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Switching from a gas stove to an electric induction stove can reduce indoor nitrogen dioxide air pollution, a known health hazard, by more than 50 percent according to new research.

Scientists are bioprinting 3D structures with a material that is a close match for human tissue, paving the way for true biomanufacturing.

Aluminum scandium nitride thin films could pave the way for the next generation of ferroelectric memory devices, according to a new study. Compared to existing ferroelectric materials, these films maintain their ferroelectric properties and crystal structure even after heat treatment at temperatures up to 600 C in both hydrogen and argon atmospheres. This high stability makes them ideal for high-temperature manufacturing processes under the H2-included atmosphere used in fabricating advanced memory devices.

Aluminum scandium nitride thin films could pave the way for the next generation of ferroelectric memory devices, according to a new study. Compared to existing ferroelectric materials, these films maintain their ferroelectric properties and crystal structure even after heat treatment at temperatures up to 600 C in both hydrogen and argon atmospheres. This high stability makes them ideal for high-temperature manufacturing processes under the H2-included atmosphere used in fabricating advanced memory devices.

An international team of researchers has embedded gold nanorods in hydrogels that can be processed through 3D printing to create structures that contract when exposed to light -- and expand again when the light is removed. Because this expansion and contraction can be performed repeatedly, the 3D-printed structures can serve as remotely controlled actuators.

An international team of researchers has embedded gold nanorods in hydrogels that can be processed through 3D printing to create structures that contract when exposed to light -- and expand again when the light is removed. Because this expansion and contraction can be performed repeatedly, the 3D-printed structures can serve as remotely controlled actuators.

Researchers have developed a new model that combines generative AI and satellite data to accurately forecast wildfire spread.

The tempo of the songs released by artists changes as they age, according to a study of more than 200 musicians with careers spanning over 20 years

There may be ways to work with your body’s natural daily and monthly cycles to get the maximum benefits from workouts and avoid injury

A virtual reality training series being developed for medical students and physicians teaches them about implicit bias in their communications with their patients who are people of color and how that affects race-based health care disparities.

This video, professionally made and showing Kiri Tamihere-Waititi doing what can only be called ranting about her oppression and that of the Māori people, and then winding up by calling for the overthrow of the New Zealand, has caused a stir in that country.  I am told that Tamihere-Waititi is a powerful member of  Te Pati Māori (The Māori Party). which holds six seats out of about 120 in the country’s unicameral parliament. The second video below identifies her as the Party’s “chief of staff,” and she is the wife of the current party co-leader Rawiri Waititi as well as the daughter of John Tamihere, long-standing Māori activist and now president of The Māori Party.

I was sent this video by an anonymous (of course) New Zealander, who added that “This video outlines [Tamihere-Waititi’s] position as a major leader quite specifically, and was broadcast as part of the official content of a programme produced by the state television broadcaster, Television New Zealand.  It leaves the viewer in no doubt that she is a major ’embedded’ leader of the party.” As the broadcasters below say, whether what she says should worry New Zealanders depends on how widespread her views are, and that we just don’t know.

Well, I can’t vouch for that, but the video does express the anger held by some Māori about their being “minoritized”, and I was startled not just by the anger and sedition, but also by the profanity, so I should add this:

TRIGGER WARNING: If profuse profanity offends you, don’t watch. But we’ve all heard such language.

There’s a transcript, too, but it leaves out the cuss words.

It’s only 6½ minutes long, and will give you an idea of some of the anger behind the attempt to indigenize New Zealand. (I won’t translate the Māori words.) You can see, given this woman’s position, why it’s gotten wide circulation. I suspect it will be taken down soon, so watch it now.  Its explicit call for the Māori to overthrow New Zealand’s government is something I haven’t encountered before.

Below is a 7½-minute video response on The Platform, a self-described “independent” radio station that’s not government-run or government-funded. The broadcaster shown here is Chris Trotter. The suggestion that New Zealand adopt a constitution is a good one, as right now the governing document of New Zealand is the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.

Water purification is a big business on Earth. Companies offer everything from desalination to providing just the right pH level for drinking water. But on the Moon, there won’t be a similar technical infrastructure to support the astronauts attempting to make a permanent base there. And there’s one particular material that will make water purification even harder – Moon dust. 

We’ve reported plenty of times about the health problems caused by the lunar regolith, so it seems apparent that you don’t want to drink it. Even more so, the abrasive dust can cause issues with seals, such as those used in electrolyzers to create rocket fuel out of in-situ water resources. It can even adversely affect water purification equipment itself. 

Unfortunately, this contamination is inevitable. Lunar dust is far too adhesive and electrostatically charged to be kept completely separate from the machinery that would recycle or purify the water. So, a group of researchers from DLR in Germany decided to test what would happen if you intentionally dissolved lunar regolith.

Fraser interviews Dr. Kevin Cannon, an expert in lunar dust mitigation.

The short answer is, unsurprisingly, nothing good. Dissolved lunar regolith causes pH, turbidity, and aluminum concentrations all exceed World Health Organization benchmarks for safe drinking water. This happened even with short exposure times (2 minutes) and static pH values, as they used a 5.5 pH buffer in part of the experiments. 

