Made this meme while studying CP violation in weak interactions... weak force why cant you be normal?? :cry:
Credit for the image on the right: KhezuG on DevianArt
this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
324 points (98.2% liked)
Science Memes
14451 readers
3225 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- !abiogenesis@mander.xyz
- !animal-behavior@mander.xyz
- !anthropology@mander.xyz
- !arachnology@mander.xyz
- !balconygardening@slrpnk.net
- !biodiversity@mander.xyz
- !biology@mander.xyz
- !biophysics@mander.xyz
- !botany@mander.xyz
- !ecology@mander.xyz
- !entomology@mander.xyz
- !fermentation@mander.xyz
- !herpetology@mander.xyz
- !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !medicine@mander.xyz
- !microscopy@mander.xyz
- !mycology@mander.xyz
- !nudibranchs@mander.xyz
- !nutrition@mander.xyz
- !palaeoecology@mander.xyz
- !palaeontology@mander.xyz
- !photosynthesis@mander.xyz
- !plantid@mander.xyz
- !plants@mander.xyz
- !reptiles and amphibians@mander.xyz
Physical Sciences
- !astronomy@mander.xyz
- !chemistry@mander.xyz
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !geography@mander.xyz
- !geospatial@mander.xyz
- !nuclear@mander.xyz
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !quantum-computing@mander.xyz
- !spectroscopy@mander.xyz
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and sports-science@mander.xyz
- !gardening@mander.xyz
- !self sufficiency@mander.xyz
- !soilscience@slrpnk.net
- !terrariums@mander.xyz
- !timelapse@mander.xyz
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Shouldn’t gravity be like a tiny, vaguely dragon-shaped worm off in another field?
I mean messing with the strong force in a fistful of atoms gets you a nuclear bomb. Meanwhile, my old, achy self can jump up and resist against a whole earth’s worth of gravitational force.
While that is true, for how long can you resist gravity? Gravity is the endurance hunter of the fundamental forces. Sure, you can lift your arm and resist the entire earth's gravity. But for how long, before you succumb to gravity's irresistible pull?
resisting gravity is super easy, as evidenced by the fact that most things aren't black holes.
Yet
Perhaps the gravity head should be a snail then
It's not a meme about the strength but about how complex the physics are.
The weak interaction breaks a lot of symmetries that hold in EM and strong interactions, like CP symmetry. Its gauge symmetry is also completely wild: SU(2)~L~ x U(1)~Y~, compared to U(1) for EM and SU(3) for the strong interaction. And finally there's also neutrino oscillations related to that. So to me the weak interaction is like a derpy brother to the other two.
Then gravity is something completely different and we are yet to figure out how to describe it in quantum physics. So that's why I chose that creature.
The weak interaction is just electromagnetism if the photons had mass and charge (and broke CP and flavour simmetry, yeah). Above the unification scale they are literally the same field.
Plus, what really makes a theory hard is how hard it is to compute a prediction. There electroweak group is renormalizable. For the strong force you need to do weird lattice calculations.
I maintain that the strong force should be the derpy one.
I love that we're this far along in physics and the question of "what even is gravity anyway?" Is still fundamentally unsolved.
My favourite theory that I've seen so far is "entropy increases, and black holes have maximum entropy of anything in the universe, so everything is always trying to become a black hole." Stuff falls downward just because that's the easiest and most immediate way of making progress towards being a black hole.
Obviously, this is a layman's understanding.
Interesting theory. On the other hand, if everything would diverge instead, like with the expansion of the universe, we also reach maximum entropy. So why wouldn't gravity be repellent?
My understanding is it's because black holes are the way to maximum entropy. Widely dispersed material has lots of potential energy and lots of possible states, but black holes are "the end" - there's no further change possible once you get there. There is no state of matter or spacetime with more entropy than that.
Ohh that makes quite a lot of sense. I always imagined entropy increase as more things are spread out, but i never considered gravity so turns out I was assuming repulsive(electromagnetic) forces when talking about entropy because we usually always considers a system of molecules
Yup got it. In that context mega-dragon makes sense. I can’t wait until we actually understand what the hell gravity even is.
What is CP?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation
Some physicists have suggested combining the EM and weak forces because of the interplay between them.
You're talking about electroweak unification. They're unified because the force carriers of the weak interactions are charged bosons, which implies they also interact electromagnetically. Therefore you can't physically describe the weak force without including electromagnetism. However these two forces are still fundamentally different.
Au contraire, mon frere. "Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space."
if you have enough mass moving quickly enough, someone's gonna have a real bad day. Gravity is fantastic for getting a lot of mass moving very quickly, it's why space missions slingshot around planets to get from A to B instead of burning propellant straight there. Even dropping tungsten rods from orbit can get you atom-bomb-sized explosions, and if you had any means of (even weakly) accelerating them before that, gravity would help further accelerate them.
That, and have you seen the amount of propellant required to overcome gravity? Compare that to the amount of fissile material you need to make a viable nuclear device. It's peanuts. A (small) nuke might as well be a rounding error compared to the amount of fuel you need to overcome gravity and leave earths orbit, gravity is that much of a fuck.
You inadvertently argued against your point. It takes only a few kilograms of fissile material to generate the energy needed to escape the gravitation of the 6 billion trillion kilograms gravity of earth.
But not really because you only compared chemical energy to fission.
Yeah, but we have no useful way to channel the energy from nuclear fission into propulsion, so that's a moot point if we're talking in practical terms. At least, we don't without irradiating everything. My point was not that combustion-based propellants are energy efficient, merely that it takes a lot of energy to escape gravity, and while theoretically nuclear propulsion would be more efficient, in practice, burning shit is really the best we can do without giving someone cancer every time we want to put something in orbit, because gravity is a fuck.
You can do nuclear without irradiating everything Just like a nuclear plant doesn't irradiate everything. The only reason it isn't done is safety. Rockets fail too often.
The argument that gravity is in anyway a more powerful force than weak force (fission) or strong force (fusion) is wrong. The only thing gravity has is distance. The strong force is 100 trillion trillion trillion times stronger than gravity.
I was more just speaking to how it’s many orders of magnitude weaker than the other 3 forces. Though it does work on an infinite scale, so maybe it ought to be a tiny but unbelievably long vaguely dragon-shaped worm thing.
Upvoted for Mass Effect, my beloved.
You didn't really overcome it though. After 2 seconds you got pulled right back.
Yup. But try pulling a proton out of an atom for 2 seconds.
Not recommended
I can pull a Proton out and put it back in, as long as you're not observing me
lol that sounds like a toddler saying "mom I can fly but i can only do it if you look away"
idk, man. that gravitational sigularity over there would like to have a word with you.
Close up off monstrous, horrifying, dangerous gravity dragon... pull back and back and back, and realize it was 1000x magnified. It's magnificent roar a barely audible squeak.
And then you look away from it for a couple billion years and it combined with with all of its friends into the devourer of worlds