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Throwback Thursday: What is the Weak Force? (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]
“Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.” –Marcus Aurelius
There are four known fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. But while we often speak of gravitation as an attractive force between masses (or anything with energy), of the electric force as charged particles attracting or repelling, of quarks and gluons attracting one another and keeping nuclei bound together, we describe the weak force as “responsible for radioactive decay.”
Image credit: © 2013 Maharishi Vedic University Ltd., via http://www.globalcountrycourses.com/.
Is this right? Shouldn’t the weak force, you know, be a force? Shouldn’t there be a weak charge and attraction or repulsion based on that charge? As it turns out, there ought to be one, but due to the fact that it’s less than one-millionth the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, we were unable to measure it. Until 2013, that is, when we did for the first time!
Image credit: Contemporary Physics Education Project, via http://cpepweb.org/.
Come learn about the weak force, and the fact that it actually is a force.
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2015/06/11/throwback-thursday-what-is-the-weak-force-synopsis/
