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Man is a quantum in the counting of people, but this does not mean that man cannot be broken down into organs, tissues, cells, and so on. What we want to emphasize is that when it comes to counting people, a person is a basic unit, and we want to count how many individuals there are and not how many cells.
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What is "quantum"? Recently, I gave a presentation on quantum information at a conference, and then someone asked a question. He said he had heard someone say that photons are quanta, protons are not quanta. I asked him why he said that, because protons are made up of three quarks? He said yes.
This reminds me that I often see a similar idea in the comments section of my article, which is to link quanta to whether matter is infinitely separable. In their view, only indivisible particles are called quanta. The aforementioned "photons are quanta, protons are not quanta", is this view. Others also philosophically believe that matter is infinitely separable, so there are no quanta.
In my opinion, this is a misconception. Whether quanta and matter are separable are two different things, and whether matter is infinitely separable are two completely different things. If we were to discover in the future what particles quarks could be divided into, would it be necessary to say that quarks are not quanta, but that particles are quanta? This is all complete nonsense.
In my recently published popular science book, A Brief Introduction to Quantum Information, I gave a clear definition of the concept of quantum: the smallest unit of discrete variation. That is to say, if a thing changes continuously and in a leap, we say that the thing is quantized, and the smallest unit of change is called the quantum of such a thing.
For example, when we go up the steps, we can only go up one step, two steps, not half a step. When we count the number of people, there can be one person or two people, but there cannot be half a person. These are discrete variations. For the upper step, a step is a quantum. For the number of people, a person is a quantum. These examples show that a quantum is not necessarily very small, it can be a macroscopic thing, and all that really matters is whether the thing changes discretely.
It is also important to note that we never talk about whether something is quantum or not, we only say that something is a quantum of something. For example, photons are quanta of light, because a beam of light must have at least one photon. Electrons are quanta of cathode rays because a beam of cathode rays must have at least one electron.
Iron atoms are quantum of iron because a piece of iron must have at least one iron atom. This sentence has nothing to do with whether the Fe atom is separable or not. In fact, of course we know that Fe atoms can be divided into Fe nuclei and electrons, Fe nuclei can be divided into protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons are composed of quarks, but these do not affect "Fe atoms are Fe's quanta". I learned in junior high school that fe atoms are the smallest units that maintain the chemical properties of Fe. You can certainly divide Fe atoms into smaller particles, but those particles are not Fe.
As in the previous example, man is a quantum in the counting of people, but this does not mean that man cannot be broken down into organs, tissues, cells, and so on. What we want to emphasize is that when it comes to counting people, a person is a basic unit, and we want to count how many individuals there are and not how many cells. Do you understand what this means?
Regarding the relationship between protons and quarks, we actually have a term to express, that is, protons are a "composite particle". Similarly, Fe atoms are composite particles. Conversely, electrons and photons have so far not found an internal structure, so we call them "elementary particles." Whether a particle is composite or fundamental is of course an important question, but it is a question of whether it is a quantum or not.
It is also often believed that matter is infinitely divisible, and that the so-called elementary particles can be repartitioned, so they are not fundamental. In fact, this is just a philosophical belief, meaningless to experimentation. Because what really matters is what observable effects such beliefs can derive. For example, you say that electrons are separable, okay, please design an experiment to show the structure of electrons. If you can't design it, what's the point of your words?
In fact, physicists have been doing experiments for many years to probe the structure of an electron, such as measuring its radius and charge distribution. But so far, none of the experimental results have measured that electrons have a non-zero radius lower limit, which means that no signs have been found that electrons are not point particles. In this case, we can only say that within the existing experimental precision, the electron is a point particle with no internal structure. This sentence has a very large amount of information, not like the oral philosophers who talk about the "infinite division of matter", there is no amount of information except metaphysics.