• Question: What is the most powerful force in the universe?

    Asked by anon-187172 to Stewart, Miriam, Marton, Laura, Kathryn, David on 13 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: David Ho

      David Ho answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      The most powerful force we know of is called the “Strong Nuclear Force.” However, it only acts over very short distances — it’s the thing that holds the protons and neutrons together in a nucleus, but over distances larger than that it’s not really detectable. The strongest long-ranged force is electromagnetism — most of the forces that you experience on a day-to-day basis that aren’t gravity are due to electromagnetism.

    • Photo: Stewart Martin-Haugh

      Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      It’s the strong nuclear force! It keeps together the particles (called quarks) that make up protons and neutrons, and holds them together. The force holding protons and neutrons together is about 35714285714300000000 Newtons when they’re very close together – by comparison, gravity would be about 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000026653896594285705 Newtons.

      Gravity is actually really weak. You can see this if you use a magnet to pick up a paperclip: the magnet is tiny compared to the Earth but its magnetic force beats gravity. We’re not sure why gravity is so weak: some people think it might be linking out into extra dimensions. We might be able to see evidence of this leakage at the Large Hadron Collider – the experiment I work on.

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