3027: Exclusion Principle
| Exclusion Principle |
 Title text: Fermions are weird about each other in a standoffish way. Integer-spin particles are weird about each other in a 'stand uncomfortably close while talking' kind of way. |
Explanation
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This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a SOCIALLY ANXIOUS ELECTRON - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks. |
This comic is about the four fundamental forces of physics: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. In typical xkcd fashion, Randall also adds a joke entry.
Transcript
[Inside panel:]
Fundamental Forces
1. Gravity
2. Electromagnetism
3. The Weak Interaction
4. The Strong Interaction
5. Electrons are weird about each other
[Caption below list:]
Big news: Physicists have finally given up on trying to explain about the "exchange interaction" and agreed to just make the exclusion principle a force.
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It should be noted, that amusingly, since the quantum gravity has yet to be full explained thanks to the fact that gravity affects, and that for all we know, Exclusion Principle may be just as valid, if not more so, to be on the list as Gravity (even though Exclusion Principle should not, generally, be on this list.) -- LilithRose (talk) 06:48, 21 December 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
Polymagnetic topologies as "color" charge, strong vs weak, etc?
I'm increasingly under the impression that these forces & principles, are each an expression of complex electromagnetic interactions? I've never quite understood why they're viewed as separate forces, instead of distinct-but-related expressions of a single type of force across complex topologies.
Particularly, I'm unclear why quark\gluon "color" interactions are seen as anything other than topologically-asymmetric fields interlocking; it just looks like the behavior of polymagnet fields, to me. (By the way, I'm glad there's now a common term, "polymagnetic", for the patterned fields that I'm sure many of us assembled while playing with tiny neodymium magnets & wire, as kids! Arranging multiple cores for a smaller, denser field, & observing that the patterns could interlock, felt like major 'Aha!' moments for me, at the time.)
I was so frustrated by my own feeling of "this complex thing I know very little about, really seems to have a very basic underlying principle that's being widely misconstrued", that I've petitioned a mindless bot to hear my case. (You'd have to scroll at least about halfway down, to get to any prompts even slightly interesting.) I'm probably wasting everyone's time with this, but it has been bothering me, more & more for decades, & my reading so far hasn't lessened that.
Why is everyone so insistent that these 'other' forces aren't magnetism? Seems like quite literally everything is magnetism, to me. Besides a formal education in the matter, what the heck am I missing, here?
ProphetZarquon (talk) 15:38, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
- I don't know what you mean by "complex topologies." Which topology? The reason we know the strong and weak interactions are not the electromagnetic interaction is that they have completely different gauge symmetries, among other reasons. The electromagnetic interaction has local symmetry group U(1), and the strong interaction has SU(3). Behaviorally-speaking, they are completely different in almost every respect, affecting different sets of particles, having different strengths, having different potentials, different ranges, carried by different fields, etc. Just as an example, an electron doesn't interact via the strong force at all.
- It is likely that at extremely high energies, the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions are all unified. A theory describing this hypothetical union is called a grand unified theory or GUT, and detecting this experimentally is a major objective of modern physics. The unified "electroweak" interaction has already been observed at lower energies. But that doesn't mean the weak interaction is "just magnetism" or that electromagnetism is "just weak." They are both a consequence of a broken symmetry. The fully symmetric grand unified field would not resemble any one of the interactions that we see at lower energies but would be a symmetric combination of all of them. EebstertheGreat (talk) 16:38, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
