strength of Forces !!

I often think in a day about 100 topic that I can write about. And I can actually write about them. But its a mental exercise, the topics are basically flashing in my mind and then flashing off, they vanish as soon as they come. Some I can envisage for a bit longer but some are more sticky even for months. This is what I call the torment of the Quantum. No can capture the quantum. If they are not supposed to be caught. They have captured the quantum essentially, 3 atoms, they made them sit in a  line like Gandhi’s monkeys. And for that they won a Nobel Prize.

I will wait till I learn more about the Nobel Prize 2012 in Physics. There will be a lot of tug-of-ideas and praise and criticism. And as I said there are 100s of topics that can flash in my mind when I sit to write. Some of them because I have to read something somewhere, the day’s news or the social media tuc-tuc. My writing inertia also adds to this. So if there are unattended issues somewhere it has to be retained in the mind. You see our mind is a constant buffer of the day-to-day responses of our world as well as the intellectual swimming we are making it to perform.

Apart from that we have our tastes and preoccupations which leads us in various alleys different from the ones we followed yesterday. So I can’t write them all although the scientist and ambitious writer in me says how fun it would be if everything can be thought deeply and written about. Ofcourse new alleys of epistemology would open up. But what good will it be? It has all to be stream-lined. Thats one of the stringent criteria of writing and especially communicating the deeper questions that spring up in our mind when we try to attend this topic or that topic. We know that we know but that might turn out to be a mere wishful thinking. Which is why all professional scientists are good writers because they take up the exercise of writing. No one can not write 1000 articles and be a good writer. [So I am about half way there as I would set the standard.]

Here is something that flashed a month or two ago. But its retentivity says it must be a deeper topic of interest in my mind. Although often when I sit back to write I am not sure how good I am going to write something. Which is why I often give up the inhibition and set on writing something. Which is also why it occurs to me that I must read more of myself and of others and continue this act of reading and writing as a career path. My mother just informed me of an employment opportunity but I seem uninterested because I love writing now. That will be hampered if I do not have a job which actually allows me and promotes my activities of reading and writing. That does not mean its easier for me to set onto that. Just that I gradually find it suitable.

Here is some epithet that just occurred to me like that “flashing of topics” so I am just going to put it here. “Anything that becomes a motive to know others will be hugely successful ..” But I am just going to write my mind on my topic lest it be bastardized more and more. Also isn’t Physics just amazing when the equations are rather described. Thats when the engineer will hate it, but who cares?

So STRENGTH OF FORCES. What do the scientists mean when they say that.

Actually most of you know that those who study Forces are called as Physicists and they are all a particular kind of scientist. The scientist is one who perseveres to know and then to share his findings. He does so first with a community that is also capable of looking deeper into such to find out any discrepancy in his work. Then comes the world audience who gradually grapples with the findings. It takes decades for breakthrough works to assimilate even among scientists which is why its a good career path because there is always more and more work apart from the more and more words. Some knowledge are also lost because there is not much interest. Interest is a commercial paradigm hence good science is often dragged off by the concerns of finance. Thats not good. But thats in the nature of how we do science.

I mean lets say Mr Xenon philanthrops. He gives a million dollar for some kind of research, whats the guarantee that, that money will be well spent. Then comes a great deal of tug-of-arguments which makes the whole business look shaky even when its not. Its not (– shaky), because one can be an enterprising scientist and open up more and more vistas of opportunity, one thread leads to another, that yet another and so on. But an individual or a group of them have to keep an eye on the whole business before one can see that good value of science comes up. W/o that it becomes a sheer waste of many kind of resources, a bad name for scientists and so on. So eventually even if science needs the same and often better financial and human resources, its the scientific passion and value which rules the roost, which guides us selflessly and on an unwithering path of achieving that value (– of science).

So I diverted a bit when I said what do they mean by strength of forces. What do they mean by forces? And what do they mean by “Nature has 4 fundamental forces”?

Although contextually a lot of our definitions will vary a bit or even more, a Force is an agent of change. If we expect from a general view of experience of something, that, that experience has to be uniform over a change in region or time or any other physical parameters then we say that there are no agents of change. In the contrary something ought to be propelling a change. eg if a friction force is present then our bicycle is slowed down. We were expecting smooth sailing of our ship when there is a breaking wind that breaks the motion of the ship. The wind in the air or friction on the surface are thus forces. They instill change.

So the blow of fist, the drive of the motor bike, the hitting of a ball with a bat, the pull and push of molecules on each other, shooting of bullets, the waves on ocean, the stream of river, broadcast of TV and mobile signals are examples of forces. There are so many different kind of forces that their understanding has led to categorising them into 4 different kinds which are fundamentally different from each other. Since there are 4 such divisions of forces these are called Fundamental forces.

[If one is to also consider the unification of forces then there will be two fundamental forces as of 2013, this is 2012, but in the next 4 months even a Government can’t be changed if the Government decides to use weird power or incites a war. Physics does not change like that, you saw the OPERA opera, right?]

These 4 forces are Gravity force, electromagnetic force, strong-nuclear force, weak-nuclear force. Strong and weak forces are named as nuclear forces because they act inside the nucleus only. Electromagnetic force acts partly within nucleus and partly anywhere, it can extend its impact up to infinite distance because its carried by a delivery-particle which is not only light its weight/mass is zero if one measures them in a frame of reference called a rest-frame or rest-frame-of-reference (– or a proper frame). The other force is Gravity, today we don’t know if it exists at the atomic scale or not. We think it does but no-one has figured out if thats true why it does not have a unity-of-strength with other forces.

