It’s been a while since I did one of these, so here’s a new Dorky Poll for readers to vote on: What’s your favorite of the fundamental forces of nature?<\/p>\n
As always, vote by leaving a comment. The winning force will be entitled to display a small graphic proclaiming it the choice of ScienceBlogs readers on all its exchange bosons.<\/p>\n
The candidates (below the fold):<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Strong Nuclear Force<\/strong>: Binds quarks into nucleons, and nucleons into nuclei. Arguably the most difficult to deal with mathematically, as it gets stronger at long range. The Democratic Party of fundamental forces, because it just doesn’t get along, even with itself.<\/p>\n The Electromagnetic Force<\/strong>: Responsible for the light that we see, and for holding together pretty much everything that we see with light. Binds electrons into atoms, and atoms into molecules. Probably the best-behaved theoretically, as the predictions of Quantum Electro-Dynamics are good to something like twelve or thirteen decimal places. The Republican Party of fundamental forces, with unprecedented party discipline.<\/p>\n The Weak Nuclear Force<\/strong>: A real dark horse. Rarely seen in everyday life, it’s involved only in certain types of particle decays. The Libertarian Party of fundamental forces.<\/p>\n The Gravitational Force<\/strong>: The sexy, maverick outsider candidate. It keeps your feet on the ground, and the Earth in its orbit, but nobody really<\/strong> knows what it’s all about. Is it a theory of curved space-time, or is there really a field theory lurking underneath that smiling face? There’s just no way to tell, and it’s not answering questions…<\/p>\n Please restrict yourselves to these four. No write-in forces, unless you’re willing to really bring the crazy, time cube style. In which case, the rest of us will point at you and laugh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been a while since I did one of these, so here’s a new Dorky Poll for readers to vote on: What’s your favorite of the fundamental forces of nature? As always, vote by leaving a comment. The winning force will be entitled to display a small graphic proclaiming it the choice of ScienceBlogs readers… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Favorite Fundamental Force?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}