They didn’t use actual lunar dust for these experiments, but a simulant modeled on the regolith returned during the Apollo 16 mission. It mimics the regolith that is thought to be most similar to the Artemis landing sites. In addition to the pH changes and the amount of exposure time (which went up to 72 hours), the authors also varied the amount of dissolved oxygen in the system and the particle size of the simulant.

Those negative results occurred for every test variation, no matter what combination of the four control variables was used. Ultimately, that means engineers will have to devise a system to filter the water from these deposits before it can be recycled into the overall water system.

After taking the first boot print photo, astronaut Buzz Aldrin moved closer to the little rock and took this second shot. His boot was already completely covered in adhesive dust.
Credit: NASA

The paper explored some potential solutions for that water purification system. Each of the limits that were violated requires its purification methodology. In the author’s estimation, lowering the turbidity is the first requirement. To do so, they suggest doing standard filtration or allowing the dust particles to settle. 

Removing aluminum is next in importance, with another experiment showing that plants that grew in lunar soil showed signs of aluminum toxicity. Additional ions, including calcium, iron, and manganese, also need to be removed, as they were above acceptable levels in some test batches but not all. Removing these ions would require a reverse osmosis process or ion exchange. Ion removal is vital to a fully functional electrolyzer system as well. 

The authors seemed to be ultimately going after a platform to test and validate water purification processes for future lunar exploration missions. Given the results from their experimentation, there will undoubtedly be future rounds of testing and plenty of technology development to work on solving these technical challenges. Ultimately, astronauts will have to drink water on the Moon – and it won’t be coming just from bottles from Earth.

Learn More:
Freer, Pesch, & Zabel – Experimental study to characterize water contaminated by lunar dust
UT – The Moon Is Toxic
UT – Astronauts Will Be Tracking Dust Into the Lunar Gateway. Is This a Problem?
UT – Lunar Dust is Still One of The Biggest Challenges Facing Moon Exploration

Lead Image:
Turbidity samples of some of the dissolved regolith.
Credit – Freer, Pesch, & Zabel

The post Moon Dust Could Contaminate Lunar Explorers’ Water Supply appeared first on Universe Today.

A weather and climate model that fuses artificial intelligence and physics simulations can match state-of-the-art performance while slashing the required computer power, say Google researchers

A better understanding of what happens to our bodies when we get fitter can unlock ways to speed up the journey – and it might be simpler than you think

Sea-floor nodules raise oxygen levels in the deep ocean, suggesting they may have a valuable role in ecosystems and adding to concerns about the impact of deep-sea mining

Humans and chimpanzees both take part in rapid social exchanges, suggesting some foundational principles of language may have evolved earlier than previously thought

I held the same National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for about 30 years, renewing it under a competitive process every three years. It was onerous (I took six months to write each renewal application), but at least you could be sure that the proposals were judged on merit. Sure, you had to check a box with your “race” (the NIH considers that a social construct), but that was for record-keeping purposes only  and, during the times I sat in on evaluation committees, ethnicity and identity were never even discussed when ranking proposals.

That has now changed, not only with the National Institutes of Health, but with all the major funding agencies: the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).  All of these agencies, though legally forbidden to take into account the ethnicity of those who apply for grants, or to boost those of minority status, have found ways around that restriction, adhering to today’s DEI Zeitgeist.  This of course devalues scientific merit in proposals—a dangerous strategy if the aim of science funding is to promote the understanding of nature (with health benefits to humans in the case of the NIH). Giving grants based on minority status rather than merit also reduces the public’s trust in science.  The situation has become so fraught that I am positively elated that I no longer have to write grants, as I’m not sure how to write a diversity statement, and am opposed to them in general.

A new paper in SSRN (“Social Science Research Network”) calls attention to the pervasive attempts to circumvent race-based funding in the federal government, and outlines the problems that such attempts produce. You can go to the paper’s website by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can download the pdf here (go to “download without registration” at the upper right).

You’ll probably recognize a couple of names among the authors:

If you want a short take, you see below a summary and preview by Krylov and Tanzman from Heterodox STEM (click headline to read).  But I’ll be citing excerpts from the long paper itself.  It has not escaped my notice that the government’s attempt to circumvent restrictions on race-based funding parallel those now used by universities after the Supreme Court ruled out race-based admissions.

I’ll summarize the paper’s main points, indenting quotes and putting the main points under headers of my devising. All bolding is mine.

What is DEI?

While no reasonable person can oppose the morality of trying to to give every American equal opportunity to become a scientist (and that starts with birth), the mandates that condition federal funding call not for equal opportunity, but for equity—“equal outcomes” so that minoritized groups—not just races, but LGBTQ+, the disabled, women, and anybody said to be disadvantaged because of oppression—are represented in proportion to their occurrence in the general population. Here’s the authors’ construal of DEI as it is actually implemented by the government:

