On Tuesday, December 27, 2022 at 2:03:44 PM UTC-6 Lawrence Crowell wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 27, 2022 at 1:04:36 PM UTC-6 [email protected]
> wrote:
>
>> My late friend Vic Stenger pointed out that there's a different way of
>> looking at this. Most people say gravity is the weakest force because they
>> compare the gravitational force between two elementary charged particles,
>> e.g. two electrons, two protons, or an electron and a proton, to the EM
>> force between them and gravity is weaker by a large factor on the order of
>> 1e-36. But while there is a natural unit of electric charge, there are no
>> particles with a natural unit of gravitational charge, i.e. mass. But there
>> is a natural unit of mass; it’s just not one that any particle has (at
>> least not any particle we could produce). It’s the Planck mass. The Planck
>> mass is derived just from the fundamental constants:
>>
>> m_P = \sqrt{\frac{\hbar c}{G}} = 2.18e-18 Kg
>>
>> So we should calculate the ratio of the gravitational to EM force of two
>> Planck masses each with unit charge
>>
>> \frac{F_G}{F_{EM}} = G m_P^2/Ke^2 = 137
>>
>> where K is Coulomb’s constant and G is Newton’s constant. And behold, the
>> gravity is stronger by the inverse of the fine-structure constant.
>>
>> Why this great discrepancy in the two ways of looking at the question?
>> Well, first in quantum field theory the particles are all massless. Few get
>> a little mass from interaction with the Higgs field which has (for no
>> particular reason) a non-zero vacuum energy. All the rest of the particle
>> masses come from the binding energy of fields. So they have very little
>> gravitational mass. The Planck mass is the mass of the smallest possible
>> black hole, one whose de Broglie wave length equals its diameter. And it is
>> huge by particle standards. It’s the mass of a bacterium. So in this way of
>> looking at it gravity is strong, but the fundamental particles are almost
>> massless.
>>
>> Brent
>>
>>
> This is a ratio of forces with gravity and EM, but with Planck masses.
> BTW, my numbers come out to 1.23x10^3. Gravitation lacks a unitless
> coupling constant such as the QED fine structure constant α ~ 1/137. The
> Higgs field gives particles their masses, where fundamental fermions have a
> small mass given by the zitterbewegung induced by the Higgs field. So a
> possible definition of a dimensionless gravitational coupling constant
> is α_G = (m_H/m_p)^2. The Higgs mass is around 125GeV/c^2 and so α_G =
> 1.x10^{-16}.
>
> LC
>
>
erratum: the last number is α_G = 1.x10^{-34}.
LC
>
>> On 12/27/2022 3:46 AM, John Clark wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 27, 2022 at 5:59 AM Jason Resch <[email protected]> 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>
>> hfl
>>
>>
>>> --
>> 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 [email protected].
>>
>> To view this discussion on the web visit
>> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2jR%2BUcPiSviVfghHmpzN7NN_yNURGiBKNcQvjYaD7y7g%40mail.gmail.com
>>
>> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2jR%2BUcPiSviVfghHmpzN7NN_yNURGiBKNcQvjYaD7y7g%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>
>> .
>>
>>
>>
--
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 [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/7fb19d40-e9db-445d-94f2-f19c25f16f65n%40googlegroups.com.
