On Tuesday, December 27, 2022 at 5:47:32 AM UTC-6 johnk...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 27, 2022 at 5:59 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote: > > *> There's an interesting relationship between the strength of the >> electrostatic repulsion between two protons, and the gravitational >> attraction of protons. It works out such that it takes ~10^54 protons >> gathered together in one place before the gravitational attraction can >> overwhelm the electrostatic repulsion. In other words, stars as as big and >> long-lived as they are because gravity is so weak.* >> > > That's true, and one of the biggest mysteries in physics is why gravity is > so weak, after all the strong nuclear force can keep 100 or even 2 protons > in one place. The only explanation I've heard is the hypothesis that there > are other spatial dimensions besides the 3 that we're familiar with, string > theory claims there are at least 9, but that all the forces of nature > EXCEPT for gravity are confined to just 3 dimensions so they generally > follow the law that says they decrease with distance according to the well > known 1/r^2 rule, but gravity is free to radiate into all 9 dimensions so > it decreases with distance according to a 1/r^8 rule; and the reason we > don't see gravity behave this way in our everyday life is it the other 6 > dimensions are curled up very tightly so the effect becomes apparent only > at the ultra microscopic scale. It's a nice theory but there's not a scrap > of experimental evidence to support it. > > John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis > <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> > It really is not so much that gravitation is so weak, but that elementary particles have such small masses. The coupling constant for gravitation is GM^2, or better a dimensionless form is (m_{pl}/m_higgs})^2. The Higgs field is a quartic field, and if it were much more massive the phi^4 interaction would require it be near the Planck mass. The GM^2 version scales with mass, which for elementary particles is very small, but for black holes is huge. LC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/ed227cdc-edfd-441d-933d-40ee917a1839n%40googlegroups.com.
