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

The weak force doesn't have any bound states.

And so that means that it's a little bit more difficult to sort of intuitively understand what it's doing because it doesn't maintain any bound states in the way that the others do.

The simplest way to describe what the weak force does is that it mediates certain forms of radioactive decay.

So it is responsible for processes, for example, that can turn a proton into a neutron or a neutron into a proton in an atomic nucleus.

We talked about

About those types of physical changes that occur in radioactive decay in the episodes that I did on that.

I didn't really talk about the underlying nuclear physics though, and one of the reasons for that is just because it's very complicated.

But what's actually what actually happens is that the weak nuclear force mediates changes between different types of quarks.

So, for example, you might start with a neutron that has one up and two down quarks, but if one of those down quarks changes into

an up quark, then that neutron will turn into a proton.

And that process is mediated by the weak nuclear force and it involves either emission or absorption of neutrinos depending on other details.

So neutrinos are important because they do they are involved in these radioactive decay processes.

Now, just as the electromagnetic force is mediated by the photon and the strong force is mediated by gluons, the weak nuclear force is also mediated by uh particular particles.

They're sometimes referred to collectively as the intermediate vector bosons, but that's kind of a mouthful and not very informative.

So often they're just called by their

Now, if we move to the strong nuclear force, gluons have.

Interestingly, the Z boson, the neutral one, does not have color charge, just like the other bosons, but it also does not have electric charge because it's uh electrically neutral, and it does not have weak isospin.

The weak force is also another short range force.

So that's one of the reasons why we don't see its effects very directly in everyday life, because it only affects over very, very short ranges, even shorter than the strong force.

Although its uh potential behavior is simpler than the strong force, it doesn't have this same sort of confinement property where it gets stronger as you move further apart.

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