Actual DEI policies do not promote viewpoint diversity, equitable treatment of individuals based on their accomplishments, or equal opportunity for individuals regardless of their identity (e.g., race, sex, ethnicity). It can scarcely be questioned (Krylov and Tanzman, 2024) that DEI programs today are driven by an ideology, an offshoot of Critical Social Justice1 (CSJ) (Pluckrose, 2021; Deichmann 2023). DEI programs elevate the collective above the individual. They group people into categories defined by immutable characteristics (race, sex, etc.) and classify each group as either “privileged” or “victimized,” as “oppressor” or “oppressed.” The goals of DEI programs are to have each group participate in proportion to their fraction of thepopulation in every endeavor of society and to obtain proportionate outcomes from those endeavors. Disproportionate outcomes (with respect to science, such outcomes as publications, funding, citations, salaries, and awards), or disparities, are axiomatically ascribed to systemic factors, such as systemic racism and sexism, without consideration of alternative explanations (Sowell, 2019, 2023). Claims, such as “The presence of disparities is proof of systemic racism” and “Meritocracy is a myth” are propagated widely despite the vagueness of the claims and their lack of support by concrete data. Similarly, tenets that are central to DEI ideology—such as diversity is excellence, diverse teams outperform homogenous teams, and the advancement of women is impeded by biases—lack a robust evidence base, particularly when applied to science (Abbot et al., 2023; Krylov and Tanzman, 2023; Ceci et al., 2021, 2023).

Note that several important claims, including the assertion that underrepresentation of minoritized groups is due to ongoing systemic racism (which would be illegal) and that diverse scientific teams consistently outperform more homogeneous ones. Neither claim is supported by evidence.

My own opinion (and that of the authors; see below) is to give as many people as possible the opportunity to do science, and choose for advancement those who do the best work.  That might not result in equity, but it does allow equal opportunity. I recognize, of course, that we’re a long way from giving different groups equal opportunity, which must begin at or even before birth. But equal opportunity is the only permanent way to solve the problem of disproportional representation in science (or any endeavor). Effecting that will be hard, and requires immense effort, money, and empirical tests of educational systems, but once it’s in place, unequal representation would reflect other things, like behavioral differences or differential preferences among groups.

How do funding agencies employ DEI? This takes place through the use of required statements and plans to enhance diversity that must accompany grant proposals. Here are two examples; the first is from an HIH program:

Recruitment Plan to Enhance Diversity (NOT-OD-20-031):

The applicant must provide a recruitment plan to enhance diversity. Include outreach strategies and activities designed to recruit prospective participants from diverse backgrounds, e.g., those from groups described in the Notice of NIH’s Interest in Diversity. Describe the specific efforts to be undertaken by the program and how the proposed plan reflects past experiences in recruiting individuals from underrepresented groups.

New applications must include a description of plans to enhance recruitment, including the strategies that will be used to enhance the recruitment of trainees from nationally underrepresented backgrounds and may wish to include data in support of past accomplishments.

Renewal applications must include a detailed account of experiences in recruiting individuals from underrepresented groups during the previous funding period, including successful and unsuccessful recruitment strategies. Information should be included on how the proposed plan reflects the program’s past experiences in recruiting individuals from underrepresented groups.

For those individuals who participated in the research education program, the report should include information about the duration of education and aggregate information on the number of individuals who finished the program in good standing. Additional information on the required Recruitment Plan to Enhance Diversity is available at Frequently Asked Questions: Recruitment Plan to Enhance Diversity (Diversity FAQs).

Applications lacking a diversity recruitment plan will not be reviewed. [Emphasis ours.]

And one from NASA:

The assessment of the Inclusion Plan will be based on […] the extent to which the Inclusion Plan demonstrated awareness of systemic barriers to creating inclusive working environments that are specific to the proposal team. [Emphasis ours.]

But to those of us in science, there are no systemic (codified) barriers to advancement, although of course there is still some racism. But those who make the claim of systemic barriers have to ignore the ways universities are falling all over each other to recruit qualified women and members of minority groups.

Why are these requirements bad for science?  Besides taking up an enormous amount of time confecting such statements, which are surely often deliberately misleading, they are palpably illegal, violating civil rights laws:

These requirements to incorporate DEI into each research proposal are alarming. They constitute compelled speech, they undermine the academic freedom of researchers, they dilute merit-based criteria for funding, they incentivize illegal discriminatory hiring practices, they erode public trust in science, and they contribute to administrative overload. “Diversity,” which is sometimes described as “diverse backgrounds” or “diverse views,” actually refers to select underrepresented identity groups (Honeycutt, 2020; Brint and Frey, 2023; Brint, 2023).

. . .The demand to provide an inclusion plan without evidence that there is a need for one is compelled speech and an intrusion of ideology into the conduct of science. Forcing scientists to “acknowledge” and “show awareness of” systemic racism and “barriers to participation” in their institutions and teams (Nahm and Watkins, 2023), even if none can be documented, misrepresents reality, is an offense to scientists who have worked hard to establish fair and transparent hiring practices in their institutions, and is inconsistent with scientific professional ethics and, indeed, the very vocation of the scientist.

The paragraphs below identify what’s illegal. I’m fairly convinced that these DEI requirements do indeed violate civil-rights laws, and that the only reason they persist—just as DEI requirements for job applications in academia persist—is that nobody has challenged them in the courts. To do so, you need “standing”, that is, you must demonstrate that you have been injured by these requirements. And anybody doing that would be forever demonized in academia, not to mention tied up in legal battles that would last years.

The interaction of DEI with the legal system is troubling. First, the demands that PIs “acknowledge” systemic racism and “barriers to participation” in their institutions (Nahm and Watkins, 2023), and insert land acknowledgements in their scientific publications (NSF, n.d.(b)) raise grave legal concerns. The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States strictly forbids compelling people to say things they do not believe are true. The circumstances under which government may condition grants or benefits on attesting that one holds a certain belief (e.g., “acknowledges” the truth to be this or that with respect to a contested matter), though somewhat obscure, are certainly limited (Supreme Court, 2013). At a minimum, government’s engaging in such conditioning on contested questions raises significant civil liberties concerns and is in tension with core First Amendment values.

