A grave situation
by cricketjeff on October 7, 2009. © Jeff Green, All rights reserved
All the forces we’ve discovered seem to be almost the same;
But there’s one that wrecks the picture, can you guess which is to blame?
When you heat up any matter the first four put on a show
But gravity sucks you know!
Faraday played with a magnet – making electricity
And the weak and strong can join them – seems to be simplicity
But the other force of nature is too weak, it has to go!
For gravity sucks you know!
If you do some calculations, and you know your QCD,
You can make your quarks stay bounded, single ones just can’t be free,
But although we search for bosons and accelerators grow;
Still gravity sucks you know.
Are there seven new dimensions so it’s power ebbs away,
As the fans of superstringing always passionately say?
Or is it simply that there’s some things that the clever sods don’t know,
As gravity seems to show?
Author notes
There are, we are told, four fundamental forces in nature, Ørsted, Faraday and
Maxwell showed that electricity and magnetism were fundamentally connected,
Glashow, Weinberg, and Salam showed that the “weak nuclear force”, the force
that breaks atoms in radioactive decay, was another related force, and Quantum
Colour Dynamics is a theory that seems to let the “strong nuclear force” join
in the game, that’s the force that holds quarks in place in protons and
neutrons.
Nobody has found a way to make gravity fit. Einstein’s theories of relativity
fit the facts extremely well but they are not in tune with the quantum
mechanical model that explains almost everything else. Superstring theory is
the leading contender for joining it all up.
English