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Development of Forces
Have been sick. Hence, have not had an interesting life.
Except for sometimes dwelling in that strange state of eternal waking that seemed to go on for several hours. It's very strange to not be able to sleep, but at the same time not be able to wake fully.
Anyway, I have been able to do something (but beware, my sense of humor is still in an addled state):
The use of the word force is probably bad. It means a whole bunch of different things. In the vernacular it can be used for everything from "my wife forced me to go shopping" to "I was forced to listen" to "I forced the issue" and "I had to force the door open" and even a situation that comes up sometimes in yaoi NWS stories which is inevitably followed by the reader screaming "Use lube damnit!". In most physics force has a definite meaning as well, a push or a pull, but particle physicists don't think like that. We see a force as any sort of interaction of any kind. So when we talk about the Weak force, don't think for a moment that there are particles involved in some sort of invisible tug-o-war contest.
So, there are six fundamental forces that we know of today:
Gravity
Weak
Electromagnetic
Strong
Reality TV
Sex
Particle Physicists only bother with the first four, because the fifth can't be explained, and we don't have enough time for number six.
But back in the day, there were only two forces, the macroscopic ones:
Gravity
Electromagnetism
Gravity is the most evident force around us today. It keeps our feet on the floor, the trees in the ground, and generally allows us to avoid the fate of being thrown off the earth into the depths of space. This is a good thing. But Gravity is commonly considered the weakest of forces because this huge big honkin' Earth generates a force so weak that you break it every time you do jumping jacks. Electromagnetism, on the other hand, is proportionally much stronger, as anyone who has ever walked through a strong magnetic field while wearing braces can attest to.
But someone will quickly realize that these two forces are quite different. Gravity always pulls things together (at least until we can find negative mass particles). EM can either attract things (electrons and protons), or shove them apart. Obviously these two forces are treated somewhat differently, since one has two modes, and the other is one way only. There must be something fundamentally different about them-and about how they are structured.
But none of it explains why a whole bunch of protons will suddenly get together and form a nucleus. Since protons normally get along like the Hatfields and the McCoys, or (just to tweak![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
avari_elf) fanatic Protestants and conservative Catholics, what the hell causes them to get along in the same party without treading on each other's feet during the line dancing? The answer that was proposed was the existence of another force, something new in the system that was strong enough-like abortion-to get the fanatics and the conservatives to temporarily put aside their differences and at least grudgingly gang up for protection.
To explain this we have to involve the next force: the strong force. The strong force was first theorized by Yukawa in 1934, the man who used to have the distinction of being the only Japanese physicist that you had to remember. He hypothesized that there was a strange field that held the particles in the nucleus together-something much stronger than electromagnetism. He also theorized that this force, just like light, was quantized, which meant that it was discreet, which meant that it traveled by means of a particle.
This should give you some insight into the mind of a particle physicist. Thing unexplained? Invent a new particle. Or several new particles. Or as many new particles as you like. This is why there are now mesons and bosons and phonons and speedons and taxons and WhyDidMyGirlfriendDumpMeons (the theory of those is particularly complex, and can only be explained in a satisfying manner when totally drunk) and all manner of other particles that nobody cares about. So Yukawa correspondingly invented a new particle, called the meson.
From here on I may be using the following terms:
lepton - "light weight" -for now, just the electron
meson - "middle weight" - Yukawa just invented them
baryon - "heavy weight" - the proton and the neutron
Those definitions will actually change over time, but this is where the original meaning of those particles came from.
In 1937, the particle that matched Yukawa's description was discovered, insuring that he would eventually win a Nobel Prize, except for the problem that the experimentalists discovered the wrong particle. They were middle weight particles, somewhere between the weights of the electron and the baryon, but they were lighter than Yukawa had predicted. They were also too common, too strange and had far too different a lifetime to be a meson. The real kicker came when in 1946 physicists in Rome demonstrated that this new particle barely interacted at all with a nucleus, and thus could not be associated with any force strong enough to hold a nucleus together.
What they had discovered was actually the muon, which you can think of as sort of a heavier electron. You are continually being bombarded with muons from cosmic-rays. They're fairly harmless most of the time, and they tend not to react with anything that much.
What Yukawa was really after wasn't discovered fully until 1947, the Pion, a true meson that is actually common in the upper atmosphere due to cosmic ray impacts, but decays relatively fast into a muon and some other associated junk before it gets down to ground level. The pion was the first meson, and the first particle we could accuse of solving that tenuous problem whereby the nucleus was held together. Apparently there was some sort of strong force, it involved these pion particles, and it held the nucleus together.
But at the same time, people had opened up a new can of worms. What the hell were all these muons doing? After all, with the pion we had closed up the last real gap in the current model of particle physics, so where did this particle fit? Where did it come from? What was associated with? What was it doing in the ballroom with a candlestick on the night Colonel Mustard was killed?
Well, we aren't about to get any answers to this. But thanks to a man named Dirac, things are about to get a lot more confusing.
