James Fodor

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3,084 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Aug

James Fodor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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The Science of Everything Podcast · Episode 163: The Standard Model of Particle Physics · 8 Aug 2026 podcast

I mean, Maxwell's equations are developed in the 19th century, and prior to that, of course, people knew about electric charges and things for since antiquity.

But the the two other fundamental forces, the weak and the strong nuclear forces, are much more recent discoveries.

Now I'm not exactly sure when it was sort of regarded as discovered that the weak and strong forces existed.

Definitely it was known that some additional force must exist to bind the nucleus together since the early 20th century.

I think around the 1910s or so, the nucleus was discovered to be the consolidated, very small relative to the size of the entire atom location where all of the positive charge in it.

atom was located.

So it was clear from that point that there must be some other force that's not electromagnetism that keeps the nucleus together.

And so you can call that the origins of sort of the um discovery of the strong force, although they didn't know that that's what it was at the time.

The weak force is mostly associated with radioactivity.

And so um early work in discovery and and exploration of radioactivity in the early 20th century also fairly quickly gave rise to the uh to the uh to the notion that there needed to be another force to account for this.

So certainly by the mid-20th century, it was clear that there were two additional forces that needed to be accounted for, the weak and the strong force, although initially not that much was known about them.

Major theoretical developments in describing these two theories.

Occurred from the 1950s through the late 1970s, which established their quantum mechanical nature as the weak and the strong forces.

So most of this, most of these theories about the weak force and the strong force were were developed after the development of quantum electrodynamics.

So most of what we're talking about here, the standard model, was sort of all in place by about 1980, although in some cases experimental verification.

Of some of the particles took uh took decades later.

Some of the quarks were only discovered in the 80s and 90s, and then the the last to be discovered was the Higgs-boson uh in 2012.

The point of that is just to establish some sort of historical timeline and to understand how the different, I guess, fields or uh subjects in quantum mechanics and slash particle physics relate to each other.

So essentially we can think of it as initially was non-relativistic single particle quantum mechanics.

That's Schrodinger's equation that describes things like it single atoms or molecules.

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