The universe is a wondrous place, but what makes it all tick. What holds it all together and stops everything from just flying off into… well space.

 I’m going to have a beginners guide look at the fundamental forces that hold the universe together.

There are a number of fundamental forces, or interactions as they tend to be called, and I’m going to take each of them in turn and explain what they do. They are called fundamental because they can’t be resolved into other simpler interactions. For instance the force of friction, can be explained by using another force called electromagnetism, electromagnetism however, can’t be explained using any simpler force, and so electromagnetism is one of our fundamental interactions, but more about that later.

The interactions that I’m going to look at today are electromagnetism, that I’ve already mentioned, the strong interaction, which is sometimes also called the strong force or the strong nuclear force.

The weak interaction or the weak force or the weak nuclear force, and gravity, but gravity is a bit strange so I’ll leave that till the end.