Order from Force

The present theme concerns the forces of nature, and what investigations of these forces can tell us about the world we see about us. The story of these forces is long and complex, and contains many episodes that are not atypical of the bulk of scientific research, which could have achieved greater acclaim ‘if only...’.

The intention of this book is to introduce ideas of how the visible world, and those parts of it that we cannot observe, either because they are too small or too large for our scale of perception, can be understood by consideration of only a few fundamental forces. The subject in these pages will be the authority of the commonly termed, laws of physics, which arise from the forces of nature, and the corresponding constants of nature (for example, the speed of light, c, the charge of the electron, e, or the mass of the electron, me).

The laws of physics govern our lives, and the constants of nature define our very morphology. The precise distances and orientations between the molecules of which our bodies are composed are determined by subtle intermolecular electromagnetic forces, whose magnitude is determined by the various constants of nature, and whose operation is dictated by the laws of physics. We are merely living representations of these immutable physical laws.