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Articles: My Thoughts | In quest of Infinity-06
- Prof. venkata ramanamurty mallajosyula
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Two questions arise at this point: “Why only four fundamental forces? Why not more?” This is question number one. Second question: “Are these forces completely unrelated to each other or is there some connection? If so, what is that connection?” These are the two questions that would concern us next.
Let us start with the first of the two questions above. After a lot of intense debate, physicists are generally agreed that there are only four fundamental forces and no more. For a while there was a flutter about a fifth force but that whisper has since died down. As regards the second question, the consensus is: “When the Universe was born, there was actually one Universal Force. But almost within a second after birth, this one Universal Primordial Force split into four, to facilitate the further evolution of the Universe. The history of the Universe from that moment of separation has been governed by four and only four fundamental forces.
This figure shows schematically, how the four fundamental forces were all born from one primordial force that existed right at the beginning of space-time, that is, when our Universe was born [about 13.8 billion years ago]. In about a trillionth of one second after the Big Bang, one force became four, and that is the way it has been ever since! It is amazing, is it not?! By the way, even in the world of physics, we have one becoming many!!
A small corollary. We often find physicists and chemists talking of all kinds of forces like the forces of surface tension, elastic forces and so on. All these are derived forces that operate within a certain context; they are not fundamental in the sense they do not determine the way leptons and quarks behave. Please keep that in mind. The derived forces are not unphysical but they are relevant only in limited context; our concern is with the Universe as a whole and in that context only the four forces I have listed above are pertinent. Hope that is clear.
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