On 12/27/2022 12:07 PM, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
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
But the proton mass, m_p, isn't fundamental. A proton isn't even a
fundamental particle. That's why Vic thought the Planck mass was the
only sensible candidate. And if a particles gets mass from the Higgs
field, comparing it's mass to the Higg's mass is more the measure of the
weak coupling between the Higgs field and the particle.
Brent
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
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