Fundamental Forces of Nature
Nature is often complicated and will forever be. But that is the challenge for us to understand its intricate details. One of those details are the fundamental forces that governs almost all physical phenomenon. They are called the fundamental forces because these forces do not appear to be reducible to more basic forces. These forces are gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force.
Gravity being the most common of the four is what we experience most of the time in our daily life. From keeping our feet on the ground to the complicated time synchronization of GPS satellites, gravity is describe by Einstein’s field equations as the curvature of spacetime where it plays an important role on the macroscopic scale involving matter with large masses and astronomical distances.
The next force may sound unfamiliar but believe it or not it plays an important role on our daily life specifically sending text and chatting with friends around the world on our smartphones. That force is electromagnetism. Electromagnetism itself is actually a combination of two forces that is electric and magnetic force that were thought to be separate until it was found that they both are actually the same thing. A changing electric field would induce a magnetic field and vice versa then these two oscillating creates light. Hence, light is a consequence of electromagnetism. This same force also what keeps electron bound to the nucleus.
The nucleus of an atom is composed of protons and neutrons. Since the number of protons are mostly not few, they must repel each other and meaning a force must be present to hold the nucleus so it is stable. The force responsible for this is the strong nuclear force which is a short range force with distance comparable to the size of the nucleus. Last is a force responsible for radioactive decay of unstable nucleus and nuclear fusion that is the weak nuclear force. These last three forces are best describe by the standard model of particle physics.
Each of this forces like said before has its own underlying theory with complicated mathematical equations that describes it. Since these are separate theories, physicist tend to unify this four forces and describe it with one single unified theory known as the theory of everything.
