How Physicists Finally Solved The Infinity Problem 

Why did I pick this topic while also delusionally feverous... 🤒 I really hope this was at least semi coherent Dodge computer viruses and check how ESET can protect you or your business and how they support science on this link: www.eset.com/uk/protecting-art-smart/

In the greek man's defense, it isn't his fault we named something divisible the "atom", when he clearly intended for the name to apply to whatever the smallest, indivisible particle was...

Theoretical particle physicist here. As nice and interesting this presentation was, I have a problem with the way you introduce "the inifnity problem" of QCD. It has long been known that the Landau pole (that is, the divergence to infinity of the strong coupling constant) does not imply a "physical" infinity, but only signals that the theoretical framework used to describe QCD breaks down. Landau poles occur in the so-called perturbative approach to QCD (and more generally of Quantum field theory), and only tell you that the perturbative expansion (around small couplings) is no longer valid, mathematically speaking. In short, the "infinity problem" only is a problem with the perturbative description of QCD, which is solved by switching to a non-perturbative framework. And this has long been understood. Now the difficulty lies in finding a way to carry out calculations non-perturbatively.

To my mind, it took this long for people who grew up in the age of dial-up to get into positions to write their own research papers. Only people who have suffered through the dial-up era can truly understand infinity.

It's a big relief that we have to deal with infinity and not infinity + 1

The Strong Force is made of rubber. It's that simple. Now I'm going to cure cancer, brb.

7:40 "Electromagnetic constant decreases by 10% at very far distances". Wrong. It decreases with distance, yes, but it is already smallest and stays ~1/137 for all distances we work with, from light years to atom sizes. It is larger at VERY SMALL distances. For example, at distances of 10^-17m (about 1/100th of proton size) it is ~1/127.

Note to 6 year old self: Don't take your dad's watch apart to see how it works. Throw it against the wall. It will be much easier to explain off as an accident.

A nice video, Dr. Miles; thank you. In your intro, if you replace “light bulb” with “bungee cord,” tension _increases_ with distance, and the example flips from baffling to intuitive. The idea that the cord or “string” eventually snaps also becomes easier to understand. There is nothing wrong with using this easier intuition since one can argue that the “flux tubes” created by the strong force truly are the universe's smallest rubber bands, as Leonard Susskind first noted in 1969. You need math to make precise calculations, but you do not need it to understand the concept. Erratum - a possibly confusing statement: At 8:15, you define “asymptotic freedom” immediately after describing the _increasing_ tension between quarks as they move farther apart. Asymptotic freedom refers to the earlier part of your statement when the quarks were close. That is when the rubber band is very loose, and the quarks do not pay much attention to each other. This indifference emulates freedom at the asymptotic limit of _closeness,_ rather than at the asymptotic limit of _distance._ That freedom is, of course, utterly different from, say, an electron and a positron bound by electric charge tension. For electric tension, asymptotic freedom comes instead with extreme distance. Conversely, for an electron and a positron, the attractive force nominally approaches infinity as they get closer. Infinities are prevented in that case by mutual annihilation. Why the attraction does not grow infinite when an electron goes through a proton, as it does in an s orbital, is a more complicated and interesting problem. For quarks, the flattening of attraction that prevents infinities is, as you described, the “snapping" of the bungee cord to create two mesons. That relaxation is unrelated to asymptotic freedom.

Sounds like rubber bands, the farther you stretch, the more resistant it gets.

The aspect of "science communication" that I despise the most is when bad, or simply outdated, ideas get passed off as being facts. This video is a fine example of this problem. Not being able to resolve the measurement problem doesn't mean a particle's mass or charge is "zero". It means we can't measure those attributes because, for example, the interactions that would reveal these attributes happen too quickly or are too small to be observed - currently.

Absolutely loved this vid. Thanks for putting in the effort even when you're not feeling well!

Wow! I am so glad the algorithm showed you! Thanks!

Excellent video. I now have a greater understanding of the mechanics behind several things I already 'knew.'

Great video thank you for sharing. Hope you feel better soon.

Thank you for this informative video, especially while you aren't feeling well. Thanks again, take care and get well soon!

"Retired particle smasher" thats got to be one of the best titles for a person.

I loved the flourish at the finish. Nice one. 👍

Ben's videos are a great refuge from the crazy world outside.

I love your channel and you and another videoit was too long in coming ! Take care mate

Very good explanation. Thank you

*_OMG!_* 3:21 As a little boy _(I was odd, precocious, and read a lot. 'nuff said?)_ and fascinated by experimental physics, at some point I thought *"Woa. **_That's like firing an 8 cylinder engine against a steel wall and then looking at the pieces to figure out how it works!"_* That was mid-1960s. I turned 70 last week. Never ever encountered that analogy in the wild! greets / thanks --ben_

This is a really interesting choice of topic for a video. I’m not a scientist but a keen learner, and the strong force often gets mentioned but never explained. Thanks for taking us on a deeper look.

beautiful explanation! thank you!

