...
he read every scrap he was sent, and even stooped in the alleys to
pick up a muddy fragment of newspaper and scan it for a message.
Thus,
he read, it
was already known in 1935 that the natural world was governed by four
kinds of force: in order of increasing strength, they are the
gravitational, the weak, the electromagnetic, and the strong.
Reading, he found himself rooting for the weak forces; he identified
with them. Gravitation, though negligible at the microcosmic level,
begins
to predominate with objects on the order of magnitude of a hundred
kilometers, like large asteroids; it holds together the moon, the
earth, the solar system, the stars, clusters of stars within
galaxies, and the galaxies themselves.
To Richard it was as if a faint-hearted team overpowered at the start
of the game was surging to triumph in the last, macrocosmic quarter;
he inwardly cheered.
I
don´t have much to add, since John Updike himself comments on the
original text, which we are told is from ´The Forces of Nature,´ a
conference by Steven Weinberg. Physicist dream of being able to
reduce all these forces to one, precisely the goal of the big
unification theory, as has already been accomplished with electricity
and magnetism being unified as electromagnetism
I
think that, when I was a student, the interaction electroweak,
unifying the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force, has
almost been completed. I don´t know how things stand now.
How
can one not like and identify with gravitation, which among the four
forces, is the only one we are familiar with?
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