Comment on Make gravity your bitch
nxn@biglemmowski.win 4 weeks agoNot 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 so far before they decay. This effectively puts a cap on the distance of the weak force.
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
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
andros_rex@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
This is how I teach both physics and chemistry. Electrons are lazy - they’re going to chill in the lowest energy level they can. They fill in sub shells like people getting on a bus - you aren’t going to sit next to someone else unless you have to, you’re going to sit probably as close to the front (nucleus) as you can.
Verito@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
That’s what she said.
sepi@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
The strong force also gets stronger with distance
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
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?
muix@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks ago
TIL the Univers was written in Haskell
tdawg@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Ostensibly sure but really it’s all hacked together perl
nxn@biglemmowski.win 4 weeks ago
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 be different.
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
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.