this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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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.
So it's like humans? π€
We aren't particularly strong or fast, but we became apex predators because we never. Stop. Coming.
Also, we, never, stop, cumming.
So much to cum, so much to cum,
So what's wrong with cumming the backstreet
You'll never know if you don't cum
You'll never cum if you don't blow
cum cum, cumcumcum cum, get ur cumcum CUM----CUM
AND ALL THAT'S CUMMING IS CUMMMM
only shooting cummmm breaks the mOwOld
(Smash mouth were so ahead of the curve, they had OwO in their lyrics in 1999)
Can you imagine being those antelope being hunted by early human ancestors -
"Ok, bob, we just bolted at 40mph for a minute or so, they're not going to find us again."
"Clarice, you said that the last 8 times and they still showed up! They're unnatural! They just keep following and following us! Alex smashed his shin that last run, and I don't know how many more times I can run myself! We're doomed Clarice! Doomed!"
It's basically a zombie movie, but the main character is Bambi.
They cannot be bargained with. They cannot be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.
about to make ourselves go away though.
Whoops
Whoopsee
Exactly. Raise your hand. Great, you overcame gravity for a second. Keep your hand raised for a minute. 10 minutes. An hour. Fuck, gravity doesn't stop. It's exactly like us.
I mean yeah but also you reverse that square enough and it's effectively zero
But never actually zero, unlike those other quitter "forces"
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.
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.
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.
This is how I teach both physics and chemistry. Electrons are lazy - theyβre going to chill in the lowest energy level they can. They fill in sub shells like people getting on a bus - you arenβt going to sit next to someone else unless you have to, youβre going to sit probably as close to the front (nucleus) as you can.
That's what she said.
The strong force also gets stronger with distance
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?
TIL the Univers was written in Haskell
Ostensibly sure but really it's all hacked together perl
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.
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.
Nah, at some point the simulation we live in is going to round down to save computing power.
Is that simulation in the room with us ri
us right now? Hurrr durr
Are you the mirror universe version of DarkViperAU?
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.
Electromagnetic doesn't go away either. It's that damn negavite charge neutralizing the stuff.
Aren't all forces subject to the inverse square law?
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.
Sounds like a stalker.