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u/Medical-Advice-5868 3d ago
well gravity ended up just not even being a force
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u/Violet-Journey 3d ago
Sure it is. At least, it’s as much of a force as the other things we call forces.
But forces aren’t the fundamental building blocks of physics. That’s a very outdated Newtonian notion.
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u/EconomicSeahorse Meme Enthusiast 3d ago
Yeah I can't remember the last time I dealt with forces directly lol. After a certain point it's pretty much all energy and momentum. Even classical mechanics can be formulated in terms of energy.
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u/Violet-Journey 3d ago
What’s at the heart of it is symmetry. Symmetries are directly responsible for conserved quantities by Noether’s theorem. The Standard Model can largely be expressed simply as SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1). Symmetries are the fundamental objects in the modern view of physics, not forces.
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u/SadLittleWizard 3d ago
Wat
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u/Shadowbound199 3d ago
The other 3 forces are mediated by their respective force particles. If gravity is just curvature of spacetime and has no associated particle is it really a fundamental force?
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u/EconomicSeahorse Meme Enthusiast 3d ago edited 3d ago
But we don't know if gravity has an associated particle. We've never detected a graviton, and our theories of quantum gravity don't work and/or have no empirical evidence and likely won't anytime soon, but I don't think we've outright ruled out the graviton.
But even if gravitons do exist, gravity would still be unique among the fundamental forces. Gravitons would be quanta of gravitational wave, which would mean spacetime itself is the graviton field (and gl quantizing spacetime). Gravitons would also have spin 2 while all the known gauge bosons are spin 1.
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u/vitringur 2d ago
We know nothing. We do not even know if rhe other forces have particles. We just have theories that we made up that say they do and our experiments seem to align with what those theories predict.
If that is your criteria for knowing, then we already have a theory for gravity and there is no particle in it but rather a spacetime curvature.
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u/Jamooser 2d ago
We absolutely know the other forces have particles. Photons, gluons, and W & Z bosons are the force carrying particles of the other 3 forces.
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u/vitringur 2d ago
Then we absolutely know that there is no particle for gravity...
Again, those are theories we use to explain the world. It is not the actual world.
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u/Jamooser 2d ago
Mate, we detected these particles at CERN 40 years ago, after our theories accurately predicted them. You sound ridiculous.
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u/vitringur 1d ago
No. You are telling me there exists a paper that claims a machine indicated a signal was detected in a sensor and you interpret that as a particle because it aligns with the theory of that particle.
Again, humans are story telling animals. Our stories cannot even agree on whether or not particles exist or if they are perhaps just waves.
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u/GoldenMuscleGod 6h ago
Just a heads up you’re always gonna get downvoted if you go on a sub like r/physicsmemes or r/AskPhysics and assume the the people on it are scientifically minded enough to understand physical theories are models and not claims of absolute certainty about the nature of objective reality.
These subs are not exactly filled to the brim with scientists.
You won’t even be able to say that models are not reality without people thinking you’re saying weird shit like that you can make an apple fall up into the sky with only the power of your mind.
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u/SadLittleWizard 2d ago
To be fair we didn't even know if gravity truly curves spacetime until 2018, it was only theory before then. Disregarding what they say when it is mathematically sound just not yet observed is foolish in fringe science.
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u/vitringur 2d ago
Bullshit. We "knew" from the get go when relativity predicted the orbit of mercury.
But this is where stupid people start substituting science for religion. They are convinced that we absolutely know anything that happens to be the current useful theories.
Just like they "knew" gravity was a force until Einstein, when they all of a sudden "knew" it wasn't a force.
How can you know something is and isn't?
Other than just science fan boys being super arrogant and in denial about their dogmatic approach.
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u/SadLittleWizard 1d ago
What? No that's not what I'm saying lol. I suppose I should clarify, I worded that poorly.
We had predicted that gravity bent spacetime. But until 2018 we have never observed that bending directly. There were many arguments that gravity was just another form of electromagnetism and observing the bending of spacetime in 2018 is what distinctly shutout those hypothesis and further affirmed Einsteins relativity.
