Jump from a height high enough and you will soon see which ones would win in a battle between gravity and the forces that unite solid ground.
The relative weakness of gravity, at least compared to the force of electromagnetism and nuclear forces, seems to limit its power to the phenomena of the vast scales of planets and galaxies.
For this reason, along with the challenge of marrying general relativity with quantum physics, physicists tend to play the role of the gravity of manual waves in particle formation, fusing it with a rather arbitrary correction factor.
Two physicists from the People’s Gravity and Cosmology Institute ‘Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University) are rethinking the place of gravity between the blocks of nature, looking for solutions to equations that would give this small force a more important role when explaining how fundamental particles could emerge.
At first glance, it seems like an unnecessary search. For a typical elementary particle, such as an electron, its electromagnetic attraction is 10 ^ 40 times stronger than its gravitational force.
Including the effects of gravity in describing the movements of an electron around the nucleus of an atom would be like considering the impact of a mosquito when talking about a car accident.
Researchers Ahmed Alharthy and Vladimir V. Kassandrov think the mosquito may be more important than we give it credit for, at least on the surprisingly small level of the Planck scale.
“Gravity may play an important role in the microworld, and certain data confirm this assumption,” Kassandrov says.
The solutions set out in the fundamental equations of field theory in the space-time curve seem to leave room for a small but non-zero gravity influence when we zoom in close. As distances are reduced, the tow of gravity becomes comparable to that of attracted loads.
There are also models that describe solitary waves that form in quantum fields in which the small effect of gravity could help strengthen the wave.
The duo traced back to semi-classical models of electromagnetic field equations, changing the commonly used wavy correction in the hand and applying rules that allow them to adjust some quantities while ensuring that others remain fixed.
By reducing the quantities that define the charge and mass of known elementary particles, the team went in search of solutions that would add up.
For the most part, there were no clear situations in which gravity seemed necessary, at least for the known particles.
But there were scenarios as the distances were reduced to about 10 ^ -33 meters for objects loaded with a mass of 10 ^ -5 grams where solutions appeared.
Theorists are not sure whether their answers describe something we can find in the Universe, although they do set limits on a spectrum that corresponds to hypothetical semantic quantum particles called maximons.
By pushing the math further, as the electric charge disappears into nothingness at the smallest scales and the masses grow to a stellar magnitude, it is clear that gravity becomes a key factor in the emergence of some quantum landscape objects.
It might sound like a fantasy flight, but these waves of neutral matter are the things that form hypothetical objects known as boson stars.
For the time being, gravity will continue to be reduced to a gentle lateral note in particle physics, its small strength being a mathematical complexity that provides no appreciable benefit in its resolution.
One day, perhaps we should give the weakest force of the four fundamental forces what is due to the smallest scales in the Universe.
“In the future, we would like to shed light on this problem that is intriguing to physicists but extremely complex from a math standpoint,” says Kassandrov.
This research was published in Universe.