I am going to play the skeptic on this thread. I have a very strong suspicion that the accuracy of the proton measurement is most likely not as good as is thought. Why does the uncertainty principle allow the size measurement to be this accurate since the particle momentum appears to be well defined.
The proton size is a theoretical number that may one day prove to be grossly wrong. The next theory will eventually come around and a new argument will begin. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Eric Walker <eric.wal...@gmail.com> To: vortex-l <vortex-l@eskimo.com> Sent: Sat, Jan 26, 2013 6:36 pm Subject: Re: [Vo]:The hydrogen s-orbital and the problem of muonic hydrogen I wrote: So it seems that under certain conditions, physicists are measuring something vaguely like Mills's fractional hydrogen -- it might be that it is Mills's fractional hydrogen, or it might be something entirely different. This is incorrect. The physicists are measuring *muonic* hydrogen and getting a different charge radius for the proton. So we're not dealing with Mills hydrogen or even something that looks like Mills hydrogen, since these have an electron and not a muon. If you extrapolate the charge radius from these experiments to the case of the normal proton-electron system, that is interesting. But what I don't understand yet is that the new charge radius is 0.04fm *smaller* than previously measured. In light of this, I'm not sure what is meant by the quotation going back to the paper that "The proton structure is important because an electron in an S [ground] state has a nonzero probability to be inside the proton." Eric