Second, there are strict laws against discrimination on the basis of race and gender, both at federal and state levels. Thus, invoking DEI explicitly attempts to circumvent existing laws. Any actual “barriers” or “systemic discrimination” can be prosecuted under existing anti-discrimination statutes, following due process.

Third, even more worrying is that successful applications require principal investigators and their home institutions to engage in practices that are likely illegal.  For example, DEI “equity”-based plans for equal gender or racial participation can, in practice, only be implemented by gender- and race-preferential hiring. This is strictly illegal under civil rights employment law (Title VI; Title IX; EEOC, n.d.).

How do funding agencies get around the illegality of this process?

Funding agencies attempt to circumvent the laws prohibiting them from basing funding decisions on race or ethnicity by cloaking DEI requirements in nebulous language (NIH, 2019; Renoe, 2023) and by disguising racial preferences and even quotas as “diversity of backgrounds” and unequal treatment as “broadening participation of underrepresented groups.” The determination of which groups to treat as underrepresented and worthy of special treatment is highly subjective, as Americans hold many identities and can be split up in a multitude of ways. In practice, implementing equity-focused DEI programs means preferring members of some groups over others (Kendi, 2019). To paraphrase Orwell, all groups are equal, but some groups are more equal than others (Orwell, 1945).

The evaluations of submitted DEI plans are not open to public scrutiny. Agencies run diversity-focused programs but refuse to give guidance on how to determine eligibility for them; they are careful to state that compliance with all applicable employment laws is the responsibility of the host institution. However, DEI metrics, which must be reported annually to the funding agency, are criteria for renewal (NIH, 2023b). It remains unclear how a principal investigator is supposed to be nondiscriminatory in hiring and at the same time fulfill de facto DEI quotas for renewal. In this way, programs are developed that are de jure “open to everyone,” but de facto allocated according to identity metrics, reminiscent of the pre-civil rights era in the U.S.

Why is this happening?  The proximate reason for DEI requirements is government regulations (see below), but the ultimate reason is the “racial reckoning” taking place in America, a reckoning speeded up by the death of George Floyd and extending now to many minority groups save those who have done well, like Jews and Asians.  The paper doesn’t mention ultimate causes, but does show several federal requirements that gave rise to DEI mandates:

In fact, the mandate that funding agencies implement DEI comes directly from the White House. Executive Order 13985, titled “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” directed all federal agencies to allocate resources to DEI and to incorporate “equity” into their decision making as a principle (EO 13985).

. . .If “consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals” means equality of opportunity and equitable treatment of people’s accomplishments based on their merit, we’re all for it. However, the Order goes on to make clear that the goal is not to achieve equal opportunity and equitable treatment, but to achieve equal outcomes for identity groups. The Order conflates racism in the past with disparities in the present and equitable treatment with equal outcomes. It attributes unequal participation in the present to alleged discrimination in the present. It charges the Domestic Policy Council with the task “[of] remov[ing] systemic barriers,” thus implicitly asserting the existence of such barriers in the present. It calls for “redress[ing] inequities,” “affirmatively advancing equity,” and “allocating Federal resources in a manner that increases investment in underserved communities, as well as individuals from those communities.” Whatever is to be said about such goals in relation to, say, social welfare programs, we question their value and appropriateness for science funding.

The authors note that in this executive order “merit,” “excellence” and “achievement” are not mentioned at all.

There is one more federal order:

The goal of promoting “equity” in science is reinforced in Executive Order 14091 (EO 14091). Titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” it explains how equity is to be implemented in various domains, and specifically calls for the “promot[ion] [of] equity in science.” It lays out specific DEI requirements for federal agencies, including NASA and NSF, such as the following:

The Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Director of the National Science Foundation […] (agency heads) shall, within 30 days of the date of this order, ensure that they have in place an Agency Equity Team within their respective agencies to coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives and ensure that their respective agencies are delivering equitable outcomes for the American people.

Both of these are orders are enforced by the government’s Office of Management and Budget, which monitors agencies to ensure that they meet DEI concerns.

What is to be done? The purpose of scientific research is not to be a lever for creating social justice. That’s the job of the government, but the government cannot violate the law to effect the change we need. In lieu of creating new law, they have to effect desired change within existing legal boundaries.  My own view, which is echoed by the authors, is to hold scientific merit as the overweening criterion for funding research.

At the same time, it would be churlish to ignore the palpable inequality in American society, an inequality that deprives some groups of simple access to doing science, often because their backgrounds and the existence of past racism or bigotry. This leads to the need for equal opportunity, something that Americans apparently lack the stomach for. Equity has become  a quick fix, a way to tell us that we’re good people, but it’s neither a permanent fix nor, in science, a way to best advance the field.  So ditch the DEI requirements mandating equity and do this:

Systemic disparities in opportunity, especially those related to socio-economic status, are real and well documented. Solid family structure, access to healthcare, good nutrition, an environment free from violence and drugs, high-quality preschool and K–12 education are necessary to nurture the next generation of scientists, but they are not equally available to all Americans. Rather than attempt to institute “equity” by mandating proportional participation through the manipulation of grant funding, we believe that increased efforts should be made to promote equality of opportunity as early in people’s lives as possible so that young people who aspire to standing in any field, including scientific fields, can succeed on merit (Abbot et al., 2023; Abbot et al., 2024; Loury, 2024).

