James Fodor

speaker

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

That was early twentieth.

And then mid-twentieth century was the development of quantum electrodynamics, which describes relativistic particles and uh systems where there's changes in particles, like um interactions in a particle accelerator, for example.

Uh but only quantum electrodynamics, that's the electromagnetic force.

And then moving into the later 20th century, that was extended to describe, or new theories were developed using that quantum electrodynamics as a template to describe the weak and strong nuclear forces.

So then by night aro about 1980, we had uh more or less the standard model in place.

And uh more recent theoretical work has focused on trying to

integrate gravity into the the standard model and that that relates to uh string theory, but there haven't been any uh experimental verifications of string theory, so that's not regarded as sort of an established scientific theory at this point.

And I may discuss string theory in a future episode.

Okay, so that gives some historical background and context as to how the different sort of theories relate to each other.

Let's now talk about the four fundamental forces in a a bit more detail.

As I said, there's gravity, which is described by general relativity.

Gravity is a very weak force, and that's why it's really only noticeable at very large scales, planets and stars and so forth.

Gravity also seems to be only attractive, as opposed to the other three forces, which can be attractive or repulsive, so that's another difference.

Uh and there's various reasons as to why gravity has been particularly hard to incorporate into a quantum framework.

Again, I'll discuss those in

a future episode on on string theory or quantum gravity more generally.

So I I mention it because I often talk about the I'll often talk about the four forces, but f really we're only talking about three of them, but just bear in mind that gravity is also there as well, but it's not described by the standard model.

So let's then move on to the three forces that are explained under the standard model.

So the most familiar will be electromagnetism.

Electromagnetism affects electrically charged particles.

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