Was a fifth force felt?Was a fifth force felt? Physicists have divided all the motions in the universe into the domains of four kinds of force: gravity, electromagnetism electromagnetism Branch of physics that deals with the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Their merger into one concept is tied to three historical events. Hans C. , the weak subatomic subatomic /sub·atom·ic/ (-ah-tom´ik) of or pertaining to the constituent parts of an atom. sub·a·tom·ic adj. 1. Of or relating to the constituents of the atom. 2. force and the strong subatomic force or color force. Each of these has its source in a different property of material objects --for example, the source of gravity is mass, while that of electromagnetic forces is electric charge. Now, a fifth force is suggested. Such proposals tend to arise from experimental anomalies that suggest an unknown force may be acting. In the Jan. 6 PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS Physical Review Letters is one of the most prestigious journals in physics.[1] Since 1958, it has been published by the American Physical Society as an outgrowth of The Physical Review. , Ephraim Fischbach (temporarily at the University of Washington in Seattle), Daniel Sudarsky, Aaron Szafer and Carrick Talmadge of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and S. H. Aronson of Brookhaven National Laboratory Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientific research center, at Upton (town of Brookhaven), Long Island, N.Y. It was founded in 1947 by Associated Universities, a management corporation sponsored by nine eastern U.S. universities. in Upton, N.Y., propose that a fifth force was operating in a famous experiment done in Hungary in 1922 by Roland von Eotvos, D. Pekar and E. Fekete. The Eotvos experiment, as it is called, tested the law of gravity
suet hard, raw fat from a beef carcass sold for cooking. . Fischbach and his co-workers suggest that, unbeknownst to Eotvos and colleagues, slight differences in the responses of different materials indicate that in addition to gravity, a small, repulsive force was acting. Fischbach and his co-workers relate this suggested force to a quality of matter called phpercharge or baryon number. The baryon number is related to the number of neutrons and protons, and therefore to the chemical composition of a material--thus explaining the difference in force for different materials. The researchers propose a formal similarity between this hypercharge Hypercharge A quantized attribute, analogous to electric charge, introduced in the classification of a subset of elementary particles—the so-called baryons—including the proton and neutron as its lightest members. force and electromagnetism. Just as electromagnetic forces are carried from object to object by intermediary particles called photons, so this hypercharge force would be carried by "hyperphotons.' A number of experiments could test for the existence of the hypercharge force, including a direct search for the hyperphotons themselves. |
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