Proton Size

I woke up this morning feeling maybe smaller, maybe less energized. Infact, a new study in Nature calculates that the proton is 4% smallerthan previously thought or as this Scientific American headline reads"proton shrinks in size"http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=proton-shrinks-in-size.So perhaps my jeans really do fit better today because my protons aresmaller than they were last week.

What do these studies imply?Does this mean that we don't understand the basic structure of the atomas well as we thought? Does a 4% difference matter? Perhaps therewas a calculation error and this newest technology that was used in thisexperiment is just off somewhat. Since now the Rydberg constant wouldnow be different, does this through a glitch into the whole concept ofquantum theory? Should we care? While protons are measured infemtometers are a lot smaller than nanometers (1000times), all matter iscomposed of protons, electrons and neutrons. So when someone says yourprotons are smaller than they thought, you should take note.
Votes: 0
E-mail me when people leave their comments –

You need to be a member of The International NanoScience Community - Nanopaprika.eu to add comments!

Join The International NanoScience Community - Nanopaprika.eu

Comments

  • Dear Dr. Nichol,

    Do you think this discovery brings in a new problem, since we have been doing our calculations based on our old measurements, and we haven't faced problems yet.

    Raghavendran
This reply was deleted.