A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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
For some further mind fuckery on the subject, I highly recommend this video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkH1citHtgs. Dude never misses in interesting content.
a 5 hour video? aint nobody got time for that
I do
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you kidding? The strong force depends on colours and increases with the distance, how is it not the derpy one?
The weak interaction is just electromagnetism if the photons had mass (and broke CP and flavour simmetry, yeah).
I mean, increasing with distance isn't that bad, since it only increases upto a point and goes out of range.
I like that its analogous with springs and all, which also increases force with distance from mean position
Color is just a word for a quantum property, not actual color.
Look man, the more I hear this argument the more I want to get into a Ph D program to figure out a better way to describe how fucking weird the Strong force is.
Sure, it "increases with distance" but the amount of energy you put in separating two particles bound by the strong force increases the probability of creating a new particle from the vacuum and then that distance snaps instantly. It has a practical limit if it is within the bounds of spacetime.
Edit: sorry I hit save before I finished
So not only is it special strong, if we define it with the only known things we can define anything with, it breaks all sorts of other things. And since the entire universe isn't bound together into one tight strongly held particle possibly means that the only reason the universe exists at all is because defining the strong force forced particles out of nothing.
Please do! Us physics enthusiasts laymen need ANSWERS ! :D
fair point, but at least it doesnt break so many symmetries
strong is like the cool hippie brother
Gravity should be the derpy looking one.
Yeah, definitely. Don't know why the literal weakest force in the universe is depicted as some mega dragon.
maybe it is because being so weak, it allows things to be come together, and eventually be strong enough, by power of family.
Then it should be Vin Diesel...
🤌
Gravity bends the geometry of spacetime itself, it's pretty eldritch to me.
I explained my reasoning here:
lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/43466460/18473372
Gravity at human scales: I sleep
Gravity at stellar scales: Real shit
It's a matter of scale, but gravity is often considered the weakest force. In quantum physics, it's so weak it's often impossible to measure.
The weak force is super cool actually
it has its charms