It is sad that to write something like that, or the paper itself, is an act of courage in today’s political climate. But if you’re committed to advancing science, with equality of opportunity as a moral ancillary, then one must judge science on merit alone while working politically to eliminate differences in opportunity.

In the end, DEI statements should be no more than this: “This project will not discriminate against anybody on the grounds of race, religion, disability status, gender, or sexual identity or orientation.” End of story.

The mass of a single proton, often said to be made of three quarks, is almost 1 GeV/c2. To be more precise, a proton’s mass is 0.938 GeV/c2, while that of a neutron is 0.939 GeV/c2.

But the masses of up and down quarks, found in protons and neutrons, are each much less than 0.01 GeV/c2. In short, the mass of each quark is less than one percent of a proton’s or neutron’s mass. If a proton were really made from three quarks, then there would seem to be a huge mismatch.

(Here and below, by “mass” I mean “rest mass” — an object’s intrinsic mass, which does not change with speed. It is sometimes called “invariant mass”. [Particle physicists usually just call it “mass”, though.])

Part of the explanation for the apparent discrepancy is that a proton or neutron is, in fact, made from far more than just three quarks. In its interior, one would find many gluons and a variety of quarks and anti-quarks. However, that doesn’t resolve the issue.

• Gluons, like photons, have zero rest mass, so they don’t help at all, naively speaking.
• The typical number of quarks and anti-quarks inside a proton, while more than three, is too small to add up to the proton’s full mass;

And thus one cannot explain the proton or neutron’s large mass as simply the sum of the masses of the objects inside it. The discrepancy remains.

Moreover, as can be verified using either strong theoretical arguments in analogous systems or direct numerical simulations, protons and neutrons would still have a substantial mass even if the quarks and anti-quarks they contain had none at all! Mass — from no mass.

Clearly, then, the solution to the puzzle lies elsewhere.

Mass is Not “Conserved”

The essential point is that the mass of an object is not the sum of the masses of the objects that it contains. In physics-speak, mass is not conserved. Did you learn otherwise in chemistry class? Well, certain lessons of chemistry class are not exactly right, and in particle physics — and specifically, within your own body and within every object around you — they often do not apply.

There’s already a subtle clue in the mass of a simple hydrogen atom, made of just one electron and one proton. It differs very slightly, by about one part in 100 million, from what you’d get if you added together the mass of an electron and the mass of a proton.

Admittedly, it’s not obvious this has anything to do with the issues inside a proton. After all,

• the hydrogen atom’s mass is very slightly less than the sum of the masses of the electron and the proton;
• the proton’s mass is much greater than the sum of the masses of the objects inside it.

Nevertheless, these two facts are indeed closely related. I’ll go through the first one before explaining the second.

Both Einstein’s relativity and quantum physics are involved. We must keep track of the fact that electrons and quarks are not really “particles” — at least, not as we mean the word in English, when we apply it to specks of dust or particles of smoke. Instead, they have many wave-like properties. I often prefer to refer to them as “wavicles”, a term which was invented about 100 years ago, and I’ll do so in this post.

• Wavicles, unlike ordinary particles, are vibrations; like any wave, they can have a vibrational frequency f, but unlike usual waves, they have an energy E that is proportional to that frequency. This is represented in the quantum formula: E=fh, where h is Planck’s constant, a constant of nature that serves as a conversion factor between E and f.
  
  
• We must also accurately account for Einstein’s relativity equation, E=mc2, a formula that relates the energy stored within an object to its rest mass m — and where c, the cosmic speed limit (also known as “the speed of light”), again serves as a conversion factor between E and m.

The key intuition we need is this: in contrast to an ordinary particle, a wavicle has the property that its frequency grows — and therefore its energy grows — when its container shrinks.

For instance, a wavicle in a hole has energy that depends on the width of the hole, as well as on the depth of the hole. This is unlike a particle’s energy, which depends only on the depth. As a result, a wavicle in a well will lose energy if the well is made deeper, yet it will gain energy if the well is made narrower. Both for atoms and for protons, this is crucially important.

Why is this true? If you want the back-story, you should read my two earlier posts comparing ordinary particles and wavicles:

• The first post highlights key differences between particles, waves and wavicles.
• The second post points out a consequence of these differences: a particle in a collapsing well will remain there to the end, while a wavicle will escape before the well collapses completely.

Atoms

Within a hydrogen atom, made of nothing but one electron and one proton, the proton pulls the electron toward it via the electric force. The smaller the distance between them, the stronger the pull.

This makes the electron behave as though it is on a edge of a very deep and steep 3-dimensional hole, with the proton at its center. I’ve sketched this in Figure 1. The horizontal direction represents the distance of the electron from the proton, while the vertical direction in the drawing showing the energy-depth of the “hole”. The little flat area is the location of the proton, where the hole terminates. (It is not to scale; the hole should extend off the bottom of your screen.)

