It's been a while since I did one of these, so here's a new Dorky Poll for readers to vote on: What's your favorite of the fundamental forces of nature?
As always, vote by leaving a comment. The winning force will be entitled to display a small graphic proclaiming it the choice of ScienceBlogs readers on all its exchange bosons.
The candidates (below the fold):
The Strong Nuclear Force: Binds quarks into nucleons, and nucleons into nuclei. Arguably the most difficult to deal with mathematically, as it gets stronger at long range. The Democratic Party of fundamental forces, because it just doesn't get along, even with itself.
The Electromagnetic Force: Responsible for the light that we see, and for holding together pretty much everything that we see with light. Binds electrons into atoms, and atoms into molecules. Probably the best-behaved theoretically, as the predictions of Quantum Electro-Dynamics are good to something like twelve or thirteen decimal places. The Republican Party of fundamental forces, with unprecedented party discipline.
The Weak Nuclear Force: A real dark horse. Rarely seen in everyday life, it's involved only in certain types of particle decays. The Libertarian Party of fundamental forces.
The Gravitational Force: The sexy, maverick outsider candidate. It keeps your feet on the ground, and the Earth in its orbit, but nobody really knows what it's all about. Is it a theory of curved space-time, or is there really a field theory lurking underneath that smiling face? There's just no way to tell, and it's not answering questions...
Please restrict yourselves to these four. No write-in forces, unless you're willing to really bring the crazy, time cube style. In which case, the rest of us will point at you and laugh.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
I've always like the Weak Nuclear force, for no real reason.
I have to go with the electromagnetic force followed closely by gravity. (Can you tell I'm an astronomer?)
"The Weak Nuclear Force: A real dark horse. Rarely seen in everyday life..."
Don't forget: it makes the Sun shine!
Can I vote for the "Nucular Force" as a write in? It's been endorsed by W. If not, I choose gravity.
I'm gonna go with gravity just because of its quirky nature (you may THINK you understand me.... )
Dangit.
Since you prohibited write-ins, I can't nominate "laziness", can I?
Just another tool of The Man, poopin' my party...
I'm not a physicist, so I'll vote Electromagnetic, followed by Gravity as runner-up...since I can actually USE the former, especially, in a lot of studies and the latter to keep myself from bouncing off of the ceiling all the time.
Gravity all the way!
Sexy gravity? Republican EM? Libertarian weak force? I think if you could mind-meld with the weak force, you'd find it is not someone making a political statement. It's just doing everything it can do, which is not much. One picture of the weak force and her sister electromagnetism should explain why electromagnetism gets all the dates.
I don't know what about sex makes you think of gravity, Chad, but there are lots of aspects to sex that make me think of neurons firing. That's not general relativity, my boy. It's something even better.
As I sit here, there's just one force with any dynamic aspect to it at all, electromagnetism. Everything interesting is EM. It's also what holds me up in my chair that dastardly gravity would pull me through. Electromagnetism is my friend, like a faithful hunting dog, extending my abilities and making a more pleasant environment at the same time. Republican indeed!Which force was behind the Clintons and Gores dancing to the Macarena? Electromagnetism, of course, gravity just made that harder. Gravity may be necessary to have a stage, but the show is all electromagnetism. So electromagnetism gets my vote.
electromagnetic!
it is largely responsible for chemicals being chemicalish (amongst other things) and since there are so many great chemicals out there I feel obliged to vote EM.
Gravity is first force that springs to the mind of the man on the street and seduces the specialists with its mystery. But this is all a facade that conceals the fact that gravity is really a weak poseur; the real force that completely dominates the action at most scales, the one you really have to understand and work with if you want to get anything done, is the one that I have to go with: the electromagnetic force.
Electromagnetic: we aren't sexy, but we get sh*t done.
Definitely gravity. I'm a sucker for things that retain an aura of mystery. :)
Hey, how come no one's giving it up for the strong nuclear force? With out it, we wouldn't have nuclei, and mispronunciations of 'nucular' would be pointless.
Gravity: The sexy force! I think you're making this poll difficult for the string theorists to vote on, because isn't it all just one force to them.
Gravitation hands down - all theory is inconsistent with observation. String theory has no falsifiable predictions at all. General Relativity fails for (Earth spin)-(lunar recession) coupling. The facile GR patch has a chiral vacuum pseudoscalar background and an Equivalence Principle parity violation. How much more fun is there to be had (with your clothes on)?
Newtonian gravitation cannot account for the persistence of spiral galaxies over all visible time. Newton was wrong. Nobody has a decent measurement of Newton's Big G.
