Slashdot Mirror
Why Is Gravity the Weakest Force?
StartsWithABang writes: If you calculate the forces between two fundamental particles separated by subatomic distances, you find that the strong, electromagnetic or weak nuclear force could all be the strongest, dependent on the particulars of your setup. But throw gravity in there, and it turns out to be weaker by some 40 orders of magnitude. This discrepancy, that gravity is such an oddball, is known as the hierarchy problem, and is by many measures the greatest unsolved problem in theoretical physics. Yet the new, upgraded run of the LHC has the potential to uncover any one of four possible solutions, some of which we have hints for already.
Theoretical particle physicist here. These claims are hype. Pure wishful speculation to entice funding agencies via the general public. They should be ashamed of themselves. Best to ignore them. Cui Bono.
Because. That's all. There doesn't have to be a reason. The mystery is the puzzlement.
ding! ding! ding!
Sith lord is not behind it !
Because it was raised as a sissy.
Table-ized A.I.
There's no such thing as gravity. It's just that the world sucks.
At its current strength. Thank you.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Unlike the other three forces, gravity neither cancels out because of negative and positive versions, nor peters out beyond subatomic distances. Its effects are therefore cumulative over huge swaths of the universe.
If gravity were much stronger, the entire universe would collapse into a singularity, and we wouldn't be here to gaze at our navels about the issue.
Scope and scale are funny things. You can only see so small before it gets REALLY hard to see, even using large chains of tools. Same with really big. Same with really slow or fast. But even from what we can observe - our reality has had a LOT of chances to get the roll of the dice to work out - and we happen to live at one level of scope in this universe that allows intelligent life to hang on, in one spot.
However the underlying constants unfold though - it doesn't have to be convenient at every level - just at any particular level. Tweak the rules around, and what we'd count as atoms could be intelligent for billions of years. Tweak it again, and you could have intelligent planetoids with lifespans of hours. Tweak it some more, and it might take a trillion "universes" of stuff to combine to make an intelligent life, in a web where they pop out constantly. It's only anthropically important to us, because we were lucky enough to get intelligence, and don't know how it could work otherwise.
Now I've got to re-watch some Rick and Morty episodes.
Ryan Fenton
Boobs are...
We are dragged along by four dimensions as they expand, but we can still move freely in the other three, but not time. Coincidence? Yeah, probably, but maybe not.
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
If string theory is correct, gravity is weak because it is not bound to this brane like open strings are. It leaks into other branes and thus its effect on this brane is diminished.
Everybody knows that.
Instead of thinking about a nucleus as protons and neutrons jiggling around in mushy pudding cloud, imagine the protons and neutrons orbiting around each other extremely closely at the speed of light. At such high velocities the relativistic mass of the particles would increase many orders of magnitude, and the gravitational force between such huge masses would also increase many orders of magnitude - enough to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between the protons. In this scenario gravity exhibits all the properties of the strong force, so are they actually the same?
I tried reading that article on my mobile device (doesn't support ad-blocker). Got ten ads. The first was a full-screen block that, after I clicked through, didn't even take me to the article. The other 9 all caused the article to "repaginate" under my fingers when I reached them (or at least, recalculate vertical spacing) and all blocked further text until they'd spent their 1-2 seconds loading.
What a terrible experience. So sure that I never got to the actual substance of the article before I gave up.
Oh, also a permanent title bar that takes too much of my small device's limited screen real estate.
Forbes is a disaster on mobile.
StartsWithABang certainly must know gravity isn't a force.
because it doesn't even lift. thank you, i'll be here all week.
Because with stronger gravity the world wouldn't exist, as we know it. Imagine a hydrogen ball the size of a watermelon becoming a star. Imagine a dozen of black holes devouring your neighbourhood. Tough, eh?
The magnitude of Gravity force is proportional to mass, so it's the weakest force because it's never met your Mom.
Im sure the govt has many secrets and break thrus that they are keeping secret.
Imagine if it was easy to create a worm hole to cut a planet in half, ISIS would dare do that and we dont need some wacko muslim doing that.
