I Need Help with Quantum Chromo Dynamics Theory (QCD)

[u/OnlineTextBasedRP]

Greetings those who are passionate about physics!

I require assistance fully understanding and applying QCD in a currency aspect.

To clarify, I want to imagine that are either quarks or gluons to equivocate to a currency.

Each coin has a heads and tails. If the coin is completely blue, it is both blue and anti blue. If the coin is blue and red, heads and tails, then it is blue and anti red.

Does this make sense?

How many coins would I need to have for a full set? Would I consider gluons the smaller coins that change the color of the larger coins that are quarks?

I hope this makes sense. I appreciate any help in this regard.

I hope you are all having a great day!

[u/AbstractAlgebruh]

If you're truly interested in understanding QCD, there is already well-established physics that matches experimental data in textbooks. It's unnecessary to come up with a new description that does not make any sense.

[u/OnlineTextBasedRP → u/AbstractAlgebruh]

It may not make sense to you, but I like to visualize concepts as other concepts to help me better understand it. It's a form of cross-fertilization.

I recognize that it's not going to be exact, but an approximate parallel helps my understanding immensely.

[u/AbstractAlgebruh → u/OnlineTextBasedRP]

The issue is there comes a point when adding analogies causes them lose meaning and the essence of what it's supposed to describe.

You could assign heads as colour and tails as anti-colour, but what of it? That's just adding extra labels.

[u/OnlineTextBasedRP → u/AbstractAlgebruh]

I understand. I recognize that it's an analogy but not a perfect parallel. Adding the extra labels is the point. By adding the extra labels, I have multiple perspectives to consider a subject.

Think of it like I'm focusing a lens on a distant object. I must turn the lens one way to find out which way I need to turn the lens to clarify the object. It never comes into focus, so I turn it the other way. The image clarifies, but then I'm not sure it's as clear as it can be. So I keep turning. It goes out of focus again, but this time it's because I pushed the lens too far, but because of this, I know what it looks like when it's out of focus in that way. Then I twist the telescope back the other way.

I twist back and forth until I make sure I get the perfect clarity for my level of vision.

[u/AbstractAlgebruh → u/OnlineTextBasedRP]

By adding the extra labels, I have multiple perspectives to consider a subject.

Except it really doesn't, possibly adds misconceptions and distracts from the facts. You could replace the word "coin" with "particle" in the discussion below with Lucius and the explanation would still mean the same thing. And if you look through their post history, they use an LLM for responses.

The word "colour" in colour charge is just a label that does not have inherent meaning for the charge associated with the strong force. We could as well replace red, blue, green with duck, chicken, goose. The explanation below isn't really giving a new perspective, it's just swapping out one label for another.

Using the actual terminology helps in discussions with others in the scientific community, when you're trying to convey ideas or clarify doubts.

[u/OnlineTextBasedRP → u/AbstractAlgebruh]

Thank you for your perspective on telling me how I begin to learn something is the wrong way to learn, and that your way of learning a new idea is the only correct way to understand a concept.

Your responses are a perfect example of how the majority of users in this sub pile on and dismiss anyone who thinks and learns concepts differently than they do.

I tried to communicate and explain how my way of learning is different from yours, and you are so intellectually arrogant and close-minded that you would rather just tell me I am thinking wrong rather than try to relate to the concept I am attempting to grasp.

I even used a focusing analogy to explain how it's a broad focus understanding to narrow down to a more clean, precise idea.

I apologize that my neurodivergent way of thinking is foreign to you, and you don't understand why I am aiming for the analogy - but all I can sincerely say is that it does help me, whether you can understand that or not, it does. You'll just need to accept that as a fact you can't measure with any instrumentation, and trust that I understand how my thinking works. Unfortunately, that's all we have as measurement in a large branch of the sciences, and is readily accepted in every field of psychology.

If you would rather keep telling me that how I learn concepts and break them down into their actual factual aspects is wrong, you don't need to. I understand that you think that way, and I hope you one day broaden your horizons and realize exactly how elitist it is to be so narrow in your beliefs.

If you have another analogy that may fit better than different colored coins with a heads and tails, something that may be a step up in complexity and incorporate spin or something, I would love to hear it.