8:32 Lev Landau looks about as happy as I’d expect after studying a ton of Quantum Chromodynamics

I learned more about particle physics from this video than I have from any other source, going back years. Wow. Thanks!

Have found this video totally randomly. The chapter names got me laughing hard) Loved it!

08:05 _... but when they're pulled apart, the energy required to separate them increases until they're essentially impossible to move further away._ I once learnt that the energy is still finite but sufficient for the production of a complete quark- antiquark- pair, and you get mesons instead of separate quarks. For example if you try to pull a red up quark out of a proton, a new red up quark will be produced alongside an anti- red anti- up- quark will be produced and yoy end up with the proton unchanged and you are holding a neutral meson in your hand. Maybe, a down and an anti- down is produced, any you end up with a neutron and a positive meson. I don't know if both can happen. 08:12 _This is called asymptotic freedom ..._ Isn't this called confinement, and asymptotic freedom is when the quarks are close together?

Wait, why does the fine structure constant have 2 decimal points in it?

Protestors: "Free Quarks!" Physics: "THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!"

It is misleading to represent anticolors as subtractive primaries. For example, red plus antired equals black. However, red plus cyan equals white. Also, your graphical depiction of gluon flux tubes is wrong. Check out what Sabina Hossenfelder has to say on that topic in her blog.

The coolest feature of the S.F. is JETS, that spray of particulate at collision sites, spewing forth powerful excitations of streaming matter. Sorta like RU-vid.

thank you, great job!

What a great lecture! 👍

08:31 Even Lev Landau himself doesn't look very happy with his pole. 😎

I really enjoyed this. I'd like to hear more about the strong force within a nucleon vs the force between them.

Hi Ben, it was indeed coherent. I did not knew the work of Alexander Deur, I knew a little Stanley Brodky. Alexander Deur is in fact French, as I am, and did his PHD at Clermont-Ferrand University. I did not knew his role in experiments that led to shed light on the nature of strong force. Very interesting.

A nice "pictorial" introduction to Brodsky et al's remarkable LFWF approach to QCD dynamics! Always a pleasure to see more details of our work ( as theoretical physicists everywhere) brought out in understandable form for the public who supports it. I would merely caution (as you very likely know, and DO hint at) that Landau poles are likely, in each QFT, a result of our Standard Model ultimately being an effective theory (EFT) of the "real" underlying theory of nature which none of us know yet. One could probably state that our current theories are no more "wrong" than Newton's theories of mechanics, especially in a lay environment where the Standard model is often described as "sick" due to divergencies which are discussed by non-experts. I only hope I live long enough to much more of nature's fundamental law(s) uncovered in my lifetime.

This is a great video. 👍

👏🤩 I loved the ending

dude i adore how you started the video , i love you channelllll 💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜

Renormalisation is often seen as handwaving but it often to get around unknowns such as this, we renorminaise this effect most of the time, I imagine most of the renormalisation's we apply have some deeper properties that are yet to be explained such as this.

Not only he did great music with the System of a Down but he is an accomplished phisicist too

I am unsure why you don't have 20 million subs but here's one more and hope you get there. Amazing explanations

Brilliant video! I love this stuff so much. Who ever thought the humble proton and neutron would be so insanely complex! How far we have come. I remember asking my high school science teacher, if neutrons have no charge what's holding the protons together? He thought for a minute & said actually, I have no idea, the power of prayer?lol).

Great intro lecture Doc. Have you every thought about a "limit" to the number of virtual particles in the void? And the possibility of changing amounts of energy required to snatch them into existence due to the density of the void (just 1 math part of the formula we don't know (completely))? And possibly as the universe expands an increasing amount of energy is required? So in the beginning it would take very little energy to pull them from the void (big bang). Just thinking and by no means proclaim this as a theory or my beliefs as I haven't found or solved all the holes in it! Best

Great video !

Kudos to Ben for all the information in the video! Did anybody told you, you look like Serj Tankian from Wish?

So as I understand this strong force it must have a form of F=k1*e^(x*k2) because it is only possibility to make such derivative: dF/dx=k3*e^(x*k2) possible to increments with distance as well as F=k1*e^(x*k2). Where k1, k2, k3 are respectievly constants and e^x is exponent. k1 is in unit [N], k2 [1/m] and k3 [N/m].

