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How much of a Neutron or Proton is empty space?

Atoms are mostly empty space, but what about their component parts?  I.e Protons and Neutrons?  I gather that there are Quarks and Gluons whizzing about inside at something close to the speed of light, but how much of it is empty space? 

Mr M.D.Gould

 

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  • Asked by grooley
  • on 2009-11-06 11:14:50
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Categories: Our universe.

Tags: Protons, Neutrons, ParticlePhysics.

 

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dmleeman says:

In your spatial visualisation a proton consist of two up and one down quark spinning around at extremely high speed forming a type of 'cloud' that can be perceived as being the proton.

A neutron is a similar arrangement but with two down quarks and one up quark.

A proton is around 1x10^-15m whereas a quark is at largest 1x10^-18m so in crude terms there are 3 items (at least) 1000 times smaller than a proton whizzing about inside the proton so I would say based on this that a proton is around 99.97% empty space. Neutrons appear to be only very slightly more massive so can effectively considered to be equal in 'size' to a proton.

But this does not take into account the soup of gluons and antiquarks in this arrangement, or that the quark may even in fact be a true point particle in that it has mass but occupies a nonzero amount of space.

They're not like ever decreasing billiard balls but more akin to the leading edge of a helicopter blade, imagine that the helicopter spins its blades at the speed of light forming a seemingly solid disc with what would appear to be a solid 'edge' however, the blades would be imperceptible individually. Again a crude analogy but it comes closer to approaching a visual representation. 

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Tags: Protons, Neutrons, ParticlePhysics.

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posted on 2009-11-16 22:06:28 | Report abuse


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