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Old 18th February 2013, 01:32 AM   #937
lpetrich
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Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 762
Originally Posted by Farsight View Post
Well protons don't decay so there you go.
So if we cannot observe something with present-day technology, it does not exist?

Protons are not observed to decay, but their decay is predicted by most Grand Unified Theories. Theories including Georgi-Glashow SU(5) and its supersets, like SO(10) and E6.

The current experimental lower limit is around 1030 - 1032 years, and it's getting close to what one expects from a GUT energy scale of about 1016 GeV. That's what one finds from the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model extrapolated up to GUT energies.

Let's see what one can discover with this argument, looking back to past decades and centuries.

The 1970's: the W and Z particles don't exist.
The mid to late 1960's: quarks don't exist.
The 19th cy. and early 20th cy.: atoms don't exist.
Around 1870: the chemical elements eka-boron, eka-aluminum, eka-manganese, and eka-silicon don't exist. They were eventually discovered as scandium, gallium, technetium, and germanium.
Around 1700: gravity doesn't exist.
Etc.

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Then ask yourself this: in low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation to gamma photons, where does the strong force go?
It disappears. There is no law of conservation of strong force.

Furthermore, the most likely result of nucleon-antinucleon annihilation is pions, not a pair of photons, and no amount of diagram-thumping can change that.
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Oh, and the $64,000 dollar question is this: The strong force keeps a proton together. What keeps an electron together?
An electron isn't held together by anything. It's a Dirac field, and it's much like a photon field.
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I'm a bit surprised you didn't want to talk about mass.
What was I supposed to say?
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Anyway, I'm off to bed.
What an argument.
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