![]() ![]() If it occurred on Earth, life would immediately come to an end. If this happened where entities like human beings exist, we’d be immediately thrust into an unsustainable configuration. In other words, every molecule in the Universe, if the electromagnetic force changed, would alter its properties in a fundamental fashion. Electrons in orbit around atomic nuclei would see their orbitals and energy levels change, and the binding properties between electrons in different atoms would be up-for-grabs. If the electromagnetic force weren’t constant, things would go bonkers on atomic scales. If the gravitational force weren’t constant, there would be no way to reliably predict the motion of objects on Earth, the orbits of celestial bodies within our Solar System, the flight paths of airplanes, rockets, and spaceships, or cosmic properties like gravitational lensing or the expansion of the Universe. If any of these forces weren’t constant, it’s easy to imagine how haywire the Universe would get. Here in our modern Universe, we’ve got four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, plus the strong and weak nuclear forces. Fischer et al., Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013) What if the interactions between particles weren’t constant? Spin-orbit interactions, as well as various quantum rules and the application of an external magnetic field, can cause additional splitting at narrow intervals in these energy levels: examples of fine and hyperfine structure. Slight changes in the observed frequency of this light will occur based on motion and the properties of spatial curvature between any two locations. The atomic transition from the 6S orbital in a cesium-133 atom, Delta_f1, is the transition that defines the meter, second and the speed of light. The bound structures that formed all across the Universe, including individual atoms, would no longer exhibit: If this had occurred anywhere within the Universe, we’d be able to detect it. Their masses would change, their magnetic moments would change, the structure of the bound nuclei they formed would change, and as a result, the properties of individual atoms and the way that they bind together would all fundamentally change. If any one of these quarks, or anything that couples to them for that matter, ceased to exist or were replaced by something else, the fundamental properties associated with each such composite particle would no longer remain the same. ( Credit: Jim Pivarski/Fermilab/CMS Collaboration) There appears to be no limit to the density of particles inside, but at high enough energies, protons and neutrons disintegrate to form a quark-gluon plasma: its own high-energy state of matter. ![]() The more precisely we look at a proton and the greater the energies that we perform deep inelastic scattering experiments at, the more substructure we find inside the proton itself. A proton isn’t just three quarks and gluons, but a sea of dense particles and antiparticles inside. ![]()
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