And yes there is a secret shadow govt, and secret highly advanced break away civilization with tech decades beyond mainstream, that probably has deep space convoys and ships and far off bases etc.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
... they are all just plain wrong, and gravity is simply weird?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
At some point, the evidence will start pointing towards a multiverse. This might be it, so I'm guessing theory 3 will be supported.
Why a multiverse? The anthropic principle. An infinite set of universes, all with varying physical properties would very elegantly explain why the laws of our universe happen to be so conveniently tuned right to support all that is required for life - all the physical laws that play into the aggregation of matter, the formation of different sets of building blocks, the concentration and distribution of energy, etc. Think of an arbitrary universe (roll a dice) and you'll in all likelihood end up with a scrap set of laws that certainly do not spontaneously evolve conscious life, but if you do it enough times (the multiverse) you will inevitably end up with (and in) a universe suitable for life.
Why Is Gravity the Weakest Force?
Entropy? If there are other universes some of them may have a different set of physical laws due to their big bangs or their aftermath playing out in a subtly different way than in the case of our universe. If some of these other universes have strong gravitational forces they will presumably pass into something resembling the upcoming black hole era of our own universe before developing any intelligent life so let's just be happy our universe has weak gravity.
Redirects to forbes.com/welcome, which is an empty page.
Stop linking sources with crude javascript, please.
I think it's unlikely that Slashdot editors will be telling Forbes that their site is invisible to any sensibly defensive techie, as Dice has probably issued a directive to treat advertisers as the epitome of perfection.
And it's even less likely that the Forbes webbies would even understand what the problem is anyway, or they wouldn't have created an invisible site in the first place. They must have PhDs in incompetence.
So, you might as well just redirect the Forbes IP addresses to a black hole to avoid getting annoyed by them almost every day.
Ideally we could redirect the IPs to a site that on each attempted click sends Forbes support (or Forbes board members) a message explaining that their devs have made the site invisible to many and so are losing Forbes a lot of revenue. Doesn't exist yet though, as far as I know.
It is left as an exercise for then reader to make up your own joke about attracting clicks.
For bonus points, work in a few hipster clichés, all of which are true in the submitter's case.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
if you think about it for a moment in terms of the weak anthropic principle, gravity has to be very weak, because it is cumulative. The Weyl curvature of spacetime, which is the metric tensor that governs the propagation of gravity in free space, acts across the entire Einstein manifold, i.e., everywhere at the same time. If gravity were any stronger, it is pretty unlikely that matter as we understand it would be able to exist long enough to produce objects like humans capable of asking that question.
With that said, it is not really an important question question on its own, as the over-hyped intro suggests. The important questions pretty much are looking for explanations as to why the universe behaves so differently at different scales and velocities. Important questions in physics and cosmology are more along the lines of "Why are our two most successful theories about the nature of the universe, quantum mechanics and general relativity, incompatible with each other?"
But throw gravity in there, and it turns out to be weaker by some 40 orders of magnitude.
Elbow room ?
Because we are presently living in a wind-up Universe and its mainspring consists of two fundamental forces that are 10^40 apart. As evidenced by the receding galaxies, we still getting all wound up.
At the end of this cycle the mainspring will snap around and in the next cycle gravity will trump the electromagnetic force by 10^40 to form a battery operated Universe. The charge light will come on and increase of potential (not spatial expansion) will take place.
The whole thing is the result of pulling on String Theory, and when contraction takes place the background remnant (which you could hear now if you play it backwards) is actually a slow voice saying,
"There's a snake in my boot!"
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
We know the theorists want to be able to describe gravitation in terms of Quantum Mechanics. This will necessarily involve hypothetical "virtual gravitons" as "exchange particles" between interacting masses. So:
How do gravitons, even virtual ones, escape a black hole?
How do gravitons from the Sun pass through the Earth to affect the Moon (and artificial satellites) when eclipsed by the Earth, as if the Earth was a zero-size object? That is, the orbits of those bodies don't change just because the Earth sometimes eclipses them from the Sun's perspective.
