(A salmonberry, for those unfamiliar, is a clusterfruit – I could have used “blackberry” or “raspberry”, but those are laden with annoying other meanings.)
Recently, I ran across a small blog piece about how we still use Niels Bohr’s solar-system atom model even though it is not really accurate/valid. This got me to thinking once again about the atomic nucleus, which is commonly depicted as a salmonberry: a cluster of hadrons stuck together, probably swirling around amongst each other.
I have my doubts.
Gauge theory is my quantum fetish. I have come to believe that the graphical models we are accustomed to are not accurate but serve the limits of our abilities to visualize and imagine.
I am thinking that things like hadrons and atomic nuclei are not literally smaller discreet things stuck together with strong-force-rubber-bands mediated by gluons or whatever, but that they are themselves singular manifestations of something like a harmonic (as particles typically exhibit wave-like properties).
In other words, an atom is a melody of hadrons, some sort of standing wave interference pattern of the energies (or placquette frustrations) that can be deconstructed into proton and neutron energy patterns, which themselves are standing waves that deconstruct into quarks.
After all, quarks are only theoretical, bound energies that were formulated as a means to simplify the “particle zoo”, and we never expect to see them unbound.
So this would mean that an atomic nucleus is a sort of vibrating blob of jelly, and when it is disturbed (or seeks to crap out what it making it naturally unstable), some of its internal waveform ejects and coalesces into a smaller blob (alpha, beta, neutron, whatever). And that fusion amounts to not sticking things onto each other but actually merging their waveform energies into a larger blob.
My question is, where does my silly notion fail? Are particles truly mostly empty space with some tiny dots in there? What is the experimental evidence that demonstrates the aggregate model over the unitary composite?