Figure 1: If an electron were a particle, it would fall, thanks to electrical attraction, into the “hole” created by the proton; this would leave it sitting on or inside the proton, as in Fig. 2, having lost a large amount of energy in doing so. Not to scale. The dashed lines represent what the electron’s energy would be if there were no proton nearby.

If the electron were really a particle that could fall to the bottom of a hole, it would fall toward the proton until it reached the proton’s edge. After radiating away some excess energy, it would eventually settle down there, as in Fig. 2.

Figure 2: If an electron were a particle (green), it would end up on or inside the proton (red), and its energy would be tremendously reduced.

The electron’s energy would then have been reduced by the depth of the hole. And how deep would that be? Well, the electron’s internal mc2 energy is about 0.000511 GeV. But in this hole, it would lose more than that, several times over! This means that the combined proton-electron system would have a smaller mass than the proton does on its own. (You can rightly worry about what that might lead to…)

But this is all heading in the wrong direction. An electron isn’t a particle, not of the conventional sort, anyway. It’s a wavicle. Squeezing it into a small region increases its frequency, and therefore its energy. As a result, its energy wouldn’t actually be reduced if it were shoved down into a deep but narrow hole; the energy would actually increase! And so an electron, unlike an ordinary particle, simply won’t allow itself to be forced into such a predicament; it won’t fall into the hole in Fig. 1.

What ensues is a competition between two effects:

• the hole is trying to pull the electron in and reduce its energy,
• but the further the electron goes into the hole, the narrower the space available to it, which increases its frequency and therefore its energy.

As shown in Fig. 3, these two effects balance, and a hydrogen atom forms, when the electron just dips its toe into the hole. In protonic terms, it ends up occupying a gigantic region — with a volume about 1,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than the volume of a proton! Said another way, the diameter of the electron, and thus of the hydrogen atom, is about 100,000 times larger than a proton’s diameter; the atom is 10-10 meters across, while a proton’s diameter is a tiny 10-15 meters.

Figure 3: In a hydrogen atom, the electron, as a vibrating wavicle (blue), remains very spread out, but falls just far enough into the “hole” created by the proton that it remains attached to it. A small but finite amount of energy would be needed to knock it free. Not to scale.

Note: this is different from what happens to a wavicle in a well with vertical walls, which I covered in a recent post. In a straight-walled hole, it’s largely all or nothing; either the wavicle is confined in the hole, or it isn’t. But here, the walls of the “hole” tail off very gradually, which permits the electron to spread out far and yet remain attached to the hole.

As is true for any object, the mass of the atom is its internal energy, divided by c2. Most of the atom’s energy is obtained by adding the internal energy of the proton (0.938 GeV) to that of the electron (0.000511 GeV). But because the electron is (barely) inside the well created by the proton, just below the “level ground” that it would sit on if it were isolated, it has lost a tiny amount of energy: a mere 13.6 eV = 0.0000000136 GeV. (This is called the atom’s “binding energy.”) That in turn means that a hydrogen atom’s mass is 13.6 eV/c2 less than the sum of the masses of the electron and proton.

Figure 4: The electron, as a wavicle, does not fall onto the proton, but surrounds it, with very slightly reduced frequency and energy. Not to scale; the proton is much smaller than shown relative to the electron.

It’s a tiny reduction, but without it, the hydrogen atom wouldn’t be stable — it wouldn’t remain intact. To break the atom apart, “ionizing” it so that the proton and electron separate from one another, requires 13.6 eV of energy be added to it. And so, unless and until someone or something provides that energy, the proton and electron will remain together in atomic form.

[Note: if you’ve seen this argued in terms of the uncertainty principle rather than using the approach I’ve used here, be reassured: these are two complementary views of the same phenomena, and they do not contradict one another.]

Seeing how an atom works now raises a puzzle. If the atom is stable because its energy is lower than that of its constituent parts, how can a proton, whose energy is higher than that of its constituent parts, be stable? I’ll answer that at the very end.

Click here for more mathy details on atoms

First, let’s see that the energy of an electron particle sitting on a proton would be reduced by more than its energy. The electrostatic energy of an electron near a proton can be written

which is just a rewriting of the usual expression seen in first-year physics; here is a number, approximately 0.007. If we put meters, the radius of a proton, then

which is a reduction in energy about three times larger than the electron’s .

Now let’s consider the electron as a wavicle in a box of length . The Compton wavelength of the electron is

The energy of a wavicle in a box of length is roughly

where I am not keeping track of factors of 2 and other details, but just capturing the essence of the phenomena. If the box is large, with , then the first term is larger than the second, and we can approximate the electron’s energy using the fact that if , then

and so

Maybe this reminds you of the expresssion for a slow particle’s energy in special relativity, where the second term is the particle’s kinetic energy, written in terms of its speed

Indeed, we should understand the second term as a wavicle’s kinetic energy, where is replaced by . This is how quantum physics works; this conversion from speed to shape underlies the Schrodinger equation.

If the electron is roughly at a distance from the proton on average, then perhaps we can think of it as being in a box of size , with a depth ? We should not expect this to be strictly accurate! A hole shaped like the one in Figure 3 is far from a simple box! Nevertheless, keeping this in mind, let’s proceed.

