How about some outside the box thinking about a perplexing scientific issue?
Quark Theory has been around since the mid-1960s and is widely accepted. According to the theory there are six quarks, plus the corresponding antiquarks of antimatter. But only two quarks are really important to us, the up and the down quarks. It is sometimes said that, if all quarks except the up and down quarks disappeared tomorrow, only particle physicists would notice.
Quarks are theorized to combine together to form subatomic particles called hadrons. Atomic nuclei are composed of protons and neutrons, both of which are hadrons composed of quarks. The third component particle of atoms are electrons. But electrons are a different class of particles, known as leptons, which are not composed of quarks.
Quarks may seem to be an arcane topic to you but they really aren't. Your body is made of atoms, which are made of protons, neutrons and, electrons. A proton is 1,836 times the mass of an electron and a neutron 1,837 times the mass. An atom, except hydrogen, contains at least twice as many protons and neutrons together as electrons. This means that virtually all of the mass of your body, except maybe one part in three thousand, is composed of quarks, all of which are combined together to form protons and neutrons.
The component particles of the atom have integral electric charges. An electron has a charge of -1. A proton has a charge of +1. A neutron has a charge of zero.
Quarks have fractional, rather than integral, electric charges. An up quark has a charge of +2/3 while a down quark has a charge of -1/3. Two up quarks combined with one down quark produces a proton with a net electric charge of +1. Two down quarks with one up quark produces a neutron with a net electric charge of zero.
In the postwar period so many new particles were discovered that it was referred to as the "Particle Zoo". It was felt by many that there couldn't really be this many fundamental particles. As it turned out, there wasn't. According to Quark Theory many of these particles were actually composed of the even more fundamental quarks.
Quark Theory has been very widely accepted. The only complication seems to be that an individual quark has never been observed. Quarks are only seen when combined together to form protons and neutrons.
Not long after Quark Theory emerged, quark stars were theorized to exist. A star is an equilibrium between the inward pull of the gravity of the star's mass and the outward push from the energy released by fusion in the star's center. A star forms when enough matter comes together by gravity to overcome the electron repulsion between atoms so that smaller atoms are crunched together into larger ones. The new larger atom contains less internal energy than the smaller atoms that were crunched together to form it. The excess energy is released as radiation and that is why stars shine.
But a star eventually reaches the point where it requires more force to break atoms apart than is released by their fusion. That point is iron and it is as far as the ordinary fusion process goes. Without the outward force of the energy released by fusion the star may collapse so that the structures of the atoms themselves are crushed.
What happens at this point is that the electrons of the atoms are crunched into the protons to form neutrons, which is what happens in ordinary fusion. This forms what is known as a neutron star, although it is no longer technically a star because fusion is not taking place.
Since the structure of an atom is mostly empty space, and since the structures of it's atoms have collapsed, a neutron star is composed of extremely dense material. A spoonful of material from a neutron star is believed to weigh billions of tons.
The collapse of the star's atoms brings it's matter into extremely close quarters. This increases the force of gravity still further and brings about further collapse. The result is that the structures of the neutrons collapse into the unimaginably dense mass of a black hole. The material of a black hole is about two hundred times as dense as a neutron star.
The theory is that, since neutrons are composed of quarks, there should be a stage in the progressive collapse of matter, between neutron stars and black holes, that had the star composed of quarks and would be known as a quark star.
But like individual quarks themselves no quark stars have ever been found. Plenty of neutron stars and plenty of black holes have been found, but no quark stars.
There is, of course, the possibility that Quark Theory is wrong and there is no such thing as quarks. But the theory explains so much and is so widely accepted.
I have another explanation of why no quarks or quark stars have ever been found and cannot see that this explanation has ever been offered. The explanation was not difficult to arrive at, it just involved some thinking outside the box.
What if the reason we have never detected quarks or quark stars is not that they are not there, but that we can't detect them? Once again it comes back to the basic presumption in science that we have an unbiased view of the universe. What if we don't have an unbiased view of the universe? In other sciences, like geology and chemistry and everyday physics, it may not make a difference. But in cosmology it does make a difference. My cosmology theory is that we do not have an unbiased view of the universe, we see it as we do not only because of what it is but also because of what we are.
