On May 12, 6:48 pm, Bill Pfeifer hotmail.com> wrote:

On May 12, 12:35 am, Robert Epstein verizon.net> wrote:

Haven't checked out Bill's links, but here's a start, and you can then
research further.

And let me repeat that I'm a renaissance man (a philosopher in the
ancient sense) and not a physicist, so I can only give you the
intuitive, simple non-mathematical story, cuz datz all I know. But I
think that's all you want, so here goes. Ok, we have the 'standard
model' of physics, that has to do with sub-atomic particles. Two of
the forces, gravity and electromagnetism, act at a distance, and their
effect is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, so
that if an object is twice as far away there's only a fourth as much
of an effect on it and so forth.

The strong and weak forces have no effect at large distances at all.
The strong nuclear force is what holds the nucleus of an atom
together. As the nucleus contains only protons with positive charges
and neutrons with no charge, the electromagnetic force would cause it
to fly apart instantly if it weren't for the strong force. So it's
the 'glue' that holds the protons together which repel each other
electromagnetically like two north poles of magnets stuck near each
other. However, strong force is much stronger than the electromagnetic
repulsion (hence strong force) and so it keeps them glued together.
The glue that the strong force uses to glue the protons and neutrons
together are called gluons. That's how I remember it -- strong force
is stronger than the magnetic repulsion, and gluons are how the strong
force glues together the nucleus.

The weird thing about the strong force is that its intensity does not
diminish inversely proportional to the distance as do gravity and
electromagnetism. Instead, the strong force gets stronger as the
particles get pulled apart. Now if you just kept pulling them apart
further and further, you might think the strong force gets stronger
and stronger infinitely, but that doesn't happen because as soon as
they get far enough apart (and we're talking still the size of the
nucleus of an atom), they get destroyed. Or more precisely, there's
this cosmic yin-yang effect, where two opposite particles, like a yin-
yang pair, pop up out of the void, and one connects to one of the
original pair of particles, and it's partner to the other of the
original particles, and now you have two separate pairs of particles
again with the strong force operating between them. No, I'm not
making this stuff up. Hence the strong force, though it gets stronger
as the distance gets greater, has no effect at all for more than a
very short distance. That is, pull too hard and you break, which
means production of 2 pairs of objects, and then within the pairs, the
strong force again acts and keeps the partners together, but now the
strong force between the separated pairs is zero.

Intuitively, I think of a coiled spring. Pull on the spring, and the
farther you stretch it, the harder it is to stretch further. Stretch
far enough and the spring breaks into two springs. Now each of the
new springs you can stretch again, but there is no pull between the
two springs because they have been completely separated. As for the
two yin-yang pair of opposites conjured up out of the void together,
think of magnets and how when you cut a magnet in half, separating the
south from the north pole, you get two new smaller magnets, each with
its own north and south pole, so that a pair of opposite poles was
created together, one going with one of the half-magnets and one with
the other, so that you now have two complete magnets. Well, that's
how the strong force works.

The weak force was added last in the standard model to explain
radioactive decay of atoms. There are three kinds of decay: alpha,
beta, gamma. Physicists could explain alpha and gamma, but not beta:
alpha decay is explained by the strong force plus "quantum tunneling";
gamma decay is explained by excess energy accompanying the decaying
process. Beta decay was a mystery, and the weak force was added to
explain it. Fermi postulated that a neutron decayed into a proton
plus and electron, but there was some extra energy missing, so he
postulated that it also created this ghost-like particle called an
antineutrino, which had this amazing property of being able to fly
through almost any amount of matter without hitting a single atom.
The weak force was created to explain this.

In physics lingo, the weak force changes an up quark to a down quark
or down quark to an up quark, which is an action that can't be
explained by the strong force (or the other two macro-level forces).
When you change an up quark to a down quark or a down quark to an up
quark, you get another one of these yin-yang pair creations out of the
void (seriously, I'm not making this up). In this case you create the
electron and an antineutrino (or a positron and a neutrino), which are
hurled out of the atom when a neutron decays into a proton: this is is
what we call radioactive decay of atoms, specifically beta radiation.
Electrons and neutrinos (and other leptons) are not affected by the
strong force, so this fought force was needed to explain what caused
this radiative decay, the hurling of an electron and antineurino out
into the world, to take place. The weak force is also short-range
only and vanishes completely on any distance larger than the size of a
nucleus of an atom. Just as the strong force uses 'gluons' to do it's
work, the weak force uses 'bosons' to do its work, which are huge
masses, like a hundred times the mass of a proton.

As for dark matter, well, that's at the other end of the spectrum --
the outer space world. We all wondered whether or not after the Big
Bang, the expanding universe would fizzle out like fireworks in the
sky and have a slow cold death, or whether the expansion would stop
altogether, and then the stars would pull back together into a 'big
crunch' only to explode again into a new Big Bang. Bhante Punnadhammo
and I both intuitively liked the latter possibility, because it had an
organic feel to it, like a cosmic heartbeat. Well, it turns out both
were wrong because we recently found out that the expanding universe
isn't slowing down -- so there isn't the question anymore as to
whether it will slow down enough to stop and come back together.
Instead, it's speeding up, and we are actually accelerating away from
all the other galaxies! It's crazy and it doesn't make sense. So --
we invented dark matter to explain it. Dark matter also explains the
unusual ways that galaxies spin, which doesn't fit the normal models.
Dark matter can't be seen, but there is much more of it than ordinary
matter. Furthermore, and even more mysteriously, there is dark
energy, which gets really bizarre. I think that's a good place to
stop (especially because that's all I know about it without looking it
up).

Hope that was helpful, Robert.

--DharmaTroll