Can you inform us about the four fundamental forces of the universe and the balance between
them?
Who possesses the faculty and knowledge that gives rise to these forces?
Yeah, so the four fundamental forces has been really, I would say, a story of progress
of unifying different things together.
So we typically talk about gravity as one of these forces, about the electromagnetic,
which is magnetism and electricity, and then two nuclear forces, the weak and the strong
force.
And so actually, that's been a story of unification.
So it used to be that magnetic and electric forces used to be viewed as completely separate.
And then with Maxwell's equations in the 1800s, those two were unified into one, which was
what we call the electromagnetic force.
Then later on in the 20th century, the weak nuclear force was unified in with the electromagnetic
force.
And so people would talk about the electroweak force.
And so then we were down to three.
And then now with the standard model, which we talked about before, the strong force and
the electromagnetic and the weak forces are now unified.
So in some ways, you could talk about two forces, the standard model and then the gravity
as being the one which is left out.
And it's not at all clear how to bring gravity into that picture.
But one of the things I would say that has bothered people about the standard model is,
again, this presence of tuning parameters, parameters that are not required by the theory,
but have to be just right to match what the experiments are.
And so this gets back to the aesthetic issues of physics.
So initially, if you think about history going way back, we had five elements, you know, air,
fire, water, and so on, it seemed very simple.
Once people started doing chemistry, they found more and more elements.
And so, you know, there's gold and lead and so on.
And eventually, by the end of the 1800s, we had a hundred or more elements.
And that just seemed too many for people, like why should there be so many elements?
And so they started to seek for a way to unify those things.
And lo and behold, they came up with nuclear theory, which then has looked simple at first,
just protons, electrons, and neutrons, just three types of particles.
And that seemed very nice.
And then they continued to do nuclear physics, and they found, well, actually,
now there are hundreds of types of nuclear particles, not just three, neutrinos,
kaons, pions, and so on.
And once again, it looked ugly.
Like three somehow is appealing, but, you know, 246 seems not aesthetically appealing.
So once again, they found a way to unify these into the standard model and quarks and gluons.
And so, at first, there was a feeling that this would be very simple, that we would just
have three colors of matter and we'd unify everything again.
But once again, now the standard model, now we have something like 17 types of particles,
each with different coupling constants and forces between them.
And for many people, it looks like too many.
It doesn't look pretty.
At every stage along the way, what you see is we have tuning parameters, things that are, seem
to be arbitrary parameters.
And I would say many physicists have the desire to have a parameter-free theory, where
everything is just required to be the way that it is by pure logic.
And what we see experimentally is that seems to be not the case.
That, in fact, there are these tuning parameters that are what we could call design parameters.
And so, in theological terms, you could say what many physicists want to do, and actually,
Einstein said this explicitly, was he said he would like to prove that God could not have
created the universe any other way.
What we see, actually, is that God, as far as we know, could have done things differently,
that all of these parameters are free parameters, and they're design choices that were made in
making the universe the way that it is.
And so, I just think, eventually, no matter how far we go, we will still see that there
are these design parameters that are free choices of God that are not required by any
kind of logical necessity or geometry or things like that.
So, let's see.
Let's see.