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Old 09-04-2005, 07:17 PM   #9
BeefontheBone
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they're the weak and strong nuclear forces, and that's the electromagnetic force. the reason the nuclear ones don't overwhelm the universe is because they only act on scales smaller than the radius of the orbit of an electron, so only within the nuclei of atoms. the strong one stops the electromagnetic repulsion of the positively-charged protons from splitting up the nucleus, and the weak one controls the nuclear decay processes which are responsible for things like nuclear radiation (but isn't well understood). electromagnetic forces are both replusive and attractive, so they average out on a large scale, but gravity is always attractive, even between matter and antimatter (although in observed interactions between them electromagnetism is dominant since the scales are smaller) which is why we view it as being the dominant force on a macroscopic scale most of the time.

I'm not a physics professor either, but i know a bit about it
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