this?".
In a round about way science is not about finding final causes but better descriptions.
The best description for what holds nuclei/nucleons together is an interaction generated by demanding the invariance under SU(3) local.
The linear potential* I mentioned is actually an approximation.
*well, more like V(r) approx r^-1 + k*r
In simpler terms, what you're saying is that the curve for interaction of the force so quickly disipates with distance that it falls below the threshold needed to over-ride the "natural" state of the quarks involve, by seperating them etc.? Or do I misunderstand.
Acutally it does not dissipate.
The force between two color charged particles stays constant with distance.
The potential energy between two color charged particles grows linear with the distance.
Lets say you got a meson build out of an red quark r and an anti-red quark ar.
So at the start you got
r-ar
then you start to drag them apart
r---ar
and some more
r---------ar
and now you have reached the point that the energy in the field between r and ar is large enough that you get pair creation (E=mc^2, remember ?)
so you get
r---ar r---ar
Endresult: No free quark, massive energy expenditure but two mesons where we started with one.
But what causes that in the first place?
I am not quite sure how to explain that.
You generate the color force by demanding SU(3) local, but for why we use SU(3) local, well the answer is because it works.
And, well, I could explain what SU(3) ( the group of transformation describable by unitarian matricen with determinant 1 in three dimensions), and how to get from SU(3) invariance to an interaction, but well, that takes quite some time and I am not good explaning stuff.
I also dont know where to start with it.
And can you be sure there are no emergent effects of so much of this quark-shifting occuring in a small place?
Sorry, I do not understand.
Though yes, my theory of gravity being related to it does seem rather silly now. But the concept in general still confused me.
Well, it takes quite some time to shed confusion about these matters and personally I am still confused about quite a bit of gauge field theory/QCD.
J
Why is it that neutrons are not considered dark, then, because they're made up of Quarks which are charged?
For a start neutrons are only stable in nuclei, on their own they decay.
Second, they do interact electromagnetically through their spin and, yes because they are made out of charged quarks, through their dipole moment.
How do you know the same isn't true for Dark energy, except they're made up of different particles to Quarks?
Well, because Dark energy pretty much behaves like ground state energy.
Which can be best described as the energy space has just because it is their. I would expect matter to be clumped which dark energy is not.
At the end of the day I should be more careful about ex cathedre prouncenments
.
Is this the idea of the Axion and the Neutralino?
IIRC Neutralino were the proposed superpartners for the neutrino, which were actually for a time traded as an candidate for dark matter.
Anyway the idea behind Neutralino is supersymmetry, and the idea behind supersymmetry is trading field quants of gauge fields and the field quants of matter field on a more equal footing, which is IIRC an result of unification of the electroweak gauge group and the color gauge group into one. IIRC the first candidate was SU(5) local, but that failed mainly because of the lower limit we have for the half life of a proton.
You may have realized that I am reaching the limits of my knowledge.
If so, wouldn't it be particularly dangerous if someone found a way to split this matter up into it's "Not Quarks", should they exist? Wouldn't vast quantities of dark energy them interact electromagnetically with our own matter? And is there any way to find out if this has happened before?
Mhm.*scratches head*
Well, like I said dark energy behaves like ground state energy.
Above I said that you could understand that by thinking of it as the energy space has by virtue of existing.
The energy space has by virtue of existing actually depends upon which fields exists.
Photons, Gluons, quarks, electrons are excitations of their underlying fields.
So you get an electron matter field, or a photon gauge field and so on.
And these fields do exists and have an energy even if they are not exited.
The energy of the electromagnetic field could be written as:
sum over the energy of all photons plus a constant
So the electromagnetic field has an energy even in absence of photons and the field is present in all of space.
So if you take everything you can out of an volumen of space you are still left with the ground states of your fields, and the energy they contribute.
You could then put energy into the field, which means that you would be creating electrons and protons and stuff.
Now this can not be the whole picture, because there is
less ground state energy (I should really talk about energy density instead of energy) then we would expect, which is really puzzeling.
If both these concepts involve gravity, and the level of dark matter 'required' is based on mass estimates derived from gravity, does this mean the suggested amount of dark 'stuff' has to exist, or could it just 'look' that way to us? I don't see how it's possible to have gravity without mass, however.
Umh, gravity couples to the energy-stress tensor, which contains all kind of terms for momentum, stress, pressure, ...
Mass is just one of the possible sources of gravity.
And around 95% of the mass of a proton is not "real mass" anyway but rather an result the energy of the colour field holding the proton together.
Or rather, it is real mass, afterall mass is just the energy an physical system has in its rest system.
But yes, dark matter could be something else.
Their have been e.g. some attempts to resolve the problem not by introducing dark matter but instead changing Newtons law for small accelerations, runs under the name MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics), but that did not amount too much as far as I know, also people are still working on it.