Is there a fifth fundamental force of nature? | Hacker News Reader

Is there a fifth fundamental force of nature?

bigthink.com

57 pointsBrajeshwar47 comments

The Law of Fives is never wrong!

Incidentally Eris is the one who ordered the Muon.

Betteridge’s Law is also holding well here

Maybe. I like to thing there’s some higher spatial dimensional force that explains all of them and we can unify all the forces once and for all.

Sadly even if true it’s not falsifiable. Such is the dilemma of not being omniscient.

Personally I believe it simply makes more sense for there to only be a single force that explains it all.

Sounds like you’re trying to find God in science. Whether or not that’s a fool’s game is maybe for a smarter person than me to say.

You can't easily falsify "there's a simpler equation" but you can get pretty sure after a while. And you can definitely find it if it exists.

They still looking for the Fifth Element?

So there are 5 observed bosons, and one postulated graviton.

The strong force is associaed with the gluon.

The Electromagnetism gets the photon.

The Weak force gets the Z and W+/- bosons.

Gravity gets the graviton, but that's mostly a placeholder since we don't know how to properly model gravitational effects with QFT.

Higgs doesn't get associated with a force (yet).

It's not that hard to model gravity with a QFT, there are so many ways to do quantum gravity now. The problem is deciding which one is right and the answer to that might involve looking inside a black hole or at energy scales of 10^19 GeV, length scales of 10^-35m, etc.

In the classical sense of "a QFT" then no there are no ways to do QG. The computations diverge. In the extended sense where you let yourself include non-QFT-like things like strings and spin foams, then sure.

But the fact that the computation diverges is not a problem by itself. All QFT diverge but this can be fixed by renormalisation. Problem is that for gravity this would require infinity many parameters and the theory could match any observation

My understanding was that renormalization only needs "parameters" when the computational methods are approximate.

I thought the issue was more that we have no idea how to perform appropriate calculations for SM+QG? Maybe I'm wrong?

for those following, LHC reached 13 TeV which is 15 orders of magnitude smaller than 10^19 GeV

Incompleteness theorem implies none of them are “right” in a “one true axiomatic model” kind of way.

Each is “right” so long as they are consistent with our consensus driven glyph system that exists to normalize discussion, and should never be taken as a 1:1 model of reality.

The glyph systems are not a pipe.

There are 8 gluons, in fact.

There is not very good reason why the Higgs interaction is not called a force. I wouldn't read too much into it, tradition carries a lot of weight in how people call things.

We could even measure the attractive force it generates: jhttps://arxiv.org/abs/1601.05087

That’s news to me. Are you saying the Higgs boson can create a force that accelerates particles in a direction? How does that work?

Kind of the opposite though right? As in it dampens acceleration in any direction?

Yes, the Higgs boson results in an attractive force between fermions given by the Yukawa potential (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukawa_interaction).

This potential takes basically the same form as the gravitational potential but with an additional exponential decay with distance due to the mass of the boson. Resulting in short-range interactions. So yes, in very short distances (~(inverse of the Higgs mass) ~ 10^-18 m) fermions do experience an attractive force between them due to the Higgs interaction.

It works in exactly the same manner the rest of interactions work, the boson (Higgs) is the mediator of the force.

Probably due to inertia

Insert Mister Mxyzptlk reference...

The power cosmic. The pheonix force. The nova force. The dark force. ...

Answer: No.

If another field exists its effects are so vanishingly minuscule and force carriers so rare we can ignore it because there are no observational consequences.

Remember we discovered an extremely weak field that has no obvious observational consequences (the weak force and the Z/W bosons) because there were gaps in the then standard model that begged for an explanation.

Besides the obvious gravity problem the standard model doesn't have many gaps left into which one can squeeze a new force and its field/carrier particles.

It's fairly obvious that we are missing at least one field (dark matter), possibly two or more (dark energy). There isn't any reason that dark matter particles could not weakly interact via some unknown force. Such a force would as you say, be pretty much impossible to detect and we can likely ignore it. That's different than it not existing.

It's not at all obvious that either of those things are fields in the QFT sense, especially since MOND and particularly emergent gravity models still match observational data so well and that dark matter and dark energy are (in the case of the latter, literally admitted by Einstein himself to be) paraphrased as 'data minus existing models equals something we're still trying to explain'.

Modern MOND theories that attempt to account for modern observations do so by creating additional fields.

I'm not 100%, but I'm pretty darn certain Einstein never offered an option on the accelerating expansion of the universe, nor on the evidence we have for dark matter such as the CMB map.

