The Strong and Weak Nuclear Force

        Went for my evening walk listening to a lecture on “The Strong and Weak Nuclear Force”. The Strong Force is what holds the nuclei of atoms together. When larger nuclei, on the periodic table of over one hundred, form, the strong force begins to break down and isn’t strong enough to hold everything together. The strong force causes gluons to fly back and forth between protons and neutrons to hold them together in the nucleus of an atom. The electron is not affected because of the electrostatic force. The Weak Nuclear force has to do with decay of neutrons and the cause of radioactivity. I’ll just leave it at that for now and I’ll re-listen to it again since there was so much more in the lecture.

        Went for my evening walk listening to the lecture again on the “Strong and Weak Force” so I could get a little more info out of it. The Strong Force also extends (by way of Gluons) down into the realm of Quarks which protons and neutrons (Hadrons) are made of. A proton is made up of two “up” quarks with an electric charge of +2/3 and one “down” quark with an electric charge of -1/3, which add up to a +1 charge for the proton. A neutron is made up of one “up” and two “down” quarks and does not have a charge. A free neutron will over a short period of time decay into a proton, and electron, and an antineutrino. The Strong force at this small of a level acts upon the color (charge properties) of the quark. At least this is how I understood it.

Electromagnetism

        Last night I found a nice site for Astronomy Podcasts called Astronomy Cast and downloaded “Electromagnetism” lecture and listened to it while on my evening walk. They talked about the history of magnetism and the Electromagnetic Theory developed by Maxwell who tied light, magnetism, and electricity as being the same phenomena. The massless, chargeless Photon, I learned, is the intermediary of electromagnetic radiation in all wavelengths and at different energies. There was a little talk about Virtual Particles and magnetic fields, which I’ll have to investigate later. Also discussed were black holes with accretion disks; how electromagnetism causes flares that shoot off into space at its poles. The lecture was only thirty minutes and packed with lots of information.

Spectra and Electron Orbits

Went for my evening walk listening to the rest of lesson 3. It was about how electrons in orbit around a nucleus get excited by photons and change orbits depending on how much energy the photon carries. Depending on which frequency the photon and orbit of the electron determines what frequency the electron can accept and the orbit the electron will jump to. The spectra of a star can help in finding out the star’s makeup, if it is moving towards or away from the observer, and if it is a binary system it can tell the mass of the two stars and their period. I’ll have to delve more into this!