Max:
Hmm hard to say, I don't think so. Here's why:
To our readers: Baryonic matter is matter composed from 3 quarks. Proton and Neutrons are baryonic matter.
I should point out that life doesn't just include baryonic matter alone. The electron (a lepton, not a baryon) is responsible for all of chemistry.
A lepton is a fundamental particle that doesn't interact with the strong force (which Hadrons do!). There are two types of leptons: charged and uncharged. There are three charged: the electron, the muon, and the tau. Unlike the electron, the muon and tau are unstable and decay (in mere nano seconds and less) , so that will not make good life ingredients. The uncharged leptons are 3 flavors of neutrino, which are so light, are not charged, and generally don't interact with anything at all, even themselves, that also makes terrible life ingredients. But the electron is eternal (at least for 13 billion years) and charged! That's great! That comes in later handy.
On to Hadrons. A Hadron is a particle composed of quarks. Quarks are fundamental particles that can combine in ways to make larger crap. 2 quarks make a meson. Mesons are unstable and decay into electrons, neutrinos, and/or photons. 3 quarks are called baryons. All baryons are unstable except the proton. The neutron is unstable by itself but in the nucleus of an atom, it's stable. There are other quark (4,5,6+) combs. are also all unstable. And you cannot isolate a single quark. So yea, looks like only protons and neutrons mixed for us today. Protons are electrically charged. I mentioned earlier that so are electrons. Opposite too! Wonderful! Now the electrons can interact positively (attract) with the protons (nucleus of atom) and form complex structures shapes with other atoms too.
Everything above are called Fermions, which basically means they obey the Pauli - exclusion principle, which means they can't occupy the same space at the same time (same quantum state to be precise).
Everything else are called Bosons. While Fermions are the 'matter', bosons are the 'force' . The best known Boson is the Photon, also called Light. Photons transmit the electromagnetic force. Photons don't interact with themselves per say (they can occupy the same space and pass through each other, like a wave), they also don't 'persist' with other matter to create complex structures, they get absorbed or scattered etc... so hard to think of life from that. The other bosons are the same, such as the Higgs Boson.
Also depends on what you mean by life... if you mean, self replicating thingy... then sure lots of crap is that. I assume you mean a bit more complicated.
I don't really know, it's hard to imagine.
Statistics: Posted by UNITEDAIR — Sat Aug 29, 2015 12:49 am