In a way, just one proposal can answer both those questions, plus the one in the title of this page's article. If gravitons interact very rarely with other particles, including each other, then they can't stop each other from escaping a black hole, the Earth would be mostly transparent to them --AND gravitation would be the weakest force.
Random thought: Maybe the effect of gravity is possible because of how maybe gravity isn't based on fluctuating energy?
61 fundamental particles?
I'm curious how would we go from zero fundamental particles to 61 all in one go? When the first particle is created (early in time) can it exist on its own, or does it need a large number of matching particles to be created at the same time to exist? What happens when a 62 particle is created? Does the nature of matter change then? I mean if nature is creating more particles, from 1 to 61 then why wouldn't more be created?
So a proton is made up of Quarks, but when matter is created, if you need at least a proton then all those quarks would need to be created in one go? Or not?
So is a proton then divisible? Can you split it intos its component quarks?
And if you slam any particle and antiparticle together, you get what? Well light, photons, is light made of these 61 fundamental particles? Or just Bosons?...
So you'd presumably have to make bosons before anything else, I mean if you were creating matter the first particle would have to be the boson, because you need it for the photon??
Is antimatter is matter going backwards in time? Al la Feyman? So what does an anti-time boson look like? What does anti matter light look like and how does it react to +ve matter light?
If you create an anti-electron (positron), how can you ever detect it? Why doesn't it head off backwards in time to before you created it?
Gravity keeps stars orbiting around galactic centers. It draws galaxies to each other. Lets see the other forces do that!
.. that branch was so low, the fruit was smacking me in the face
> "If gravity were much stronger, the entire universe would collapse into a singularity, "
Yeh, but *why* is that?
Most likely its a delta- force, a some small difference in another force. Because otherwise it would have to be a *special* force (Occams Razor, the les complicated the better, the fewer forces the better). And that difference has to explain why its always attraction, never repulsion.
So for example, if it was a delta on a magnetic force somehow, then that would always be attraction, because, well this effect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWoQDzyonFA
The magnets could repel or attract, yet they always attract because the tiny size of the magnet vs the large distance to the next magnet.
And likewise a delta force on electro-static spinning dipoles (little +- spinning pairs) does the same thing, the dipoles kick each other to align themselves to a net attraction force.
So understanding why these things are always attraction is fairy easy.
----
And you'd have to explain why its related to mass. Gravity scales with mass. But magnetism is related to change of charge, neutral particles don't have the same magnetic field as protons etc. so any delta in magnetic force wouldn't work, it wouldn't scale with mass.
On the other hand, the only difference between all particles are the charge, + and -.
So you could hypothesize that all matter is made of just two fundamental particles, and every anti particle, is just the particle with the + and -'s swapped. And photons? Well they would be clouds of spinning dipoles.
If you then asserted that, then you have a relationship between mass and the delta electrostatic force you get with dipoles.
Some force has to be the weakest. And perhaps there's some other force 40 orders of magnitude smaller yet. maybe there's some inter multiverse quantum repulsion that causes multiverses to diverge. We just don't know about it.
Likewise it's possible there's some force 40 orders of magnitude stronger than the strongest forces we know of. perhaps quarks have sub particles that are held together by this but it's so string we've never seen them unbounded.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Because if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here to observe it.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Einstein said gravity is not a force. Newton approached gravity as a force, Einstein approached gravity as a consequence of time and energy.
If it were the strongest we would be crushed to the size of a pea while or bodies molecules would change. Obama could than be something other than a feces flinging chimp.
Progress is insanely expensive, funding is all but non-existent, it's hard to find talented scientists who actually want to study it, and the general public just isn't interested anymore.
I completely disagree, funding still exists although it is being squeezed by governments who want to fund building better widgets rather than understanding the physics which will let you continue to do this 50-100 years in the future. Given the article it is clear that the public are interested in it - so much so that they will listen to someone like 'startswithabang' who, when it comes to particle physics, doesn't really know what he is talking about since the heirarchy, or fine tuning, problem is all about trying to explain the difference between the mass of the Higgs and the scale of gravity and not just why gravity is so weak. For example in SUSY you still end up with gravity incredibly weak and there is still no explanation as to why.