2^32-1, everything that can transform, can transform independently. So a photon can transform independently. If you held something down, all the tiny parts would rotate.

I asked this question elsewhere but: With the Big Rip idea of the end of the universe, could the pull of spacetime cause Quark pairs to split and capture new quarks, forming new pairs, which then also split, etc etc.? If that happens, basically everywhere all at the same time, could that runaway creation of new quark pairs effectively be a new big bang?

0:44 I always imagined it as a a rubber band which when overstreched causes matter to pop out

Please make the whole video explaining how that particle and dimension part and how it's related to graph data

You got me at "huskier more nasal overtone bro." Cracked me up. Great show btw,

Before watching this video I did not understand how deeply weird the strong force was. Thank you.

Nice, thx!

I’m constantly fascinated by the intricate diversity in the universe of all these forces and once they were one. Bizarre! 😅❤

Richard Feynman also got bested by swinging a bucket around in a circle. This bucket had a super fluid inside and was superconductive. It gave Richard a big headache upon striving to picture what was happening to the fluid inside the bucket. As you look out astronomically this is what occurs inside a neutron star. What is felt to happen is small magnetic pins run through the neutron star as the magnetic field is expelled from inside a superconductor producing these pins running through the star. A neutron star thus becomes more strange than we can imagine even before it is filled with strange material near the core.

Somewhere on you tube I leaned than the mass of atoms was in energy. Thanks for duplicating the idea here.

Dr Ben, Why do you have 2 decimal pints in the digital number of 1/137? Look at timestamp 4:11. Is that a way of saying in-between? I've never seen that before.

Very good explanation of something I don't understand.

@9:30, using htop, i see what you did there ;o)

Amazing how QM uses color theory to explain the Universe at a particle level. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but Einstein's formula originally was derived to explain how to account for all the mass of a nuclear particle, in spite of the fact that quarks only account for a small %. Originally, the formula was m=E/C^2 which is far more important in thinking of mass in relation to energy. Thank you for your videos, I am now hooked :)

I typically like all your episodes. So what is that thing from which quark/antiquark pairs spontaneously emerge? Surely it isn’t really nothing?

Great explanation thanks! So once these quarks bind with quarks from the void, are they still attracted to their original pair bond? So if you stop applying force to pull them apart do they go back to their original state only now with these additional quarks?

There are some interesting demonstrations using bubbles to model surface tension geometries. Some crude parallels could be shown to describe the boundaries between bubbles that represent electron obitals and atomic bonds. In general, configurations that reduce stress define the final structure. Learning how to calculate those stresses will be the key to unlocking physics at any level. The strong force is just another manifestation of stress in our universe. We just don't fully understand all of its parameters yet.

Hiw do they accomodate for conservation of matter?

particles must essentially be vortices in spacetime. The trick is to find the math to describe the stable shapes. Spherical shapes could oscillate in and out like a vibration but that seems like this would radiate, so it seems toroid's and higher order knots look like more promising geometries where the energy can be contained in a rotation of a thin string like structure with an external pressure from the fabric of space.

Just woke up on my day off and watched this. Mind blown .. rest of day ahead😅

How do we know that electrons are not... symptoms or side effects of the strong force? The picture (towards the end) of a couple of fundamental particles bursting into new particles is blowing my mind right now.

May the force be with you

What practical thing like a spring the further you pull on the ends the force becomes greater to a point then yields So maybe these little particles have spring like forces between them that doesn't like unraveling

May be it historical, but gold . We could not explain neither the boundary of atom nor that of proton. Why collapse is it QCD spacing ? Experiments can see when energy spill over Situation is at all cost entangled . Measurement problem with reference of statistics as defined. You are right w.r.t strong coupling digit after two decimal is for floating photons without mass. No mass below 1/3 of proton scale !!!

They should have asked a mechanical engineer. This is exactly the behavior of a spring. As you extend a spring the force gets larger and larger, until a limiting point where you cannot increase the distance any more - the spring is as its maximum extent. But then the material the spring is formed from itself deforms and the distance again increases. The spring is no longer extending, the material itself is extending.

I like that picture of The Atomons. That's wallpaper-worthy.

amazing!

I love how people quote me on a daily basis. I was the person that introduced the idea that infinity in the mathematics means something has gone slightly wrong back around 2003. Before that nobody ever dared say that in physics. After that it is literally became dogma.

@7:13 I'm confused! The Coulomb's law does not hold anymore? I thought we can trust Maxwell equations on a large scale. Is it a new discovery that the electrostatic coupling constant is decreasing with the distance? I'm eager for details!

If quarks pop into existence when two is pulled apart in qcd, does that also works with particle collisions, and further, does that mean that some of the discovered particles at cern was created like that ?

