Week 4 Assignment--Energy, Matter, and the Four Forces

Hello everyone!  Check out this awesome article I found on "unbroken wholeness":
http://www.expressionsofspirit.com/quantumphysics.htm


How has E=MC2 affected you?
Interestingly, it has actually affected me quite a lot.  I grew up in New Mexico, which is the nuclear dumping ground of the entire country.  It is where the atomic bomb was developed at Los Alamos, first detonated at White Sands, and where the nation's transuranic waste is stored in Carlsbad Caverns.  My parents worked in the movement to end the proliferation of nuclear materials, and for 20 years fought the opening of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad.  The reason for this is that all over the state the nation's poorest people, people of color, proud people have radiation poisoning.  And it really was one of the issues that introduced me into community organizing.  When I was 14 I sat on the board of the Department of Energy's Sandia Labs Citizens Advisory Board.  I learned a lot about the ridiculousness of the use of nuclear materials, which really centers around the main problem with radiation--it's half life.  It takes hundreds of thousands of years for only HALF of some of these materials to decay.  So we're constantly producing radioactive materials which we are stuck with until basically forever, for our species, anyway.  And sites like Hanford in Washington and Rocky Flats in Nevada will NEVER be cleaned up-they are essentially radioactive superfund sites that can never be restored to a habitable level.

How would you compare the four "forces"?
Gravitational Force is my favorite since it's so mysterious and elusive to dissection by the human mind and tools.  I'm just very grateful for it and all the great things being gravitated toward the earth has done for my life.  In terms of comparison to the other forces, it seems to exert the least amount of force on objects, yet has the furthest reach.   It also exerts this constant attraction on things, though it seems to me that the other forces are constantly exerting pressure even if their "pressure is not constant."

The Weak Nuclear force, the force that is responsible for radioactive decay is "attractive" to me (tee hee) because it is this hopeful promise of the decay of something that we have unleashed from Pandora's box but ironically it's force will likely not benefit the human race in erasing our mistakes soon enough!  The weak nuclear force is stronger than electromagnetism but because it has the greatest mass, it's so slow-moving that it's strength is downplayed.  I think that's very silly, because the quality of being strong enough to cause radioactive decay seems worthy of being recognized.  Actually, a punch that quickly hits and then retrieves is not as transformative as a punch that hits and then stays pushing and engaged with it's target.  That is what actually moves things and elicits what can be intentional change.


The Strong Nuclear Force is the strongest, and we can thank it for keeping quarks together and protons and neutrons together inside of atoms.

The Electromagnetic Force we can thank for keeping atoms together.  Yay!

What is the function of gravity?
That is an interesting question.  I definitely think it depends on the eye of the beholder.  Some might say it keeps us from flying off the planet.  Yet, since every object exerts a gravitational force on everything else, many conclusions could be drawn.  Since the "graviton" can't be seen or analyzed, who's to say gravity isn't the force of attraction between to individuals and therefore it's function is procreation?  It's function might also be my thrival:  I basically keep an orbit around my home, going from here to there, but never departing too far a distance between myself and my home.  I also keep an orbit around my family.  Who's to say?
   
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