Protons are really really tiny, so much so that the new 0.00000000000000003 meters difference scientists just discovered is 4% smaller than originally thought over decades of discovery.
The new sizing comes from years of tests conducted by European physicists and could have major implications on the field of physics, specifically quantum mechanics which relies on finely tuned measurements in order to properly conduct tests.
Ingo Sick, a physicist at Switzerland’s University of Basel told Scientific American:
“It’s a very serious discrepancy. There is really something seriously wrong someplace.”
Given their extremely small size, a proton can not be measured directly, instead scientists rely on what they know about quantum mechanics to provide a measurement. As described at io9:
The energy levels that electrons occupy in the atom are partially described by the size of the proton, and physicists have keyed in on this fact to arrive at incredibly accurate measurements of the proton radius. Before this experiment, that figure was thought to be about 0.8768 femtometers, a little less than one quadrillionth of a meter.
In this new study scientists chose to use a different particle other than electrons, a particle known as a muon which is approximately 200 times heavier than a proton. Muon’s and their higher relative weight are more sensitive to protons. The team fired the muons into a cloud of hydrogen causing the electrons to become displaced from the atoms, they then used lasers to determine muonic levels which provided them with their figures.
The figure that occurred after their experiments took 6 years to realize since it was so far off what scientists had expected that they weren’t looking in their results range. In fact scientists thought their laser system was broken until in 2009 they extended the range of where they were looking and found the new numbering.
While the study has not been proven by the larger scientific community, if it is found to be correct the practice of quantum mechanics will need to be re-tuned, which could mean thousands of calculations need to be recalculated. The study could also mean a new look at the Rydberg Constant which links together proton size and the energy levels of orbiting particles.
Every now and then a new theory or discovery comes forth that changes the way scientists are able to determine how things work, while it’s still too early to determine if that will be the case in this circumstance, it’s interesting to think that scientists could be off by as much as 4% in a field that requires extremely precise mathematics.
There’s another possibility, a yet undiscovered particle is somehow interacting with the muon and proton in a way it did not with an electron/proton relationship, which would still mean discovering a new particle in a universe held together by both the seen and unseen. In any case the study will warrant further scientific study and the more scientists realize about our universe the better off we are….well at least until they accidentally open a black hole that swallows all of us alive.