I'll tell you why gravity is the weakest force. It wasn't willing to put the time in the gym like the other forces.
In short, gravity is a wuss.
Maybe it's because most physicists don't consider gravity a force anymore. It's a warping of space which takes a lot of energy/mass and that's why it's so weak.
Whether this is design or natural selection/optimization is immaterial. The question is stupid though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Because it doesn't even lift
Science doesn't answer "Why did Santa Claus bring me a sweater instead of a choo-choo train?", either. Because the question is formulated such that it isn't a valid question. Just as the questions that philosophy (and its retarded offspring, religion) likes to say "science can't answer" (as opposed to science hasn't answered yet) are.
"Why is the universe here" is no more meaningful than "why did santa (do anything)." Both assume facts not in evidence: For the former, that there is a why (no evidence for this whatsoever); while for the latter, it assumes there is a santa (no evidence for this whatsoever, either.) In the scientific sense, neither one is a meaningful question. In the philosophical sense, all those questions do is reveal large domains of "philosophical thinking" as intellectually bankrupt.
Even very intelligent people are often variously naive, gullible, uninformed, misinformed, fearful, or simply lack critical thinking skills (as opposed to potental ability.) Or various combinations thereof. Less intelligent people, more so, and more often. All of these people are vulnerable to failing to spot the invalid posits in many "philosophical" questions without a significant amount of help. And that help is often rejected, as it is a common human failing to not be at all willing to change anything that might affect one's perception of one's self in relation to everything else.
Until or unless something can be done to improve both the overall level of human intelligence, along with considerably better education, we're going to be stuck with these kinds of invalid questions and the people that disadvantage others by inserting them into the public mindset as if they were valid.
There are myriad examples of this stuff out there. Taken from the net just now, located in only a few seconds:
"Crystal Healing Stones Bring Healing Energy To Your Health, Wealth, Spirit, Emotions and Soul."
"Jesus loves you."
"One day we will meet again on the rainbow bridge."
"God created the world for His pleasure and our good."
"Why is there something rather than nothing?"
"The beauty of the principle of similars is that it not only initiates a healing response, but it encourages a respect for the body's wisdom."
...just because someone can (or did) phrase something in the form of a question (or an answer), doesn't mean something worthwhile has been accomplished. Quite often all it does is waste resources and screw people up. Religion being the front-and-center poster child for exactly that.
tl;dr: Much of philosophy is nonsense; all of religion is nonsense; the general intellectual level is low; people resist change.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yeah, but gravity never made me want to chew my arm off to get out from under it in the morning. No, that was alcohol.
Science is based on fundamental philosophical axioms. Agreed, philosophy is definitely the parent and science the child.
Much of science has been developed from thought experiments. They, by their very nature are philosophical, not scientific. The "child", science, is not "full grown" and needs support from its "parent" to function and grow. If, indeed, it can ever "stand alone".
It is a big world out there and science is only part of it.
If you use Planck Units then all your coefficients (G, Ke etc) are set to a value of 1. All fields and forces are now the same. The basic equations governing the behavior of energy and matter do not favor one force over another.
Matter itself is now the issue. The question changes from "Why is Gravity the Weakest Force" to "Why is matter so fluffy?" (i.e. why is the the mass of elementary particles that make up matter so small relative to their charge).
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The inverse square function of distance is no coincidence, it's comes from the dimensionality of space and an omnidirectional force ...
The PBS series and book, "The_Elegant_Universe" (being just one reference) claims that Gravity should be the strongest force, yet one of the weakest.
Gravity is also the only force that can transverse different dimensions (sharing it's force), it explains dark matter for me.
its all electromagnetism
Seems so obvious: Because Gravity is not a fundamental force between particles.
It's merely a consequence of the warping of spacetime due to the presence of mass. Therefore they haven't found, and never will find the graviton.
it won't Awaken until December 18th at a theater near you.
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
Gravity doesn't lift.
I have heard about a theory that gravity is sort of leaking into other dimensions that we are thus far unable to detect, making it seem weak to us, but in this other dimension of space/time it would be far stronger. I'd cite a source but I was unable to find the video I watched that talked about this.