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Articles: Devotion | In quest of infinity - 9
- Prof. venkata ramanamurty mallajosyula
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The short answer to the above question is no; in fact, the relative strengths change as indicated in the figure below:
The effect of the four forces varies with distance in today’s Universe. Let us say there is a number S that proclaims the “strength” of a particular force. We know what the value of S is today, for each of the four forces. Have these values of S remained the same through the history of the Universe? This question when carried over to elementary particle physics becomes: Do the values of S remain the same at very small distances, as they are at larger distances?
That is the question answered above. Particle physicists have strong reasons to believe that they do not. There is thus much incentive for physicists to get some idea of the values for S at very small distances. However, the experiments are difficult. Theoretical speculation is, however, possible, and sure enough there is a lot of it. Cosmologists latch on to these numbers churned out by particle physicists, and then try to figure out what might have happened in the early Universe. That is how the two groups work together.
What is particularly striking is not merely that all three of the four forces tend to become almost equally strong but that gravity, which is usually dismissed as a rather weak fellow becomes pretty assertive at very short distances. In other words, gravity becomes a very dominant player when one is considering the Universe at its very early stage. This is a very important point to which I hope to come later. There are two other questions that I shall pose right away and consider the answers later.
QUESTION 4: All earlier discussions of physics treated gravity as if it was a sort of stand-alone thing; is there any way of linking gravity in a natural manner to the elementary particles or the building blocks?
This is a very good and most important question. In recent decades, a connection has been found, and understandably, that is having an amazing and revolutionary impact on physics at small distances and cosmology as well. This is going to engage our attention soon. But meanwhile, let me quickly state the last of the present set of questions.
QUESTION 5: This dark energy, that featured so strongly in an earlier issue [QFI – 08]; how is connected to all this, if at all?
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