>>12075126It's what we observe. There's the strong force (holds nuclei together, extremely short range. What makes nukes go bang),
the weak force (causes Beta decay or something, I don't really care about it I'm an engineer so idgaf,
The gravitational force (which is really that mass and energy deform spacetime and objects following a straight geodesic through it react to the warped reality as if pulled on by a force. Like, light always travels in straight lines. Always. Near black holes and stuff it's the definition of a straight line that is bent. A similar story follows for mass),
And then my favorite which is the Electromagnetic force. There's like a blanket of disturbable and linked magnetic/electric sheet through all of space. If you wiggle a charged object say by shaking a static-clingy balloon back and forth in midair or by bouncing an oscillating current up and down you'll send ripples of energy through it. That fact was actually pivotal in proving that electrons don't really whizz around nuclei like planets around a star-they would shed their energy as these waves while oscillating and fall in.
Because excited atoms like in your flourescent light like to give off these ripples of a quantized energy and frequency we originally thought they were straight particles and so we called them photons. Depending on the frequency they can do all sorts of whacky shit. For instance, low frequencies can induce current in conductors (radio). Hybridized electron clouds in chemicals can absorb specific swaths of frequency (reason #884 for where colors come from.)
Recent particle physics experiments from a few months ago actually found a subatomic reaction where the resultant angle at which certain particles were ejected was a few degrees off fom what the standard model predicts. There are several very smart people who think this may be evidence of an as-of-yet unknown fifth force. Me, I don't know. I'm not a physicist.
