The Proton Shrinks In Size! Tiny change in radius has huge implications

[DiRollin]

"The proton seems to be 0.00000000000003 millimetres smaller than researchers previously thought, according to work published in today's issue of Nature1.

The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care. But the new measurements could mean that there is a gap in existing theories of quantum mechanics. "It's a very serious discrepancy," says Ingo Sick, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who has tried to reconcile the finding with four decades of previous measurements. "There is really something seriously wrong someplace."

The proton shrinks in size : Nature News

 

[nikokapo]

Would someone care to explain how this would affect quantum physics theories?

 

[StridAst]

simple. everything is math. change one of the base constants and it throws off all your calculations based on it. This is one of the more basic measurements being thrown into question.

There's an awful lot of math based on things like this. If you change one of the base measurements, then decades of work is wrong and has to be redone and rechecked..... as an example. if calculations on the size of quarks are based on the size of the proton composed of those, then suddenly the size of a quark is off too. add in the total size of an atom of say uranium is suddenly off by a fair amount. Interactions between subatomic particles that are calculated as probabilitys of happening based on size are also off, as is any theory about secondary interactions. etc.

 

[drlava]

Physicists and government 'accountants' are the only people who deal with numbers with that many zeros. The only difference - only the physicists care when things don't add up!

 

[Meatball]

^Like

So if the proton is smaller than previously thought, than it is also more dense than previously thought.... soooo now what?

 

[Fonduman]

so this one experiment or whatever it was suddenly proves its smaller?

 

[Meatball]

perhaps not proving so... but it was measured, or observed as so. They are still going through all the data to look for any errors that may have occurred.

 

[ossumguywill]

Now hold on-I thought protons were fuzzy as with everything else on that scale? We can't really say the exact size of a proton, only the size of its probability field I thought...