We rely on electromagnetic radiation, which includes visible light, for our information about the universe. As the name implies electromagnetic radiation is based on electric charges. In my cosmology theory empty space consists of a perfectly alternating checkerboard of negative and positive electric charges, in multiple dimensions. The basic rules of electric charges are that opposite charges attract while like charges repel. The charged particles of matter, such as electrons, consist of like charges held together against their mutual repulsion by energy. This energy shows up as the intrinsic energy in matter known as the Mass-Energy Equivalence. It is why Einstein's famous formula, E = MC squared, has mass being convertible into energy.
In contrast to matter electromagnetic waves, including light, consist of disturbances, caused by energy, in the checkerboard of alternating electric charges comprising empty space. In my cosmology theory energy always goes to overcome the basic rules of the electric charges. Matter forms when the mutual repulsion of like charges is overcome by energy, to produce charged particles such as electrons. Electromagnetic radiation is formed when energy overcomes the attraction between opposite charges in space.
When electromagnetic waves encounter matter they "bounce off", or are reflected, by the electric charge of the electrons on the outside of atoms. This is why matter reflects light and we can see things. It doesn't matter if the outside of the atom has a positive or negative electric charge, it would be reflected off antimatter in the same way as ordinary matter.
Has anyone ever thought that the reason we cannot detect quarks and quark stars is not that they are not there but due to the nature of the electromagnetic radiation upon which we depend for information?
What if the production and reflection of electromagnetic radiation as we know it depends on integral electric charges? By "integral" I mean integers or whole numbers. A proton has an electric charge of +1, an electron of -1, and a neutron of 0.
Remember that quarks, in contrast, have fractional electric charges. An up quark has a charge of +2/3 and a down quark of -1/3. What if electromagnetic radiation, as we know it, only works with integral electric charges and not with fractional charges?
Electromagnetic radiation is produced by the movement of integral electric charges. The only way that we can see or detect electromagnetic is for it's energy to knock electrons out of their orbitals in atoms, this produces an electric current in our eyes or detection equipment.
Why is it that we can see or detect the electromagnetic radiation from matter as long as it is composed of integral electric charges, but it seems to "vanish" and we can detect it only by it's gravity when it breaks down into fractional electric charges? Doesn't that make it seem clear that the "invisibility" of the fractional electric charges is due more to the nature of electromagnetic radiation than to the matter itself?
Electromagnetic radiation, including light, is produced by the movement of integral electric charges, which are almost always electrons with a charge of -1. They are reflected by integral electric charges which are, again, almost always electrons. The only way that we can receive electromagnetic radiation is for it's energy to knock electrons out of their orbitals, in our eyes or detection equipment.
It appears that electromagnetic radiation, as we know it, is based on integral electric charges. When the radiation encounters something that is not composed of integral electric charges, which simply means the charge on an electron or a proton whether it be negative or positive, it is as if the matter is speaking a different "language" that our familiar electromagnetic radiation doesn't "understand".
The way we see it is that the gravity of the black hole is so great that it doesn't allow even light to escape. But what that amounts to, once again, is the basic presumption in science that we have an unbiased view of the universe and that our observations and measurements are completely reliable in our gaining understanding of how the universe works. But the fact is that we are dependent on electromagnetic radiation to convey information to us and one of the things that we must take into account is the nature of that radiation.
This adds a new dimension to electromagnetic radiation. Not only is there the wavelength, from long radio waves to short gamma rays, but there is also the electric charges that produce, reflect and, receive the waves, from the integral charges on electrons and protons to the fractional charges, in thirds, on quarks.
Since we are dependent on the electromagnetic radiation involving electrons for our information let's call it "Electron Dependency". It is the reason that we cannot detect individual quarks or quark stars or black holes.
One obvious conclusion that some might come to is that this explains "Dark Matter". Matter that is gravitationally active but cannot be seen because it is not composed of integral electric charges.
Here is a link to another line of thinking, my hypothesis that black holes actually are the missing quark stars:
https://markmeeksideas.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-missing-quark-stars.html?m=0
We can discern nothing about the structure of electrons themselves. They seem to us to be nothing more than point particles. But, once again, that is a matter of our perspective and that we do not have an unbiased view of the universe. We have seen that we cannot see electrons as anything other than mere points simply because it is electrons that we depend upon to convey information. Here is a link to that posting:
https://markmeeksideas.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-inaccessible-structure-of-electrons.html?m=0
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