Proton

The proton is the positively charged particle found in every atomic nucleus, and the sole nucleus of ordinary hydrogen. It was identified by Ernest Rutherford between 1917 and 1920 as the hydrogen nucleus knocked out of nitrogen by alpha bombardment, and given its present name in 1920. Its charge is +e, equal and opposite to that of the electron; its mass is about 1836 times the electron's, or 938.3 MeV/c²; its spin is ½. The number of protons in a nucleus fixes the chemical element, so the proton is the quantity that the periodic table is ordered by.

In the Standard Model the proton is not elementary. It is a baryon composed of two up quarks and one down quark bound by gluons, and only a small fraction of its mass comes from the quark masses themselves — the great majority is attributed to the binding energy of the colour field. The proton is the only baryon believed to be stable: grand unified theories predict that it should eventually decay, but no decay has ever been observed, and experiments such as Super-Kamiokande place the lifetime above roughly 10³⁴ years.

Two features of the standard picture are unsettled within mainstream physics itself, and both are worth stating plainly because they are often raised in the literature below. The first is the proton spin problem: deep inelastic scattering measurements from the late 1980s onward found that the spins of the three quarks account for only about a third of the proton's total spin, the remainder being assigned to gluon spin and orbital motion in ways still under investigation. The second is the proton radius puzzle: the charge radius measured from ordinary hydrogen and from electron scattering had settled near 0.88 femtometres when a 2010 measurement using muonic hydrogen returned about 0.84 fm, a discrepancy far outside the quoted errors. Later measurements have largely moved toward the smaller value, but the episode is routinely cited here as evidence that the proton's size is a model-dependent quantity rather than a directly seen one.

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The researchers catalogued here almost uniformly reject the point-like, quark-composed proton and replace it with an extended object with real geometry. The dominant approach is the toroidal ring: a circulating current loop whose radius, charge distribution and spin are physical rather than formal.

Charles William Lucas develops the fullest version of this programme, deriving nuclear structure from a finite-size electrodynamic particle model in A Classical Electrodynamic Theory of the Nucleus (2006) and A Physical Model for Atoms and Nuclei, Part 2: Structure of the Nucleus (2003); on his account the proton's properties follow from classical electrodynamics applied to a real charged ring, with no need for the strong force as a separate postulate. David L Bergman, working through Common Sense Science, calculates the measured fine-structure quantities of the proton directly from ring geometry in Fine-Structure Properties of the Electron, Proton and Neutron (2006). Jaroslav G Klyushin treats the proton as a torus with two independent rotations — equatorial rotation giving charge, meridional rotation giving spin — in his vortical particle papers, extended to the neutron in On a Toroidal Model of the Neutron (2006).

Other lines of work here approach the proton from mass ratios and packing geometry rather than from field theory. Carl R Littmann derives particle mass ratios from the volume ratios of close-packed spheres in Muon to Proton Mass Ratio, Geometric Volume Ratios, and an Overview of the Particle Zoo (2010), and examines a mass-accounting anomaly in Why the free Electron Mass Plus Free Proton mass Exceeds the Bohr Hydrogen Mass (2016). Koshun Suto predicts the proton's size and revises the Rydberg formula in Theoretical Prediction of the Size of a Proton and Revision of the Rydberg Formula (2008). Nassim Haramein takes the opposite extreme in The Schwarzschild Proton (2009), modelling the proton as a mini black hole whose gravitational binding replaces the strong force.

Aether-based models are also well represented. William R Hohenberger builds the electron and proton as fractal structures in the aether in Aethereal Fractal Structures for the Electron & Proton (2012); Stoyan Sarg's Basic Structures of Matter - Supergravitation Unified Theory - a new approach in Physics constructs protons and neutrons from sub-elementary aether formations. Harold Aspden argues in A Theory of Proton Creation (1988) that protons are created continuously from the vacuum, a claim with obvious consequences for Big Bang cosmology. Daniel H Deutsch offers electromechanical models of all four of the standard particles in Electromechanical Physical Models of the Electron, Proton, Neutron, and Neutrino (1991), and Thomas G Barnes proposed classical proton and neutron models as early as 1980 in New Proton and Neutron Models.

The common objection running through this material is not that quantum chromodynamics computes badly but that quarks are never seen in isolation, so that a composition claim which cannot in principle be checked by separation is treated here as a bookkeeping scheme rather than a structural discovery.

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See also