What I am saying the other 3 forces are unified or the manifestation of the same mathematical quantity in different scales and different magnitude or strength of force. So according to unification there is Gravity which extends up-to large distances and at very small distances may be zero. The other 3 are known as unified forces or you can say nuclear-electromagnetic forces. I am not sure anyone else has ever used that name, that sounds concise though. If anytime in the future they (– all four) will be unified, that is, if they will be consistently known to be the manifestation of the same force at different scale, different strength we would have matched the expectations of a great man by the name Albert Einstein.

If not which is the case at present we have two fundamental forces. If we do not talk about unification we have 4 fundamental forces though and no more is known as of now. Nature is not against having more than 4 fundamental forces but we have not discovered more. And I must add unification is not a way to get rid of forces, its rather a way to understand and be efficient about what we understand. eg in Language there is a great deal of unification but a far more waits to be achieved. My website is now filled with research on language where for generations we have used the fruits of unification of language.

This is what I say as 1-1 correspondence of language, eg all of Indian languages and English alphabets have a 1-1 correspondences. Any further consonants are merely a conjugation. Once thats so its an unification, because each time you have a word in one language it must have a corresponding word in another. Plus one can delineate only in one language and not in others and find a new word, but if one falls back onto the source form of the words one sees its the same. So there is inherent unification.

Forces are unified the same way. There may be (– infact there are) 100s of kinds of forces. They merely are conjugations of each other, in-fact conjugation of only 3. And the other fundamental force the force of gravity stands standalone. So molecular forces are electromagnetic and electromagnetic forces are in turn partly nuclear because thats where they originated at-least partly.

So when forces can be broken into parts in a mathematical way it can be checked if they all come from the combinations of a few parts. Thats what has been achieved when we say we have unified all forces.

So whats a strength of a force? Which above I described as a magnitude of force. Magnitude is used in the sense of an arbitrary comparison of the amount of force, eg same force is present in different magnitudes. But strength of a force is used in a very well specified sense of the magnitude of the force. Only when the force has the smallest unit possible its strength is its magnitude. And it can thus be compared to the magnitude of other forces in such units, then the forces having greater magnitude is a more stronger force.

eg Gravity is the weakest among all 4 forces. Then comes weak-nuclear force. Then comes electromagnetic force and then comes strong-nuclear force.

A strong-nuclear force is stronger than an electromagnetic force and an electromagnetic force is stronger than a weak-nuclear force and a weak-nuclear force is stronger than a gravity force.

But whats that unit I talked about above which lets us compare the forces for their magnitude to be more or less, hence decide which is stronger and which is not. I figured that out.

Think of force as the tension in a string. See force is present when you stretch a string or a thread. Thats elementary knowledge. So if to stretch the same thread or string I give you 4 different forces then you will need more gravity force to stretch the same amount, you will need less weak-nuclear force than the gravity force to stretch the same amount. You will need more weak-nuclear force to stretch the thread than the electromagnetic force for the same stretching. You need more electromagnetic force to stretch the same amount of the thread than you need strong-nuclear force. In other words the Young’s modulus of strong force is less than that of electromagnetic, Young’s modulus of electromagnetic force is less than that of weak and that of weak is less than that of gravity. Which means length of thread being same the stress produced by strong force is less than that of electromagnetic, is less than that of weak, is less than that of gravity. In other words “Hawking like wit”; A man who is stressed more has more gravity force acting on him. My wife is usually stressed out more because she is sensitive to the galaxy scale, she thinks about the galaxy even when she had to think about only her neighbourhood .. 笑 笑 笑笑 笑.

This is also literally Physics: see you have to stretch something more to access the strong force dimension/scale, you have to stress less for em force and so on. This also explains the range of em force. The strength of em force is more in the least-scale that is within the nucleus. So it might be getting more deeper-access than even weak force. Also Gravity comes from the extent of the Universe, that is; its like a sheet which is spread across the sky whose tension is Gravity. The tension of a blanket spread across the sky is gravity except this blanket is called spacetime and the extent is far-far beyond the sky deep into galaxies. But also see it like this; scale of the force is the smallest for the strong force. Actually its the ratio of that scale/range and the magnitude of the force which is called the strength of the force. So magnitude of force being stress and scale/range being strain strength of force is inverse of Young’s modulus.  [the extent of region over which a force is valid is called range and that attribute is called scale]

With the same force if you look at smaller and smaller objects you will have to stress your eye more and more. Which is also why strong force is stronger than weak force, the ratio of the amount of strong force you have to spend to the size of an object, for the same sized object, is less than the ratio of amount of weak force to that size. Or strong force is more capable hence its strength is more. Also ratio being less Young’s modulus is less. So Young’s modulus and strength of a Force seem inversely related. Young’s modulus is how much you can elongate something by applying a force. Since we often elongate wars/arguments more than necessary we have to spend more force there .. If less force elongates a war it means less young’s modulus but that also means swift devastation. A stronger force does more devastation. Thats why its stronger. With a stronger force you have to spend less of it to incur more damage, hence with same amount of different forces we incur more damage with stronger force.

I think I have written enough about a topic that was brewing over in my mind for a couple of months or so.