Talk:Quantum chromodynamics

We just made a duplicate page redirect here, here is the content, I don't know if there's anything which needs to be merged in:

Quantam Chromodynamics, or QCD, is a relavistic quantam-mechanical quage theory of the strong interactions based on the exchange of mass-less gluons between quarks and antiquarks.

QCD is analogous to quantum electrodyanmics (QED) in the field theory of electromagnetic interactions, but with gluon replacing the photon and the 'color' quantam number instead of electric charge. The theory has been tested successfully in high-energy experiments involving muon-nucleon scattering and proton-antiproton collisions.

(by User:Vholiday), fabiform | talk 02:21, 3 May 2004 (UTC).

Non-neutral

Previous versions of this entry were non-neutral in favour lattice theory and I tried to mitigate this. It seems I may have undone some alterations which was inadvertent and unexpected?!?

Poor grammar causes confusion

If I knew more about this subject, I would try to make the correct changes myself, but I am not so lucky.

The second sentence in this article doesn't make any sense:

"Because of its special property [property], it was first proposed in the early 1970s by [people]"

This means that QCD was proposed because of this property. It doesn't seem right that the property itself didn't spark the proposal, and if by some strangeness, it did, that should be explained.

• I apologize, I'm not a native speaker and "Because of its..." is my sentence. But could you explain your objection more comprehensibly? I am simply not understanding what can be unclear about the sentence. QCD exhibits asymptotic freedom, and this is the only good reason why it was proposed as a description of the strong interaction. It explained the experiments, Bjorken scaling, and so forth, that indicated that the quarks are "free" at very short distances. This behavior of quarks - suggestive of free particles - was the only good justification for introducing the non-abelian theory and gluons, and therefore the discovery of asymptotic freedom was essentially identical to the discovery of Quantum Chromodynamics, and this is why these three men got the Nobel prize today.--Lumidek 15:00, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• • I'd suspect that the objection is that for QCD to have the property asymptotic freedom QCD must already exist and if it already exists it can't be proposed. While not incorrect, the sentence doesn't communicate the relationship between the two or the significance (i.e. that by having the then unique quality of asymptotic freedom QCD could effectively describe the strong force, which other theories could not do.) VermillionBird 16:45, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)

This sentence's poor grammar also makes it hard to understand:

"According to this theory, there is [noun phrase] and that [noun] are [noun phrase]."

The "that" doesn't seem to fit.

Heavy flavors

In many applications of QCD one can ignore the heavy flavors (charm, bottom and top)

The text is unclear. This is the only reference to charm, bottom, and top. Why are they heavy? What are the other three flavours called? Why are they called these names? ("charm" is kinda sweet)

Charm, bottom and top are the three heaviest flavors of quark. You can read more about them on the page about quarks or the page about flavour (particle physics). Each quark flavor has a particular mass and these three just happen to be the heavy ones. The other three flavors are up, down and strange.

The names are weird historical artifacts: Up and down are so called because they differentiate between different isospins of particles. If you think of isospin as being a real spin rather than just a flavor number, then naming the different ones up and down makes some kind of sense. The strange quark is so named because particles containing strange quarks have long lifetimes, which physicists at the time thought was strange. The charm quark is so named either because Glashow thought the charm quark would be the charm that won him the Nobel, or because people thought the notion of a two sets of two quarks would be charming. Though, from looking at Glashow's paper on the subject, it seems that he just picked the letter C because it came after B for baryon. Bottom and top are so named to match down and up. -- Xerxes 17:19, 2005 September 1 (UTC)

wait a minute!

Okay, let me get this straight. According to this article, the attraction between quarks does not diminish with distance, therefore, it would take an infinite amount of energy to separate them. Here are the problems as I see them:

1)it would take an infinate amount of energy from the quarks themselves.
2)they dont seem large enough to have a force of that magnitude apply to them.
3)wouldn't there be a particle by neccecity for the force according to the laws of quantum theory? (a.k.a. all particles can be intepreted as waves, and all waves as particles)
4)If such a force existed, wouldn't all the quarks squeeze together into one big mush?

a point in favor:

1)could this actually account for inertia? quarks make up everything, and if it is all one big mush, then maybe inertia is just us rearranging the quark mush and they are exerting preassure against us?

Arakanuva 23:46, 5 September 2005 (UTC)arakanuva

1&2) You don't actually separate quarks this way; it's impossible.

3) Yes, it's called the gluon.

4) Yes, they form hadrons like the proton and neutron.

1) No, quarks that are close to one another feel little force. In their natural low-temperature state, they just form protons and neutron that live happily in the nuclei of atoms. Unless you hammer the nucleons really hard, you'd never know about the quarks at all. -- Xerxes 03:09, 2005 September 6 (UTC)

Grip on reality

I think the introduction to this article can be made more accessible to non-specialists. The present introduction contains too much technical information without describing to a layperson what the strong interaction is. I know all the relevant links are present in the introduction, but perhaps a few words about QCD being a description of the stong interaction, which is a nuclear force etc. could be mentioned. Also, some of the links themselves aren't that great either: for example, a gluon is described on that page as a vector gauge boson that mediates the strong colour charge interactions of quarks in quantum chromodynamics !!! This suggests that some of the other technical articles can be made slightly more accessible to non-specialists. MP (talk) 12:02, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

That's what a gluon is. I don't see what's so confusing about that. A reader unfamiliar with any of those terms can click on the associated links. Can you be more specific about what you find confusing? -- Xerxes 16:24, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Hi Xerxes.

All I meant was that the introduction (to this and other articles) could be made more accessible to non-specialists by adding a few more (less technical) descriptive words. Regarding the definition of the gluon, I know that the definition given is correct, I'm just saying that it could be made less abstruse by a few more words of explanation at the start. The beginning of an article is most important; if the reader's attention isn't grabbed at the start (by not understanding what is meant, and especially if they have to click on several links just to make sense of the first sentence in the article), then they will be turned away. I agree it's not always easy to do this in the nmore technical articles, but I think we should make the effort. MP (talk) 10:05, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Well, admittedly I'm completely biased by being an expert in this field, but here's my perspective: We're not advertising QCD. If people have clicked on a link or searched for the term, they must already be interested in the subject. Then we Wikipedia editors should present them with an article that is (in order of importance) 1) correct, 2) complete, 3) clear, 4) accessible. If we can make the article more accessible without making it less correct, complete and clear, I'm all for it. In practice, people attempt to be accessible by putting in nontechnical words that start out being unclear (because nontechnical words lack the precision of the correct terminology), then mutate into sort of a muddle of lengthy sort-of-correct hand-waving and then back into popular misconceptions. There are so many errors and omissions around that our time seems poorly spent rewriting paragrphs that are already correct.

Anyway, that having been said, I tried tweaking the abstract a bit yesterday. Better? Worse? -- Xerxes 14:51, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

I can see your point of view. I had similar problems when editing some of the general relativity articles; I'm from the other end of the spectrum and am trying to learn more about paricle physics. To a certain extent, we are advertising QCD and other theories; I've been guilty of falling into the trap of treating Wikipedia as a place to write articles solely for specialists. Take a look at the general relativity article, for example - several of us have worked hard at this article and it has only recently become more accessible to non-specialists without losing clarity and completeness. Perhaps it's in the nature of particle physics that there are so many technicalities. However, if there are more specialists editing the pages, then they are the ones who are most likely to present the material in a more accessible way without making it less complete and clear.

Anyway, yes, your tweaking was fine - I think it makes the intro. better. MP (talk) 08:16, 29 December 2005 (UTC)