Posted on 06/23/2003 9:25:12 AM PDT by RightWhale
ROFLMAO! Not until you tell us what "color" they are...
"Binding energy" is a negative energy. If the mass of a nucleus were always less than any sum of its potential components, then it would always take energy to split a nucleus. This is true for any nucleus below iron. For nuclei above iron, the binding energy becomes less and less; the strong nuclear force creates stable minima in which very heavy nuclei can exist, but these are but local minima sitting high on the electromagnetic hill. A uranium nucleus is heavier than thorium plus helium.
Doc Smith, in the classic novel Triplanetary, made the error of taking binding energy to be a positive, exploitable energy. Accordingly, the aliens used iron as fuel for their starships, iron having the maximum binding energy...sucking it, if necessary, out of the hemoglobin of human beings! In reality, iron is the one nucleus that can't be used for fuel, but I'm glad I didn't know that as a 12-year-old just the same.
Around here, you have achieved Mt. Rushmore status.
I believe the attraction between them is the same, as they have the same strength of charge.
If it is a quark/antiquark (same color) it is called a meson. If its between quarks it is called a baryon (protons and neutrons fall in this category). Here is the rub, baryonic particles can exist if their total color is neutral; i.e. have a red green and blue charge altogether.
Both mesons and baryons are "colorless" with respect to the outside world. In baryons, as you say, red + blue + green = colorless. In mesons, for example, red + anti-red (or, if you like, red - red) = colorless.
Aw, great. Now Daschle represents me. Worms! More worms I say!
Surely you jest.....
;-)
Yes, but the reasons you gave for that announcement were goofy, IMNSHO.
Like the folks doing the experiment, you may have arrived at the right answer more by accident than via correct reasoning.
[Deep-Fried, Insufferable Geek Alert: there are three color charges, each with a corresponding anti-color. Every gluon carries both a color and an anti-color charge. Shouldn't there be nine kinds of gluon? Why are there only eight?
The combination red-antired + green-antigreen + blue-antiblue is colorless. Therefore, if I assign three gluons that are red-antired, blue-antiblue, and green-antigreen, I'm doing something redundant, because blue-antiblue (for example) is just 0 - red-antired - green-antigreen, and so forth. I'm using three vectors to span a two-dimensional space.
So what we do is choose two of the three color-anticolor pairs, and use them to compose two orthonormal basis vectors (such as g1=(red-antired + blue-antiblue)/sqrt(2), g2=(red-antired - blue-antiblue)/sqrt(2)), with the other gluons being g3=red-antigreen; g4=red-antiblue; g5=green-antiblue; g6=green-antired; g7=blue-antired; g8=blue-antigreen.]
[Atomic Wedgie Geek Alert: The symmetry group of Quantum Chromodynamics is SU(3). In the minimal representation of SU(3), there are three generators...the color charges. In the non-minimal representation, there are 3²-1 generators...the eight gluons! This was spookily mirrored by Murray Gell-Mann's original (1964) quark theory, which also exploited the SU(3) symmetry. Only this time, the minimal representation was the three light quark flavors (up, down, strange), and the non-minimal representation was Gell-Mann's famous Eightfold Way, which correctly(!) predicted the properties of all the light hadrons, including some that had not yet been discovered.]
Trivia Of The Day: Because their foot pads end in literally billions of microscopic filaments, geckos use Van Der Waals forces to allow them to stick to just about any surface and climb up walls and across ceilings. They do this so efficiently that the average gecko is "glued" to the wall with about 200 pounds of force.
The same argument could be applied to the force of electromagnetism, but electromagnetism conclusively propagates at the speed of light.
It can't be that simple. Physicists would have nothing to do. You want to be responsible for all these physicists being out of work and on welfare?
Cha, cha, cha... You know,
epicycles can explain
retrograde motion.
If you're willing to
pile complexity onto
complexity, you
need never give up
on Ptolemy's paradigm.
Sorry. Just rambling...
"So Ptolemy adopted an instrumentalist view --- this strange model is only an accurate calculator to predict the planet motions but the reality is Aristotle's model. This apparent contradiction between reality and a calculation device was perfectly fine in his time. Our modern belief that models must characterize the way the universe actually is [!] is a tribute to the even longer-lasting influence of Aristotle's realism."
Van Flandern also now insists that electromagnetism propagates at infinite speed. (Not electromagnetic waves, mind you, but the field...whatever the devil that means.) It's nonsense, but he's forced into it by his own (mistaken) geometrical argument.
Presumably this frees gravitational waves (as opposed to fields) to propagate at c.
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