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It is known that a proton is of greater mass than an electron and that a neutron is far heavier than both. It is also known that protons and electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom. Can we then deduce that a neutron is a sphere?

John R. Merriam
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    You have the mass hierarchy correct, but it is the electron which is the mass outlier: the neutron is only slightly heavier than a proton plus an electron. The protons live inside the nucleus with the neutrons; only the electrons “orbit.” – rob Aug 22 '22 at 12:43
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    For measurements of the neutron’s sphericity, the search term is “neutron electric dipole moment.” – rob Aug 22 '22 at 12:44
  • you seem to confuse various concepts. start with this wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom – anna v Aug 22 '22 at 13:37
  • Related: What's inside a proton? (which applies just as much for neutrons as it does for protons). – Emilio Pisanty Aug 22 '22 at 22:16

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At low energies, the neutron has been determined to be a sphere via scattering experiments performed in the 1950s and 60s. As you raise the energy of the probe particle, the neutron and proton both stop behaving like they were little ping pong balls and start behaving as if there were three hard little point particles residing within that spherical volume. These guys were determined to be the quarks which earlier had been predicted on theoretical grounds but never detected before.

niels nielsen
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  • Why is the neutron slightly heavier than the proton? Why is the mass of an electron 1800 times smaller than a neutron? Go easily on me, for I am not a scientist. – John R. Merriam Aug 23 '22 at 16:07
  • The 3 quarks that make up both the proton and the neutron have slightly different masses, and the energies carried by the gluons that hold them together in there have slightly different energies. the neutron combo is slightly heavier than the proton combo. Regarding the masses of these particles and the electron, no one knows why they have the values that they do- the model we use to predict how they all behave (the Stantard Model) is silent on that topic. – niels nielsen Aug 23 '22 at 16:14
  • Thanks for the valuable information. So if we don’t yet understand the electron/neutron relationship, how can we be so smug on our conviction as to how the universe was formed, the Big Bang Theory? The universe is expanding, but is it possible that it goes through periods of expansion, contraction then more expansion? Are we living in one universe, five or five trillion? Are the laws of physics different in each? I have always thought that the Giant Kaboom Theory is too simplistic. – John R. Merriam Aug 23 '22 at 19:15
  • We do indeed understand the neutron/proton relationship quite precisely; the people who figured out all of that got Nobel prizes. we are allowed to be confident (not smug) about the earliest moments of the big bang because we can recreate those conditions in our particle accelerators and see exactly how every particle that could have existed then would interact with all the other possible particles. This story is well-recounted in Stephen Weinberg's book The First Three Minutes which I strongly recommend you read. – niels nielsen Aug 24 '22 at 01:43
  • Sorry, I didn’t mean to cause offence with the word smug. I am just an ordinary guy interested in the universe (or multiverse). What does it all mean and how did we get here? I just think that there are so many profound questions that are unanswered that we are are far from determining how our universe originated. Our species might become extinct before we have all the answers. Perhaps there was another civilization somewhere in the universe that arose 2 million years ago became extinct 1 million years ago. Probably they knew a lot more than we do. – John R. Merriam Aug 24 '22 at 22:16
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No, that would be an inaccurate conclusion. The problem with that theory is that you are assuming because it isn't known how the neutron moves that it must be the sphere. In truth, scientists don't know exactly how the three quarks move.

Neutrons and protons move similarly inside the atom's center while electrons move outside the center. However, that doesn't make either protons or neutrons the sphere. We know more about how they relate to electrons rather than how they move inside the nucleus.

Tasios Orthodontics
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