As an out of practice physicist now teaching high school physics this is word for word what I would have said should I have to explain the fundamental forces without researching any of the things that have slipped my mind. {{Title text: "Of these four forces, there's one we don't really understand." Unlike the weak force, though, the residual nuclear force decays over a much longer distance about the width of an atomic nucleus. The comic also outlines how progressively difficult it gets to describe the forces. --188.114.101.78 10:31, 20 February 2015 (UTC), To me it appeared as a typical exam situation for Cueball with him being the pupil. "Force-choking the chicken" might mean a technique of self-gratification by use of the "force… Mikemk (talk) 07:50, 16 February 2016 (UTC), For the record, this is, with only a very little exaggeration, exactly how the four fundamental fources were presented to me in high school. So yes, the weak force can push and pull just like any other force. The oldest nuts tend to be the toughest. Off-panel: I see. The off-panel audience, probably a student or class, is interested, but quickly begins to realize Cueball's lack of understanding. It's possible that Cueball does understand the strong and weak interactions, but is completely at a loss when he tries to summarize them. My Patreon page is at https://www.patreon.com/EugeneK Weak Horse, Strong Horse, Flavor Horse, Chromatic Horse... 199.27.128.194 01:57, 24 February 2015 (UTC), couldnt the title text joke just be joking about how the professor doesnt know anything? Two Nobel Prizes in Physics have been awarded for work on this unification, in 1979 and in 1999. Quarks and Gluons explained. This is an inverse square law multiplied by an exponential decay with distance. There is…sort of. -CDJ, https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1489:_Fundamental_Forces&oldid=199156. 758 votes, 37 comments. Under Games > D&D, you can filter for a spell. It’s just that the other things it does are usually more interesting and noticeable. This is known as beta decay, a form of radioactivity. Figure: It's strong. Instead of acknowledging the problem directly, Cueball simply blusters onwards. You can actually write down a force law for the weak force, if you really want to, and it’s at least sort of possible to talk about the force exerted by the strong interaction. The xkcd comic above is available under a creative commons license. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). Gravity is a phenomenon that is readily observable to anyone, and so the audience accepts it without question--note that Cueball's explanation doesn't really do the topic any better justice than his explanations of the other forces; he just doesn't need to. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). It holds protons and neutrons together. ... Then the weak force is just like, "Uh, it has to do with radioactive decay." You spin me right round, baby, right round, in a manner depriving me of an inertial reference frame. Strong force holds up and down quarks together into a proton or neutron. Come to discuss the comics and other work by Randall with other … This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). Why use weak names when we have new strong ones? Off-panel: Also what? Relevant SMBC. So, how much force can tug-of-war players exert? The title text refers to the fact that it is gravity that appears to be the simplest and easiest to understand of the four forces, but turns out to be the hardest to reconcile with a coherent (quantum) understanding of all four forces together. 108.162.230.221 12:26, 20 February 2015 (UTC), I knew from the title, "Fundamental Forces", that this was going to be a great one. Magnetism Weak force → Strong force So, while G5e*cbCy74Tm$*SZthE7igp7L is certainly difficult for a would-be attacker to guess or break using brute-force attack methods, it's all but impossible to remember. The weak force is much weaker than electromagnetism at typical distances within an atomic nucleus (but is still stronger than gravity), and has a short range, so has very little effect as a force. Radio waves exert force on things. If two birds were flying half a meter apart and tried to go perfectly straight, they would fly for over a thousand kilometers before the gravitational force between them finally steered them into colliding. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. > >| Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors). Not a lot of force. While that's true, I find the statement a bit weak. «The off-panel audience, probably a student or class, is interested, but quickly begins to realize Cueball's lack of understanding. Malamanteau314 (talk) 04:59, 6 November 2015 (UTC), Should the explanation be updated to note the discovery of gravitational waves? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. “Of these four forces, there’s one we don’t really understand.” “Is it the weak force or the strong—" “It’s gravity.” SEARCH COMIC TITLES AND TRANSCRIPTS: Search RSS FEED - ATOM FEED COMICS I ENJOY: THREE WORD PHRASE, OGLAF (NSFW), SMBC, DINOSAUR COMICS, A SOFTER WORLD, BUTTERSAFE, PERRY BIBLE FELLOWSHIP, ARCHIVE WHAT IF? Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. It can cause a down quark to become an up quark, and in the process release a high-energy electron and electron anti-neutrino. Same goes for gravity. the joke is its the only one he can describe easily, but then he says its the most difficult one. "Is it the weak force or the strong--" "It's gravity. than to use a single word with some substitutions in one particular "common format". Nuclear Forces, mechanisms for binding & transmutation • Fundamental forces of nature: • The range comes from the uncertainty principle: • When converting reactant(s) to product(s), energy is spent on the mass of the force carrier: ΔE ≥ M. X. c. 2 CircularReason (talk) 14:55, 13 June 2015 (UTC), I find a different humor in this than it seems the rest of you do. What it has instead is the property of changing one particle into another. Baby. i think thats irony, but maybe not. Spot on. The message of this XKCD entry is that it's much more secure to use phrases of plain words (without odd capitalization, substitutions, etc.) BLAG STORE ABOUT A … |< In our example xkcd comic, 44 bits of entropy is estimated to take 550 years to brute force. (Only marginally related to linguistics.) There’s a great SMBC comic exploring the geopolitical consequences of having Superman turn a crank to provide an unlimited source of energy. More details. Figure: And (4) The Weak Force. A 2011 paper analyzing the immune systems of several "elite tug-of-war players" [3] The paper notes that "Few studies have been done to examine the effects of [the] tug-of-war sport on physiological responses," which seems likely enough to me. This page was last edited on 9 October 2020, at 23:53. 