Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "What's the Fifth Force?" video.

  1. The standard model is pretty constrained by math. There is not much about it that doesn't follow logically from special relativity and quantum mechanics as far as I know. And it's not like we didn't try tons of the possible variations. Pretty much everything that we keep discovering fits right in. What it is not, of course, is a TEO. It is entirely descriptive, with no deeper principle behind it other than a choice of symmetry groups. If anything, I would go the other way and say that there is nothing special about the three forces that we know about other than that they are close to a stability point. There can be a large hierarchy of other fields (or vacuum excitations, if you like that better), which are spurious and just not all that easy to detect because they are far away from the stable energy range and are therefor strongly suppressed in the 1TeV range. One can equally assume that our stability point is not actually the lowest one and that there may be an infinity number of (potentially self-similar) repetition at much lower energies. That would solve a lot of of the cosmological riddle, too. It would, of course, remove the last bastion of anthropocentrism by eliminating the human scale as something special.
    2
  2. They may or may not have, but if they did, it would indeed be number four. :-)
    2
  3. No. It would probably not be a particularly good idea, either. It is likely that a nuclear explosion would be the outcome of such a device.
    1
  4.  @Chaos3183  Because removing the mass from massive fields greatly alters their effective ranges and dynamics. If all fields were effectively massless, there would be no stable matter, as far as I know, which means that atoms and nuclei would disintegrate and release their binging energy. I am sure somebody already wrote a theory paper on the dependence of nuclear physics on the coupling to the Higgs. We just have to do a literature search.
    1
  5. That's a footnote of science history. Einstein basically cut himself off from real physics as soon as he doubted the fundamental importance of quantum mechanics. That was a boneheaded move.
    1
  6. None of it. Quantum mechanics is a very simple theory, you are just not being told the actual facts about it. What you get to see on the internet is a half-baked phantasy that was popular around the early parts of the 1920s. Real physics had moved on from that state of ignorance as early as 1928/29. The modern picture was developed around 1948 to the mid 1960s. Since then the theory has seen one experimental confirmation after the other in the energy range below 1TeV. There is very little doubt that it holds for much higher energies just as well (experimentally that's confirmed by cosmic rays). So if you have a problem with it, then that problem is entirely in your mind.
    1
  7. Mass-energy. The equivalence principle is still going strong.
    1
  8. Let's not oversimplify things too much. :-)
    1
  9. Gravitation does not behave at all like the other forces. One can force a QFT picture on gravity, but it's not obvious to me that that's either natural or that it should be successful. Phenomenologically gravitation is different. There is no reason to deny that in theory.
    1