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“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way — things I had no words for.” -Georgia O’Keeffe
When it comes to the Universe, it isn’t just the stuff that’s in it that’s important.
Image credit: 2MASS Extended Source Catalog (XSC).
It’s also how all that stuff interacts with itself and everything else. To the best of our knowledge, there are four fundamental forces in the Universe, and they’re all essential to our existence.
Image credit: Stichting Maharishi University of Management, the Netherlands.
Some of them are familiar, like gravitation. On the largest scales in the Universe, gravitation is not only the most important force, but arguably the only important force in play. The amount of mass and energy inherent to objects determines how spacetime itself is curved, and this curvature of spacetime in turn determines how objects move and accelerate.
Image credit: Mark Garlick / SPL.
There’s no “anti-mass” or “anti-energy” that causes some objects to be gravitationally repelled while others are gravitationally attracted. Gravity is always attractive, and we can interpret mass/energy as the lone type of gravitational charge, if we want to.
But other forces and interactions can be more complicated than gravity in this regard. Take the electromagnetic force, for example, just by looking at charged particles.
Image credit: http://Maxwells-Equations.com, copyright 2012.
Instead of one type of charge where like-attracts-like, we have two types of electric charge: positive and negative, where like charges repel and unlike charges attract. It’s very different than gravity and somewhat more complicated, but there are some things that are familiar to us.
Image credit: Science Photo Library.
A neutral atom, for instance, is a good example of electromagnetism, where the positively charged nucleus is orbited by a swarm of negatively charged electrons. The electrons repel each other, but they’re all attracted to the nucleus even moreso. As long as the total charge of the atom is zero and there is no sufficiently strong external radiation, the atom will remain stable and neutral.
We even understand, at a fundamental quantum level, how this works. The attraction and repulsion between all charged particles is mediated by the same particle: the photon.
Image credit: Ask a Mathematician / Ask a Physicist.
It just takes one particle to take care of both attraction and repulsion, because of the relatively simple structure — two charges, like-repels-like and opposites attract — of electromagnetism. But things get a lot more complicated if we go inside the nucleus, and ask just how it is, at a fundamental level, that these tiny, charged structures hold themselves together.
Image credit: Hyak / Martin Savage, eScience Institute, University of Washington.
An atomic nucleus, of course, is made up of protons and neutrons, except for hydrogen, which is just a proton by itself. But seeing as how protons have a positive electric charge and neutrons have no electric charge at all, there must be some sort of extra force — a force even stronger than the electromagnetic force — to hold these nuclei together.
In fact, the creatively-named strong force is required to hold even the individual protons and neutrons themselves together. Because a proton and neutron themselves are not fundamental, but composed of even smaller, fractionally-charged particles known as quarks.
Image credit: Learn EveryWare, © 2009 Alberta Education, error caught by Rich and Mike, edited by me.
The electric forces inside of a proton, for instance, would cause the nucleus itself to fly apart if there weren’t another type of charge attached to each of these quarks: in addition to electric charge, they also possess color charge, which comes in not one type (like gravity), nor two (like electromagnetism), but three.
Only unlike gravitation and electromagnetism, you can’t just have a color charge off by itself: you need a red, green, and blue together, to add up to “colorless,” just like red, green, and blue light together add up to white. (Any Americans who want the three colors to be “red, white, and blue” can leave now, as can any Frenchman who thinks they should be “blue, white, and red.” I’m making an analogy, and your flag does not trump physics.)
Image credit: Focusbox.net, retrieved from Nuno Canaveira at nColour.
Just like there’s matter and antimatter, there are quarks and anti-quarks, and so there are colors (red, green and blue) and anti-colors: cyan is the anti-red, magenta is the anti-green, and yellow is the anti-blue. So to add up to “colorless,” you either need three quarks (or three anti-quarks), or one quark and one anti-quark.
Image credit: McLean County Unit District Number 5, http://www.unit5.org/.
It’s a little bit weird: if red + green + blue makes white, but red + anti-red also makes white, does that mean that green+blue is the same as anti-red? Yes, yes it does, at least in terms of color. Which means you can pair a quark with either two other quarks, with an antiquark, or possibly even with three other quarks and one antiquark. As long as the color comes out white (or colorless), you’re in business.
And that’s why you can have combinations of three quarks, like protons and neutrons, or combinations of one quark and one anti-quark, like mesons. But unlike gravity, which bends spacetime, or electromagnetism, where photons (with no charge) are exchanged, the strong force works by exchanging a new type of particle — the gluon — which carries both a color and an anti-color!
These gluons are responsible for holding both individual particles — like protons, neutrons, and pions — together, as well as for binding larger atomic nuclei together.
Image credit: CERN / European Organization for Nuclear Research, http://www.physik.uzh.ch/.
How does this work? With three colors (red, green, and blue) and three anti-colors (anti-red = cyan, anti-green = magenta, and anti-blue = yellow), you might think there are nine types of gluons that you can get from matching each color with each anti-color. That’s a good first thought, and it’s almost right.
Imagine you’re a red quark, and you emit a red/anti-green gluon. You’re going to turn the red quark into a green quark, because color is conserved like that, and then that gluon is going to find a green quark, and turn it red. In this fashion, colors get exchanged.
Image credit: Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons user Qashqaiilove.
That turns out to be a good explanation for six of the gluons: red/anti-green, red/anti-blue, green/anti-red, green/anti-blue, blue/anti-red, and blue/anti-green.
But what about the others: there should also be red/anti-red, green/anti-green, and blue/anti-blue, right?
Almost, it turns out. Because each of those has no inherent color, those quantum states are allowed to mix together. In quantum physics, whenever mixing isn’t forbidden, it happens. So you get mixtures of red/anti-red, green/anti-green, and blue/anti-blue states.
Image credit: Me, your gluon hero.
But one of them — the one that’s an equal mixture of all three color/anti-color pairs — is truly colorless, and doesn’t physically exist. So there are only eight physical gluons.
And it’s the exchange of these gluons between the quarks and antiquarks that keep protons, neutrons, mesons, baryons, and all other atomic nuclei together. There is much more to the strong interactions than what I’ve described here, and if you want to go deeper, I recommend this jaunt by Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek. Whether you do or not, the strong force is what holds every atomic nucleus together; without it, we’d simply be a lifeless sea of fundamental particles, too repulsive to hold together in any meaningful fashion.
Image credit: Roy Uyematsu.
And yet, here we are, so much more than a cosmic soup, with galaxies, stars, planets, heavy elements, molecules, life, and you and me. It’s the strongest force in the Universe, and without it, none of this would be possible. Enjoy!
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