• rockerface 🇺🇦@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    Gravity is the weakest fundamental force, yes. At least, at relatively close distances. The advantage gravity has is that it never quite goes away, no matter how far you are.

        • Captain Janeway@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Is that actually true? I’m not an expert but I thought all forces extend our into infinity. I thought we just allowed them to go to 0 at a certain radius for the sake of making the math manageable.

          • nxn@biglemmowski.win
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            3 days ago

            Not the person you replied to, and not really an expert either, but I can tell you that the W and Z bosons (force carriers for the weak force) are very short lived and can only travel through space so far before they decay. This effectively puts a cap on the distance of weak interactions.

            • peoplebeproblems@midwest.social
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              3 days ago

              Strong force is the same.

              I don’t know if it’s shorter than the weak force, but you gotta be in an atom’s nucleus to experience it

              Edit: i just realized I may have confused people - strong force has a limited distance, not that it’s because they decay.

              Edit 2: If i ever got a PhD or master’s even in Physics, id probably write a book on how “The Universe Demands Laziness.” Because pretty much everything in physics ends up with a system taking shortcuts to save a little bit of energy.

              • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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                2 days ago

                If i ever got a PhD or master’s even in Physics, id probably write a book on how “The Universe Demands Laziness.” Because pretty much everything in physics ends up with a system taking shortcuts to save a little bit of energy.

                This is how I teach both physics and chemistry. Electrons are lazy - they’re going to chill in the lowest energy level they can. They fill in sub shells like people getting on a bus - you aren’t going to sit next to someone else unless you have to, you’re going to sit probably as close to the front (nucleus) as you can.

              • Verito@lemm.ee
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                3 days ago

                I don’t know if it’s shorter than the weak force, but you gotta be in an atom’s nucleus to experience it

                That’s what she said.

                • peoplebeproblems@midwest.social
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                  3 days ago

                  Except the energy required to increase the distance between the particles is enough that it ends up creating more particles and the distance never gets any more distancier?

              • nxn@biglemmowski.win
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                3 days ago

                So this is where my inexperience kicks in, but I don’t understand how the strong force can function in the same way considering that gluons are massless.

                The W and Z bosons having mass prevents them from being able to travel at the speed of light, and therefore they experience time and can only travel some limited distance before decaying into fermions.

                But since gluons do not have mass, they, like photons, do not experience time – and so how could they have a half life?

                In my mental model of the strong force I assumed that they simply were created and destroyed in an exchange between quarks – much like how photons get absorbed/emitted by electrons. But this alone does not cause a limit on the distance of strong interactions, so I assumed that mechanically any limit on the strong force’s distance must function differently.

                • peoplebeproblems@midwest.social
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                  3 days ago

                  Gluons do not have a half life?

                  Remember that they DO make an exchange - Gluons have color charge - red, green and blue. QCD is the magical realm of color charge.

                  The hardest part for quantum anything is grasping the “probability aspect” means spontaneous things can happen. In the case of QCD, as you put energy into separating quarks it becomes infinitely more likely to pull particles out of the vacuum than to separate them.

                  QCD is involved in fusion in a similar way - two protons will oppose each other with infinitely more force the closer they get because their charges are repulsive. The faster two protons are flung at eachother, the probability of the quarks binding increases.

          • Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz
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            3 days ago

            Nah, at some point the simulation we live in is going to round down to save computing power.

            • TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub
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              3 days ago

              Is that simulation in the room with us ri

              WARNING: Unexpected false vacuum decay.
              Reverting current state.
              3,245,333,345,728,345,876 recoveries until reboot.
              

              us right now? Hurrr durr

              WARNING: Unexpected false vacuum decay.
              Reverting current state.
              3,245,333,345,728,345,875 recoveries until reboot.
              
    • The advantage gravity has is that it never quite goes away, no matter how far you are.

      That’s true of all the fundamental forces, though. They all drop off over distance with inverse square laws. Like if you had two lone electrons in an otherwise empty universe, their electromagnetic repulsion would also persist indefinitely at 1/r^2 strength, just like gravity. The difference is that our universe has near-perfect charge neutrality at large scales.

      • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
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        3 days ago

        Dipoles are, effectively, not — so if you have a charged bit and another opposite charged bit, while an inverse relationship might exist between either one, the net effect is that it drops off much faster.

        The thing with gravity is it tends to go one way, unlike, say, charge.