Uh, the force is constant - potential grows linearly though so it’s kind of like a weird spring that doesn’t fight back at you more but stores more and more energy. If I remember my string tension simulation correctly. Of course that one was merely a quenched simulation, but for the purposes of this computation is actually appropriate.

I read about this recently, and what immediately came to mind is....neutron stars. If alpha s levels off beyond the diameter of a proton (or neutron), what does this mean for interactions deep within neutron stars? Maybe something like quark soup? Crude analogy, but....

First time I understood that one 😊

I didn't know that coupling constants diluted with distance. Is this one of the observations that string theory uses to support the additional dimensions, forces 'leaking' in extra dimensions?

Actually, quarks DIDN'T pop out; however, hundreds of unknown particles with unique properties did pop out. Our simplest consistent explanation for this is that all of these particles are composed of 2-3 quarks. Second, infinity and infinity plus one are exactly the same limit.

Fundamental forces of matter: 1) Strong force = 1 with a range of influence of 10^(-15) meter. 2) Electromagnetic force = 1/137 with an infinite range of influence. 3) Weak force = 10^(-6) with a range of influence of 10^(-18) meter. 4) Gravity force = 6(10^(-39)) with an infinite range of influence. Fundamental Force Concepts. Georgia State University, College of Arts and Science, Department of Physics and Astronomy. 21 December 2012. 10^(-15) meter = 0.0000000000000001 meter = 0.00000000000000393701 inch

You should put links to your sources in the pinned comment or description of the video.

at 12:38: why are u and d- on the left and d and d- on the right instead of u and u- on the left?

The needing more energy to pull it apart as it gets further away reminds me of a rubber band, or those exercise things

Good video

Nice!

Could you attempt to separate the quarks in an environment where the virtual particles are constrained from appearing? I thought in very confined spaces between two objects it can be difficult for virtual particles to be created due to lacking space, would quark binding energy be asymptotic there?

Yep, the 5 Dimension i talk about little more wide then the one you talk about. You have to understand Infinity different from math to Quantum math, things got other rules in Quantum math 5 Dimension. 5 Dimension are what i call it, "The non time existence in time." In other words Infinity are not linear, you need to go into 5 D. The Pythagoras Triangle 3A 4B 5C When use infinity in Normal math this model breaks even when our logic says A B C are same value. This are here my Ü make sense to use. Going on to Infinity graph and the triangle reappear in simple term say'ed. Result looks like this. 3Ü=A (A = 3 infinity long) 4Ü=B 5Ü=C Normal graph and you can't see anything. Also: Ü*0=1 1/0=Ü 1/Ü=0 All this make sense in 5D rule system, it can even predict light entanglement. Einstein things lightspeed ... Dark matter and energy plus magnetar blackholes. At least give the tool to understand it.

This kind of sounds almost like the phenomenon (I forget what it's called) where protons have an upper speed limit that's dictated by interactions with the cosmic microwave background. If these virtual particles within the proton kind of function a little bit like the cosmic microwave background, then the further a particle travels inside, the more likely it is to interact with the fluctuations. This almost sounds to me like a sort of lower dimensional imprinting. Like the way that 4D macro space can be imprinted onto a 2D surface at infinity that represents the limit of what we can observe. I already understand that such imprinting occurs on the event horizon of a black hole... And based on the back of the napkin math that I'm capable of doing, it would seem to me that a similar event horizon exists within the proton... But this event horizon has an inverted geometry. It also suggests to me that there should be a glue on equivalent of a photosphere at a distance of ~66% * the event horizon radius... Am I crazy for seeing this pattern? (Edit:) Okay, so I wrote this in the very beginning of the video before actually getting to the holographic part. That's pretty cool. And it actually seems to reinforce my intuition. The part that bothers me though is that unless I misunderstand the math, this requires a negatively curved spatial geometry... And that is hard for me to wrap my head around.

06:05 Isn't the anticolour to a certain colour also a linear combination of the two others, like it's depicted here (anti- red seems to be a combination of blue and green, just it is with actual colour mixing)?

Can the gravity gradient near the event horizon of smaller blackholes be steep enough strip protons apart and as the result of the kick from the creation of extra quarks, emit protons as form of radiation? Would this be a separate type of radiation from Hawking radiation, or just one of it's already predicted manifestations?

Never mind the fever, you presented this with exceptional clarity. Thank you so much. Actually take care of that fever, the world needs you whole and well.

At 4:11 you have the fine structure constant on screen twice.

I hope you feel better soon.

when i fell for someone, that is the strong force, too. the farther away they are, the more i miss them and want them close.

What happens inside protons and backwards in electrons to generate what we call positive and negative charge?