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Why the weak nuclear force is short range
The “range” of a force is a measure of the distance across which it can easily be effective. Some forces, including electric and magnetic forces and gravity, are long-range, able to cau…
Extracting more physics out of Feynman diagrams than they actually contain resembles a cult activity, and while this was common fifty years ago, before quantum field theory was well-understood, few theoretical physicists of the current generation subscribe to it. Figure 9: (Left) Feynman diagram for computing the electric force between two electrons existing over time and separated by a distance in space; a “virtual photon” appears in the calculation. [For physics students: these statements are obvious when the electrons and neutrinos are at rest and the “propagators” — i.e., the corresponding Green functions — of the virtual photon and Z boson are written in position space; just take the Fourier transform of the more familiar momentum-space expressions and .]
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