108.162.254.98 11:58, 20 February 2015 (UTC), In high school Physics, my class was taught that physicists had recently combined the Electromagnetic and Weak Nuclear forces into the Electro-Weak Force, so there were only three and if we were to find the Higgs Boson, there might be just two or one. 108.162.254.77 11:35, 22 February 2015 (UTC), This comic and the ensuing discussion is more intriguing when the Chrome xkcd substitutions extension is turned on. Cueball is a stand-in for scientists, and while he likely understands these concepts very well, has no earthly idea how to encapsulate them for someone who hasn't studied them in-depth. It's really the nuclear force (or residual strong force) that keeps nucleons together in an atomic nucleus. Hence the scrollover punchline. $\begingroup$ Obligatory xkcd. —Ryan Finnie. 188.114.111.224 22:34, 21 February 2015 (UTC), In the first panel, Cueball forgot to mention Einstein's field equations. The standard cup of tea, as described by the International Organization for Standardization in ISO 3103, contains two grams of tea per 100 mL of water. The weak force is much weaker than electromagnetism at typical distances within an atomic nucleus, and has a short range, so has very little effect as a force, but has the property of changing one particle into another. Off-panel: That's not a sentence. Renormalist (talk) 11:12, 20 February 2015 (UTC), Irony like this is not uncommon in physics. Presumably aiming for somethin like this Wikipedia overview: Fundamental interactions, … There are quite a number of assumptions being made there, (assuming max key space walks for every attack, assuming static crack rates of 1000 H/s, assuming straight brute force of bits, etc.) The mass defect and therefore the nuclear binding energy is determined by the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. This comic says that a password such as "Tr0ub4dor&3" is bad because it is easy for password cracking software and hard for humans to remember, leading to insecure practices like writing the password down on a post-it attached to the monitor. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). As the concepts become more abstract and unintuitive, Cueball's explanations become more incomprehensible to the increasingly vexed lay audience. More details.. I've added one more bug to the list of fixes: genpass-xkcd was producing too short (weak) or too strong (long) passwords and/or printing errors when IFS was set to a non-default value (either missing \n or including anything from [a-zA-Z]). This residual strong force is carried by pions and does decrease rapidly and exponentially with distance due to the pions having mass. More details. What was the first encounter with electric phenomena? For goodness sake, I majored in Physics and got a masters in a related field, and I still couldn't give a better explanation than the one in that comic. We could imagine Yoda using the Force to run a similar generator. This residual strong force is carried by pions and does decrease rapidly and exponentially with distance due to the pions having mass. The alt text highlights the irony of this situation, where the lack of any comprehensible explanation of the strong and weak forces leads the audience to believe that they are not well-understood, but in fact it is gravity, the force they simply accepted without question, that is a mystery. Ok, it’s not quite as bad as xkcd would have us believe. In #1 Fundamental Forces (xkcd 1489), the narrator starts out boldly and then winds down. 108.162.241.11 21:55, 20 February 2015 (UTC), Is it just possible that Randall posted this forum to see how we here actually try to explain strong and weak Forces? More details.. Between protons and neutrons there is a residual strong force, analogous in some ways to the van der Waals force between molecules. Cueball is acting here as someone teaching physics at a basic level, perhaps a high school science teacher. Two xkcd cartoons from the world of science (the fundamental forces of physics) and math/computer science (NP-complete problems): (#1) (#2) Fundamental Forces. The weak force is much weaker than electromagnetism at typical distances within an atomic nucleus (but is still stronger than gravity), and has a short range, so has very little effect as a force. and none of them model a real-world attack. Every single spell has a special link or action associated with it. The currently accepted particle table has 17 slots: 12 fermions (first 3 columns of the table - six quarks [top two rows] and six leptons [bottom two rows]) and five bosons (last two columns of the table - four gauge bosons [left hand column] and one scalar boson [right hand column]). The fact is that knowing the mathematical formula that describes the phenomenon doesn't constitute understanding. ... force is so small is one of the reasons why the weak interaction force is so weak and the actual "force" part of the weak force is largely insignificant since it does not result in any bound states. It [mumble mumble] radioactive decay [mumble mumble] Figure: ANd also maxwell's equations I’m going to—of course—ignore the prequels. Prev; Next; Yoda. Standard Model, Chirality, Helicity, W & Z bosons, and the Weak Nuclear Force. Or take Zenos paradoxon. r/xkcd: /r/xkcd is the subreddit for the popular webcomic xkcd by Randall Munroe. Gravity was first mathematically characterized in 1686 as Newton's law of universal gravitation, which was considered an essentially complete account until the introduction of general relativity in 1915. Electromagnetism is less intuitive to a layman, but its effects are still observable, so the audience, accepting it, seems more concerned that Cueball glosses over