The total energy of the electron, under this guess, is then

The first term is independent of . The second grows positive when is small, while the third grows negative when is small. The balance point between these last two effects, where is smallest, is at

or, being careless with factors of 2 and

This answer turns out to be too big, by about a factor of a few, mainly because our approximation, in which we treated the hole as though it were a simple box, isn’t sufficiently valid; there are some factors to account for. But it captures the essence of the physics — the atom forms through a balancing act that prevents the wavicle from sinking to the bottom of the hole.

To check this reasoning is really correct, it’s time to sit down and solve quantum physics equations and do some hard work. At the end of that effort, one does indeed find detailed energy levels, and an atomic radius, that matches precisely with experiments on hydrogen.

See also this argument which gets the same answer, within a factor of 2, via an even simpler approach.

One more thing: What would hydrogen be like in a universe with electrons of even lower mass? Such electrons would spread out even further, and the decrease in their energy would be less. The smaller the mass of an electron, the larger its atoms, and the less energy would be required to ionize them.

This means that electrons with zero rest mass could not form atoms at all! They would be infinitely large and infinitely easy to ionize.

And that, in turn, is why the Higgs field is so important for our existence. Without it, electrons would have no rest mass, and stable atoms would not exist.

Protons

A proton presents a puzzle. We’ve seen that the electric pull of the proton on an electron lowers the electron’s energy. How can we use a pull to hold an object together and yet give a wavicle higher energy, and lots of it?

Within a proton, the quarks, gluons and anti-quarks are all pulling on each other via the strong nuclear force. When the distances between them are much smaller than a proton, the strong nuclear force is similar to the electric force, only somewhat stronger: it makes them behave as though they are within a deep, narrow “hole”, where their energy falls rapidly as they approach each other.

But when they try to separate from one another, something new happens; the hole’s walls, rather than sloping gradually outward as in Fig. 3, extend upward, preventing any escape, as in Fig. 5. The quarks and gluons are trapped.

[A reminder about what is plotted in Fig. 5, as in Figs. 1 and 3: the horizontal direction represents the distance between a quark and, say, an anti-quark, but the vertical direction represents energy, not a vertical direction of space. So the picture conveys that the energy between the quark and anti-quark is growing very rapidly as they separate… very different from the gradual die-off of the energy seen in Fig. 3 that allows an electron to move far from a proton.]

The high wall changes everything. The “hole” that contains the wavicles is very narrow, and if the walls were absent or low, the quarks and gluons would easily escape, or at least spread out, as in Fig. 3. But thanks to these walls, the quarks and gluons find themselves stuck inside the hole.

Figure 5: In contrast to an electron in an atom, a quark or gluon in a proton acts as though it is in a narrow hole with towering walls. This traps it and forces its frequency and energy upward, well above what naively would be “ground level” (dashed line.)

Moreover, the trap remains extremely narrow as one climbs the walls, which the wavicles, figuratively speaking, attempt to do. This raises their energy to the point that it’s the width of the trap, not the masses that the quarks themselves carry, that determines how much energy the quarks have — and it greatly exceeds their E=mc2 energy! Gluons, which have no mass, get all their energy from the trap.

[Specifically, the trap is much narrower than the Compton wavelength of the quarks. This is unlike the situation for an electron in an atom, where the electron can spread to an extent much larger than its Compton wavelength. The math of this is discussed in an aside below.]

In other words, it is the trap’s effects on the wavicles, not the masses of those wavicles, that provides the majority of the proton’s internal energy. That’s why a proton’s mass can be so much larger than the mass of the objects that it contains.

In fact, inside this trap, a quark’s energy would be almost unchanged even if its mass were zero. Since both gluons and quarks would still have a plenty of energy, a proton would still have mass even if its quarks had none! All that’s needed to generate considerable energy for the wavicles in the “hole”, and thus mass for the full collection of wavicles that make up a proton, is that the “hole” be narrow and that it have high walls that prevent the wavicles from escaping. And that’s what the strong nuclear force achieves.

Such are the deep secrets that lie at the heart of every atom. Without them, the proton and neutron would be a shadow of their true selves. Our existence depends upon this remarkable, intricate interplay of the strong nuclear force, Einstein’s relativity and quantum physics.

Click here to see more mathy details for the proton

You’ll want to look first at the related discussion about electrons in atoms, located at the end of the “Atoms” section.

The main difference for what happens in a proton versus what happens in an atom is that here the box is smaller than the quarks’ Compton wavelength. As a result, in the expression for the energy of a wavicle in a box,

the second term is now much larger than the first. Expanding the square root as before, but in the opposite way, gives us

The contribution of the first term involves the diameter of the proton, which is approximately meters, and gives us an energy per wavicle that corresponds to a good fraction of the mass of a proton! (As for electrons in atoms, this gives a bit of an over-estimate, thanks again to some 2’s and ‘s.)

The second term is zero for gluons, and for quarks, it is so small by comparison to the first term that it can be largely ignored. Almost all the energy is coming just from the fact that is small.

As before, this estimate, while far from precise, captures the heart of the phenomenon: merely by creating a small box for the quarks and gluons to live in, the strong nuclear force produces a proton with a mass much larger than the masses of its ingredients.

To conclude, here are answers to two questions that I’m sure many readers will ask.

Wait! What About The Other Picture of a Proton?

Those of you who’ve read my book, or read elsewhere on this website about protons, will no doubt have noticed that this picture looks very different from the one I usually present, in which the inside of a proton is a maelstrom of quarks, gluons and antiquarks running about at or nearly at the cosmic speed limit, smashing into each other, and appearing and disappearing.

