Can someone explain the weak nuclear force?
- Thread starter aggle-rithm
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nathan
Zygoticly Phased
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a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
Er, is that a serious question or an ICP joke?
Alpha decay is actually governed by the strong and EM interactions, not the weak. The weak interaction governs decays that involve quarks decaying to a different type. So beta decay, where a down quark in a neutron changes to an up quark, resulting in the neutron becoming a proton and emitting a W+ which quickly decays to a positron and a neutrino, would be a decay governed by the weak force. See here.
Oops, well spotted.
Belz...
Fiend God
Why would you want to know about the weak nuclear force ? Don't be a loser, learn about the strong nuclear force !
Evilgiraffe
Scatterer of X-rays
No. Those are for the weak nuclear bladder.
Why do you say that? You can draw field maps and potentials for the weak interaction just as you can for any other field.
Eggs Ackley
Thinker
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I think the weak force might be a kind of analog of the Euler force.
The Euler force is the force that causes you to go flying off the merry-go-round when your ostensible friend stops it suddenly. This seems like a plausible analog of a particle being ejected from a nucleus. Except, it can't be exactly that, because of course the Euler force is only a pseudo-force and so can't exist in inertial reference frames. However, there is a physical mechanism that causes reference frames to relatively rotate if they are relatively translating and coss-wise accelerating, called the Thomas precession. It is a simple consequence of relativity. Kinematics then implies that if observers in Thomas-precessing frames don't experience rotational pseudoforces in spite of rotating on account of the Thomas precession, then an observer in the inertial frame will observe forces that are counter to expected rotational pseudo-forces. We can call these the anti-Coriolis, anti-Euler, and anti-centrifugal forces. The anti-Coriolis force clearly resembles the magnetic force between charged particles (acting perpendicularly to the velocity of the charge), and the anti-centrifugal force being always attractive (opposite the centrifugal force) looks like the strong force. That leaves the anti-Euler force to correspond to the weak force.
Here btw is a paper that argues independently that the magnetic force is an anti-Coriolis force of the Thomas precession: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.3624
My contention about the strong and weak forces certainly goes mch beyond what that paper says. It is still conjectural. It might seem unlikely, but it is incumbent on physics to be able to describe physical processes that involve Thomas precession, and its existence demands that these kind of forces exist more generally than in the linked paper. This is why I continue to try to prove it, in spite of it turning out to be more difficult than I'd anticipated.
The Euler force is the force that causes you to go flying off the merry-go-round when your ostensible friend stops it suddenly. This seems like a plausible analog of a particle being ejected from a nucleus. Except, it can't be exactly that, because of course the Euler force is only a pseudo-force and so can't exist in inertial reference frames. However, there is a physical mechanism that causes reference frames to relatively rotate if they are relatively translating and coss-wise accelerating, called the Thomas precession. It is a simple consequence of relativity. Kinematics then implies that if observers in Thomas-precessing frames don't experience rotational pseudoforces in spite of rotating on account of the Thomas precession, then an observer in the inertial frame will observe forces that are counter to expected rotational pseudo-forces. We can call these the anti-Coriolis, anti-Euler, and anti-centrifugal forces. The anti-Coriolis force clearly resembles the magnetic force between charged particles (acting perpendicularly to the velocity of the charge), and the anti-centrifugal force being always attractive (opposite the centrifugal force) looks like the strong force. That leaves the anti-Euler force to correspond to the weak force.
Here btw is a paper that argues independently that the magnetic force is an anti-Coriolis force of the Thomas precession: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.3624
My contention about the strong and weak forces certainly goes mch beyond what that paper says. It is still conjectural. It might seem unlikely, but it is incumbent on physics to be able to describe physical processes that involve Thomas precession, and its existence demands that these kind of forces exist more generally than in the linked paper. This is why I continue to try to prove it, in spite of it turning out to be more difficult than I'd anticipated.