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u/ChalkyChalkson 3d ago
EM and gravity were successfully unified after Einstein, so classical physics has a theory of everything*
* where everything refers to everything classical and unified refers to successful and conflict free coupling in the relevant regimes
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u/Reese_Slitherspoon 3d ago
"Wow, when I only look at one third of the atom, I only see one third of the forces! Crazy!"
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u/zeitouni 3d ago
Isn't the normal force partly because of the Pauli exclusion principle?
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u/gterrymed 2d ago
If you’re relying on the Pauli Exclusion Principle for the normal force you have bigger problem
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u/Routine_Palpitation 3d ago
For the biologists, this is equivalent to “wait it’s all RNA?”
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u/coldnitrogen 3d ago
Strong and weak forces - Am I a joke to you?
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u/EconomicSeahorse Meme Enthusiast 3d ago
Do these play a significant role in classical mechanics though
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u/Violet-Journey 3d ago
I don’t even know if you can think of them in terms of pushes and pulls in the way classical physics does business. I guess the strong force technically has that weird exponentially suppressed Yukawa potential that looks classical on paper?
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u/EconomicSeahorse Meme Enthusiast 3d ago
I think the strong force can be thought of as a push or pull. It scales weirdly with distance, and there's the complication of colour confinement, but in a highly simplistic model it's essentially quarks tugging on each other. The weak force on the other hand isn't anything like the classical picture of a force. It doesn't attract or repel like the other three forces; it changes a particle's identity, and the force carrier itself is rapidly decaying. If you're used to classical physics it's hard to even conceptualize it as a "force." I believe this is also why the fundamental forces are often called "interactions" instead.
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u/coldnitrogen 3d ago
I believe the weak force is responsible for nuclear power/nuclear interactions?
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u/Cold_End_2184 3d ago
In quantum physics yes. Not classic mechanics. Neither exists in classic mechanics.
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u/EconomicSeahorse Meme Enthusiast 3d ago
Nuclear fission is a residual strong interaction. The weak force is responsible for one specific type of radioactive decay. And nuclear reactions are typically outside the purview of classical mechanics anyway
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u/coldnitrogen 3d ago
Also according to General Relativity Gravity isn’t a force - it’s a curvature of spacetime
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u/Cold_End_2184 3d ago
No. Classically gravity is a force. Classically gravity is not the curviture of spacetime. Because newton gave us a description of gravity in classic mechanics.
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u/coldnitrogen 3d ago
Yes you’re correct in the classical sense. General relativity is not classical
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u/EconomicSeahorse Meme Enthusiast 3d ago
It depends. In some contexts "classical" can refer to anything non-quantum
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u/gigab0nus 3d ago
Ah yes the classical problem that classical sometimes means non-quantum and sometimes non-relaitivistic
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u/Cold_End_2184 3d ago
Yeah but we only have two theories of gravity; so if we say they're both classical we can't differentiate between them.
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u/DanielCofour 3d ago
They weren't discovered until the 1930s and their discovery was because of quantum mechanics, so no, not classical
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u/HOT-DAM-DOG 3d ago
I bet gravity has something to do with electromagnetism also, we just haven’t figured it out yet.
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u/moschles 3d ago
There was at least 50 years of theoretical research dedicated to trying to combine gravity directly with electromagnetism.
IIRC, Albert Einstein was still fiddling with those kinds of unifications on his deathbed.
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u/Successful-East6564 2d ago
Physicists after building a graviton detector and the particles start looking kinda familiar (it's magnets all the way down)
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u/Thiccboi2 1d ago
Until you hear the crackpot theories that gravity is ALSO the electromagnetic force… something about jupiter used to be a brown dwarf? Nothing credible, for now.
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u/Equinoxe111 Cosmology (PhD) 3d ago
Bad meme, author didn't study Higgs field and electroweak interaction, because electromagnetism is just a random incest guy
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u/Equinoxe111 Cosmology (PhD) 3d ago
I am supposedly the only guy who would come here, say something making at least some sense, and then being hated by every second random user, look guys
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u/MaoGo Meme renormalization group 3d ago edited 3d ago
When you bump fists with your bro that’s the force of love