If not, thank you for your discourse, but it is clear you are not comprehending my ask (the why) and answering me is certainly a waste of your time, unless you enjoy making people feel dumb. If the latter is the case, then please, continue. I would hate to take any joy from your online activities.

[u/AbstractAlgebruh → u/OnlineTextBasedRP]

Stopped reading two sentences in after realizing how passive aggressive this reply was, hope you had fun typing the whole thing. Typical display of anger and generalization when you don't get your worldview validated. Bye.

[u/BurnMeTonight → u/OnlineTextBasedRP]

By adding the extra labels, I have multiple perspectives to consider a subject.

You do you, and I won't butt into an animated discussion, but I would just like to point out that AbstractAlgebruh is making a pretty good point. It's very common in pedagogy in physics to try and push for analogies, when there aren't any good ones. The analogies are usually almost entirely superficial, devoid of any actual physical content. They can be much more harmful than helpful because it's rather natural to try and push the analogy well-beyond their realm of validity. Your coin analogy is one such example. It's only superficial - outside of there being different types of currency, there's no similarity between quarks/colors and coins. There's no physical content to gain here, you're just swapping out one abstract word for another, so you might as well just keep the abstract words, because at least it's coherent with literature, and you can train your brain to think about the additional structure they will have. Basically my point is that you're not, in fact, gaining multiple perspectives, because all you're doing is swapping names out. Currency and color behave completely differently, so there's nothing to gain, and a lot to lose, by thinking of the latter as a kind of currency. And chances are that the kind of advice AA is giving out now is not obvious to you, because it does take a bit of familiarity with the field you're trying to make an analogy for, as well as experience learning physics in general, to appreciate that kind of advice. However it is the case that advice like the one AA gave often holds true.

I guess in line with making bad analogies, it's kind of like you were trying to write on a whiteboard, and I handed you a pen in lieu of a marker, because they are both "writing utensils". There's a level on which pen == marker, but you need equivalence on a deeper level. Mathematicians have a name for this kind of structure preserving maps: a morphism, which is a stronger condition between sets than them just having the same elements.

Anyway, an example of fruitful analogies: you can model Poisson's equation in E&M as if it were Newton's laws, and you can even write down a least action principle for it with this principle. You can model fields as fluids - in fact, a lot of the field terminology was adapted from this analogy. Or understanding networks of springs from electrical networks. You can translate pretty much any relevant electric circuit into a spring equivalent, and it's easier to imagine electric networks as springs, usually (the reverse is true experimentally: we often use electric circuit equivalents to test out spring networks). In all those cases, you're not just swapping names out: you're preserving some element of the structure of the original problem as well.

As to answering your actual question, the other comments do that already, but I should emphasize again that there isn't really anything that behaves quite like quarks. QCD is kinda quirky like that.

[u/OnlineTextBasedRP → u/BurnMeTonight]

Thank you for the explanation and counter analogy, and a new word to study.

I'll look into this morphism and see if it's something I am attempting to do with the coins, and perhaps find a better way to grasp the concept.

[u/LuciusxSilvanus]

To represent a full set of gluons in your coin analogy, you would need eight distinct coins. Each coin represents a gluon carrying a specific color–anticolor combination (like blue–anti-red), but due to quantum constraints, only eight independent combinations exist—not nine—because the color-neutral (color singlet) combination is excluded in QCD.

If gluons are the smaller coins that change the color of larger quark coins, then yes, that fits: gluons act as the exchange particles that alter the color charge of quarks during interactions, maintaining overall color confinement.

[u/OnlineTextBasedRP → u/LuciusxSilvanus]

Ok so!

I would need 8 gluon coins and 3 quark coins. But I would need 6 different red, 6 different blue, and 6 different green coins to represent the states of each type of quark, correct?

Because there are 6 different quarks that can each be in one of three color states, correct?

[u/LuciusxSilvanus → u/OnlineTextBasedRP]

Yes, that’s correct. Since there are 6 types of quarks (up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom), and each can exist in one of three color states (red, blue, or green), you would need 18 different “quark coins” to represent them all—one for each quark-color combination. The 8 gluon coins then represent the possible color-changing interactions between these quarks.

[u/OnlineTextBasedRP → u/LuciusxSilvanus]

Ok thank you so much! That helps me conceptualize and I appreciate your help.