Figure 6: Snapshot of a proton from my book, showing many quarks, anti-quarks and gluons as particles, moving around at high speed. © M. Strassler

The difference between them is a classic example of how one transitions from a particle picture to a wavicle picture.

There’s an analogue here for atoms, too. Before the correct picture of an atom, shown in Fig. 4, was discovered, there was the Bohr model of the atom, which captured some of its properties. This model is presented in any first-year physics class (sometimes without explaining its limitations!) In that early picture of an atom, an electron is a particle, not a wavicle; it travels on a path that orbits the proton, and so its behavior is somewhat like a planet orbiting a star, except that it has to follow strange, inexplicable rules. One can go from the Bohr picture to the true, quantum picture in stages; the Bohr view is a good stepping stone, but it has flaws that are uncorrectable in the end.

Figure 7: In the Bohr model of atoms, electrons (blue) are particles traveling on paths around the nucleus (red), not vibrating wavicles as in Fig. 4.

The picture I usually give of a proton is somewhat like the Bohr model of the atom: it treats the quarks, gluons and anti-quarks as though they were particles, not wavicles. Like the Bohr model, it captures some of the story. In particular, it correctly illustrates these points:

• a proton is far more complicated than an atom;
• the energy of particles inside the proton is far greater than their E=mc2 energy;
• it is impossible to say how many quarks, gluons or anti-quarks are inside a proton
  • though there are always three more quarks than anti-quarks

But as with the Bohr model of the atom, the reasons it gives to explain these three key facts are not complete or accurate. The correct picture is only obtained by treating the quarks, anti-quarks and gluons as the wavicles that they truly are. Then one learns that:

• it is the strong nuclear interactions among the wavicles that make the proton complicated and turn it into a prison;
• the reason that the wavicles inside a proton have so much energy is that the proton, for them, is a tiny prison, far smaller than their Compton wavelengths;
• the patterns of wavicle interactions (which can create or destroy gluons, and convert quark/anti-quark pairs to gluons and vice versa), combined with a quantum physics effect known as “superposition”, assure that a proton simply does not have a definite number of quarks, of anti-quarks, or of gluons
  • nevertheless, the number of quarks minus the number of antiquarks is definite, and equal to three.

Why did I leave this important story out of my book? The reason is simple: there wasn’t room for it. But… that’s why I have a website! What couldn’t fit in the book fits here.

Wait! Why is the Proton Stable?

Now we know why the proton is greater than the sum of its parts: the strong nuclear forces among those wavicles creates a high-walled, narrow trap. But why doesn’t the proton fall apart? If the energy of the individual quarks and gluons is smaller than that of a proton, how can the latter be stable?

This is far from obvious, and is directly related to why the walls of the hole stretch so far upward. Understanding how the strong nuclear force does this has been worthy of Nobel Prizes.

It turns out — I have written about this before — that it is impossible to isolate a quark on its own. If you try to isolate a quark, you will have to supply a huge amount of energy — so much that nature will co-opt it. Despite your best efforts, nature will take some of that energy and spontaneously create additional quarks and gluons and antiquarks in the vicinity of the quark you’re trying to isolate. In this way, nature itself assures that your effort will fail!

This effect is sometimes (and somewhat incorrectly) called “quark confinement” (for in truth it involves confinement of the strong-nuclear-electric field, or “chromoelectric” field.) The existence of the high walls in Fig. 5 is itself a consequence of this effect.

What this means is that a quark or gluon is never found outside a narrow deep “hole” with high walls… and therefore, all objects made from quarks, anti-quarks and gluons have mass greater than the masses of the quarks and anti-quarks that they contain.

Again, this cannot happen for atoms. You couldn’t have a hydrogen atom with more energy than an electron and a proton have separately, because the atom would instantly disintegrate; the electron and positron could reduce their energy by rushing apart from one another. But the quarks and gluons in a proton cannot escape each other; when they try, more quarks and gluons are made, requiring even more energy. Consequently, a proton cannot break into its component parts, even though those parts, treated individually, have less mass than does the proton itself.

Former President Donald Trump bragged in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that "right-to-try" had saved "thousands of lives"? What's the real story? (Hint: Nowhere near that.)

The post Donald Trump bragged that “right-to-try” has saved thousands of lives. It hasn’t. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

From the NYT (click to read), but first I’m gonna say that yes, I was right again:

Excerpt:

President Biden, 81, abandoned his bid for re-election and threw the 2024 presidential contest into chaos on Sunday, caving to relentless pressure from his closest allies to drop out of the race amid deep concerns that he is too old and frail to defeat former President Donald J. Trump.

After three weeks of often angry refusals to step aside, Mr. Biden finally yielded to a torrent of devastating polls, urgent pleas from Democratic lawmakers and clear signs that donors were no longer willing to pay for him to continue.

There’s more, but the race has suddenly become interesting. Will Kamala Harris replace him as the default candidate? (I hope not; I’m a Gretchen Whitmer fan.) Will Gavin Newsom throw his hat into the ring? Or will some dark horse emerge from the convention and go on to trounce Trump?

At this late date it’s probably too late to defeat Trump, but suddenly I feel hopeful again.

So who do you want to run?