a hint that it's a bit more complex than his initial explanation would suggest. Today's XKCD cartoon accurately depicts the sad state of explanations of the fundamental forces. that had me guffawing at this comic and feeling a bit sheepish at 793: Physicists 173.245.56.164 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~), What is a "fundamental horse"? Like Socrates was the expert ethicist simply by virtue of not knowing what the good is, Cueball (Monroe?) The title text is a pun on the term "choking the chicken", a colloquial expression referring to male masturbation. Mouseover: "Of these four forces there's one of them that we don't really understand." d^2 What don't we understand at all? All that said, though, why are we thinking about this in terms of forces? The electromagnetic force does indeed give rise to Coulomb's law of electrostatic interaction (another inverse-square law, proposed in 1785), but a much more comprehensive description, covering full classical electrodynamics, was only given in Maxwell's equations around 1861. I've also updated the description of the commit (and force-pushed) and of the PR. You just said "Radio- but yeah thats just my tide whats yours.TheJonyMyster (talk) 03:57, 26 February 2015 (UTC), When I read this comic, I see a metaphor for the scientific community's difficulties explaining these interactions to laymen. The equation for the residual nuclear force is our old friend the Yukawa potential from our analysis of the weak force. The electroweak force was also mentioned in a later comic, 1956: Unification. The unification of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force—known as the electroweak interaction—is the only currently-accepted unification of two fundamental forces. I just … Over even shorter distances, and much higher temperatures, the weak interaction and electromagnetism are essentially the same, thus being merged to form the electroweak force. like if hes just saying that from a quantum point of view that gravity is the hardest, then its not really a joke. The explanations of strong and weak forces are no more coherent, but the complete lack of observable effects to laymen makes this lapse unforgivable to the audience. Weak, bordering on homeopathic. The average cell phone transmitter exerts about a billionth of a newton of pressure on its surroundings. More details.. is the expert physicist because he refuses to bullsh** about which and how many are the most "fundamental" horses. Right. He seems to understand the general idea of the four fundamental forces, but his understanding gets progressively more sketchy about the details. In this comic strip, Randall is proposing some changes to the Standard Model of particle physics. "Is it the weak force or the strong--" "It's gravity." The strong force doesn't act directly between protons and neutrons but between the quarks that form them. Figure: -And those are the four fundamental forces! The strong and weak forces cannot easily be summarized as comparably simple mathematical equations. The gravitational force between adjacent starlings is small. "}}, xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. 11 months ago. 173.245.56.209 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~), As a philosopher, my interpretation was not that Cueball "can't encapsulate" the ideas, but that no one really understands them, even specialists. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). Unlike gravity and electromagnetism, the strong force gets stronger with increasing distance: It is loosely similar to the restoring force of an extended spring. But this is only half of the question in the XKCD comic. More details. The weak force is a force, but is there a nice, neat equation for it like there is for electromagnetism and gravity? How much Force power can Yoda output? Triboelectricity. It looks like Cueball is a physicist who knows that the distinction of "four fundamental forces" is basically wrong/obsolete (the term "force" is not even used anymore in theoretical physics), but since his audience are high school students, he can't go into the many complex details underlying the fundamental interactions, and therefore is forced to gloss over it. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). Or the divisibility paradoxon. Explanation []. There is something about the way Randall captures the exact way I think (have been trained to think?) [1] Further ISO standards concerning tea include ISO 3720 (black tea), ISO 11287 (green tea), and ISO 14502-2 (the difference between black tea and green tea). This is confirmed by the title text (if Cueball didn't understand the theory of fundamental interactions, he wouldn't give that answer). Lord Vader has apparently force-choked himself to the point of unconsciousness (or possibly even death) and is being transported from his house on a stretcher by two Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. In simple cases the entropy of a password is calculated as a^b where a is the number of allowed symbols … Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and the Strong Nuclear Force. 199.27.128.200 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~), I prefer Chromatic Force and Flavor Force. Figure: (2) Electromagnetism, which obeys this inverse-square law: Fstatic = Ke (q1q2) And ironically that situation looks similar to the real scientific understanding of the topic. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. One of … What it has instead is the property of changing one particle into another. This work is licensed under a It can cause an up quark to become a down quark, and in the process release a high energy electron and neutrino. However, all stable heavy particles are neutral to the strong force, due to being made up of three "colors" (or a color and the appropriate "anticolor") of quarks. Instead of acknowledging the problem directly, Cueball simply blusters onwards.», My interpretation is rather different. On the other hand, a password such as "correcthorsebatterystaple" is hard for computers to guess due to having more entropy but quite easy for humans to remember. Keep in mind that saying there are four fundamental forces is basically a heuristic tool to help teach a complicated reality.
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