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0609027
http://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/publications/pdf/prl85-2869.pdf
They aren't close.
Electromagnetism. You think gravity keeps your feet on the ground? Yeah, right. What do you think keeps your feet from going straight into the ground? E&M, mofos. You kids can go spend your adolescences musing about "gravity" and "Marxism," but when you're ready to grow up and appreciate a REAL force, give me a call.
The strong and weak forces have never given me anything but trouble. (Oh, how I suffered through Particle Physics and Field Theory classes in grad school.)
I have rarely seen the "sexy" side of gravity; its dull, ordinary Newtonian public face is how I think of it.
However, after getting past a rocky start in my college years, electromagnetism and I have developed a long-lasting and fruitful relationship. I have come to appreciate it in many of its forms: light, electrostatic repulsion, induced dipole moments, electricity to run my computer...
Electromagnetism it is.
What force is so hot it's Radioactive? The Weak Force of course.
I like Gravity, partly because I understand GR better than I understand standard model theory stuff, but also because the notion of gravity as a curvature of spacetime is just so elegant. If that is really how things work, it neatly elimitates the mystery of why gravitational and inertial mass are the same thing.
I do have to admit that it makes me feel a little dirty to have the same answer as Uncle Al, but I comfort myself in the fact that Uncle Al's reasons are all baloney, and that indeed part of why I like gravity is directly antithetical to the reason he likes it. What's more, anybody whose read his comments on blogs know that ignoring him is the very first thing one should do....
My love for gravity makes me a little sad about the conflict between quantum mechanics and GR... because both are extremely succesful theories in their regimes, so we can't just throw one out. I don't know enough about loop quantum gravity or string theory to know if the fundamental elegance of gravity -- the gravitational "force" as just the result of moving on geodesics through curved spacetime -- is preserved.
-Rob
"Gravity Rides Everything."
I also don't agree that Al's reasons for liking gravity are baloney. When someone finally gets around to doing the eotvos experiment, maybe it'll even get exciting (and isn't someone doing it now?).
But my vote is for EM! Gravity may be beautiful, but all the interesting stuff in my day to day world happens because of EM forces.
Also, since physical laws must be invariant under transformations that might, say, take us out of the U.S., those U.S.-centric political party comparisons are bad!
Electromagnetic for sure.
All you kids are too young, I guess, to realize that gravity is The Enemy. Trust me on this.
MKK
The strong force. Failing that, duct tape.
Gravity!
What other force still holds the potential to revolutionize physics?
Gravity was the first force analytically described (approximated to our length scales at least), was th initial motivator for scientific inquiry which led to physics and modern science....and gravity still remains the least understood and may lead to the unification of all forces.
Ya, 'nuff said.
Strong Nuclear. Because I just finished reading Wilczek's Fanstastic Realities and have been thinking about asymptotic freedom and anti-screening.
Weak force. It's connection to the top quark and symmetry breaking makes it more badass than the others.
Gravity has caused me a world of pain for much of my life, and I loves me some chemical reactivity, so I'm going to have to vote for electromagnetic.
I never used to think of gravity as very sexy -- but that's before I started doing astronomy research. Gravity is the weakest force we know of, but it controls the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe. Who could resist?
Strong nuclear all the way!
I'm a big fan of EM, but I think Gravity is cooler, if a bit misuderstood and evasive.
I'd vote for the electrostatic force if it were an option in isolation, but since it's stuck on the ticket with that slippery bastard magnetism, it's Right Out. So, my vote goes to gravity.
I'm going with gravity, because it's so cool that this force that is so much weaker than all the others can have such amazing effects over the large scale of the universe.
Also in honor of a great Asimov F&SF essay from way back, "First and Rearmost".
Gravity ... Rob Knop's entry nails the reasons (nicely done, Rob!).
Let's face it, only physicists care about the other forces but everyone is concerned with gravity on a daily basis. Vote for Gravity, the People's Choice.
The strong force, which is sadly underappreciated. Sure, we know the right theory for it, but it remains nearly impossible to calculate many of its important real-world consequences. (Contrast gravity, where we don't know the right theory but can still understand how it works at observable scales.)
here is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand.
Gravity of course.
Sorry about the late entry. I was just going over past dorky polls and found this.
Gravity, strong force, Electromagnetism. Big whoop.
All they do is make stuff attract and repel. Who cares?
The weak force changes things. It turns muons into neutrinos, up quarks into down quarks. How cool is that?