Except for sometimes dwelling in that strange state of eternal waking that seemed to go on for several hours. It's very strange to not be able to sleep, but at the same time not be able to wake fully.
Anyway, I have been able to do something (but beware, my sense of humor is still in an addled state):
The use of the word force is probably bad. It means a whole bunch of different things. In the vernacular it can be used for everything from "my wife forced me to go shopping" to "I was forced to listen" to "I forced the issue" and "I had to force the door open" and even a situation that comes up sometimes in yaoi NWS stories which is inevitably followed by the reader screaming "Use lube damnit!". In most physics force has a definite meaning as well, a push or a pull, but particle physicists don't think like that. We see a force as any sort of interaction of any kind. So when we talk about the Weak force, don't think for a moment that there are particles involved in some sort of invisible tug-o-war contest.
So, there are six fundamental forces that we know of today:
Gravity
Weak
Electromagnetic
Strong
Reality TV
Sex
Particle Physicists only bother with the first four, because the fifth can't be explained, and we don't have enough time for number six.
But back in the day, there were only two forces, the macroscopic ones:
Gravity
Electromagnetism
Gravity is the most evident force around us today. It keeps our feet on the floor, the trees in the ground, and generally allows us to avoid the fate of being thrown off the earth into the depths of space. This is a good thing. But Gravity is commonly considered the weakest of forces because this huge big honkin' Earth generates a force so weak that you break it every time you do jumping jacks. Electromagnetism, on the other hand, is proportionally much stronger, as anyone who has ever walked through a strong magnetic field while wearing braces can attest to.
But someone will quickly realize that these two forces are quite different. Gravity always pulls things together (at least until we can find negative mass particles). EM can either attract things (electrons and protons), or shove them apart. Obviously these two forces are treated somewhat differently, since one has two modes, and the other is one way only. There must be something fundamentally different about them-and about how they are structured.
But none of it explains why a whole bunch of protons will suddenly get together and form a nucleus. Since protons normally get along like the Hatfields and the McCoys, or (just to tweak
avari_elf) fanatic Protestants and conservative Catholics, what the hell causes them to get along in the same party without treading on each other's feet during the line dancing? The answer that was proposed was the existence of another force, something new in the system that was strong enough-like abortion-to get the fanatics and the conservatives to temporarily put aside their differences and at least grudgingly gang up for protection.To explain this we have to involve the next force: the strong force. The strong force was first theorized by Yukawa in 1934, the man who used to have the distinction of being the only Japanese physicist that you had to remember. He hypothesized that there was a strange field that held the particles in the nucleus together-something much stronger than electromagnetism. He also theorized that this force, just like light, was quantized, which meant that it was discreet, which meant that it traveled by means of a particle.
This should give you some insight into the mind of a particle physicist. Thing unexplained? Invent a new particle. Or several new particles. Or as many new particles as you like. This is why there are now mesons and bosons and phonons and speedons and taxons and WhyDidMyGirlfriendDumpMeons (the theory of those is particularly complex, and can only be explained in a satisfying manner when totally drunk) and all manner of other particles that nobody cares about. So Yukawa correspondingly invented a new particle, called the meson.
From here on I may be using the following terms:
lepton - "light weight" -for now, just the electron
meson - "middle weight" - Yukawa just invented them
baryon - "heavy weight" - the proton and the neutron
Those definitions will actually change over time, but this is where the original meaning of those particles came from.
In 1937, the particle that matched Yukawa's description was discovered, insuring that he would eventually win a Nobel Prize, except for the problem that the experimentalists discovered the wrong particle. They were middle weight particles, somewhere between the weights of the electron and the baryon, but they were lighter than Yukawa had predicted. They were also too common, too strange and had far too different a lifetime to be a meson. The real kicker came when in 1946 physicists in Rome demonstrated that this new particle barely interacted at all with a nucleus, and thus could not be associated with any force strong enough to hold a nucleus together.
What they had discovered was actually the muon, which you can think of as sort of a heavier electron. You are continually being bombarded with muons from cosmic-rays. They're fairly harmless most of the time, and they tend not to react with anything that much.
What Yukawa was really after wasn't discovered fully until 1947, the Pion, a true meson that is actually common in the upper atmosphere due to cosmic ray impacts, but decays relatively fast into a muon and some other associated junk before it gets down to ground level. The pion was the first meson, and the first particle we could accuse of solving that tenuous problem whereby the nucleus was held together. Apparently there was some sort of strong force, it involved these pion particles, and it held the nucleus together.
But at the same time, people had opened up a new can of worms. What the hell were all these muons doing? After all, with the pion we had closed up the last real gap in the current model of particle physics, so where did this particle fit? Where did it come from? What was associated with? What was it doing in the ballroom with a candlestick on the night Colonel Mustard was killed?
Well, we aren't about to get any answers to this. But thanks to a man named Dirac, things are about to get a lot more confusing.
no subject
:-D
no subject
no subject
My bad -- it's A Short History of Nearly Everything.
It's terrific.
Especially liked his chapters on the atom and the volcano under Yellowstone.
;-)