Modern MOND theories modify the gravitational force at their simplest, they do not presuppose a quantum origin of that force. Ergo they're not creating new fields. More exotic MOND theories (like emergent gravity, mentioned above) reframe gravity as an entropic, not fundamental, force, akin to the "force" that "pushes" heat from hotter areas to colder areas. Again, not a quantum origin. It's still possible emergent gravity requires some kind of quantum component.

Again, the "evidence" we have for "dark matter" is just inserting dark matter post-hoc to explain some mysterious misalignment between theory and data. That's all it is. Mechanisms for explaining that discrepancy are called "dark matter" because people aren't imaginative enough to entertain any other possibilities besides "it's definitely another particle, bro". I'm not saying MOND is more correct, we can't say that at this time, what I am saying is the confidence and zealotry of dark matter advocates is severely misplaced and amateurs do not have a grasp on what exactly is being claimed to notice that there's nothing actually being explained, no theory per se whatsoever, when words like "dark matter" are bandied about, and so feign the confidence that the dark matter die-hards themselves project.

As for Einstein: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant

"Dark Matter" is a name for the observations of the discrepancy. It's not a theory in and of itself. Lots of the theories trying to explain the observed discrepancy (dark matter) include that in their name (like the λCDM theory), others (like MOND) don't. They're all trying to explain the same observations though, so they're all theories of "dark matter".

I don't think it's helpful to lump in MOND under the "dark matter" umbrella, and no one else aside from you seems to do that. It's specifically not about matter nor energy (i.e., QFT) in every formulation that's out there.

Further, MOND does try to explain the discrepancy with articulated theories, just in ways that don't conform to the assumed supremacy of QFT-based explanations.

Scientific theories are usually advanced by finding and then explaining misaligments between existing theories and data...that's how physics works. Scientific theories can often predict future, yet unmeasured data that would not fit other competing theories. This is exactly what occurred with the measure of anisotropies in the CMB. Dark matter models correctly predicted the form of anisotropies in the CMB. MOND theories did not.

Additionally, while the various dark matter theories have the problem of being self consistent and consistent with current observations, but extremely difficult to experimentally confirmed, MOND theories have the issues of not being self consistent and/or not being consistent with current observations.

And yes, the newer MOND theories add additional fields to account for CMD anisotropies:

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-mond-theory-account-cosmic-mic...

"The new model begins by using the original MOND idea of two types of fields that behave together as a type of gravitational force—one is scalar, the other vector-based. Next, the researchers added parameters that suggested gravity-modifying fields generated in the early universe—ones that mimicked dark matter. These fields, they further suggest, evolved over time until they became the type of force described by the original MOND model."

And no, Einstein did not discuss dark energy. A cosmological constant is the most well accepted explanation of dark energy. And Einstein did not add the cosmological constant to his equations because of any cosmological observations, merely his own assumptions as to the structure of the universe.

"Dark matter" didn't predict anything. Dark matter is always and every time an exercise in begging the question. Show me a single dark matter theory from first principles, that doesn't start with assuming the conclusion, and you will show me a dark matter "theory" worth considering.

Yes, that's the general idea of individual dark matter theories. We have an enormously successful cosmological model, lambda CDM, that includes cold, weakly interacting matter. Many theories have been put forth to explain what the additional matter actually is. A few of them are actually not created originally to account for the matter in lambda CDM, such as axioms. But yes, there correct, it's the lambda CDM model making successful predictions, the individually dark matter theories are just along for the ride.

Anyway, you are free to spend as much or as little time as you like considering different speculative theories by whatever metric you see fit. I find it odd that you are a proponent of MOND theories but seem to dislike theories that modify existing frameworks and are continually refined to match observational data.

Au contraire, I am seeking precisely theories that actually modify existing frameworks without merely begging the question. The approach of "oh, must just be more matter but it's weird that we can't see it" is going to be seen as ether or geocentrism is now. It's just grossly unimaginative and ironically doesn't actually modify existing modes of thinking, i.e., assumes that gravity is still a fundamental force if only we could describe it as a quantum field.

MOND is a change to the existing framework that makes predictions from the basis of a theory that actually explains the data "discrepancies" we're seeing vs typical assumptions. The discrepancies are testable with MOND. It's not merely a post-hoc justification of some detailed maps of where matter "isn't". While with dark matter all one can try to do is detect particles that we are already blindly assuming are there. Dark matter enthusiasts love to espouse the "shoulders of giants" thing with their tiny incremental modification to LCDM but they're taking an approach that fails to learn from the historical blunders of physicists before who wanted to assume some substance exists and then try to back-prove its existence with increasingly elaborate and specialized theories of origin.

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