Comment on Make gravity your bitch
nxn@biglemmowski.win 1 week agoSo this is where my inexperience kicks in, but I don’t understand how the strong force can function in the same way considering that gluons are massless.
The W and Z bosons having mass prevents them from being able to travel at the speed of light, and therefore they experience time and can only travel some limited distance before decaying into fermions.
But since gluons do not have mass, they, like photons, do not experience time – and so how could they have a half life?
In my mental model of the strong force I assumed that they simply were created and destroyed in an exchange between quarks – much like how photons get absorbed/emitted by electrons. But this alone does not cause a limit on the distance of strong interactions, so I assumed that mechanically any limit on the strong force’s distance must be different.
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 1 week ago
Gluons do not have a half life?
Remember that they DO make an exchange - Gluons have color charge - red, green and blue. QCD is the magical realm of color charge.
The hardest part for quantum anything is grasping the “probability aspect” means spontaneous things can happen. In the case of QCD, as you put energy into separating quarks it becomes infinitely more likely to pull particles out of the vacuum than to separate them.
QCD is involved in fusion in a similar way - two protons will oppose each other with infinitely more force the closer they get because their charges are repulsive. The faster two protons are flung at eachother, the probability of the quarks binding increases.