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Old 01-March-2008, 01:12 AM
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Steve Limpus Steve Limpus is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
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Whoa. Good questions - I found this a good place to start:
"The electromagnetic force causes like-charged things to repel and oppositely-charged things to attract. Many everyday forces, such as friction, and even magnetism, are caused by the electromagnetic, or E-M force. For instance, the force that keeps you from falling through the floor is the electromagnetic force which causes the atoms making up the matter in your feet and the floor to resist being displaced.

The carrier particle of the electromagnetic force is the photon. Photons of different energies span the electromagnetic spectrum of x rays, visible light, radio waves, and so forth.

Photons have zero mass, as far as we know, and always travel at the "speed of light", c, which is about 300,000,000 meters per second, or 186,000 miles per second, in a vacuum."
http://particleadventure.org/index.html
You will want to consider the strong and weak nuclear forces too, and on astronomical scales you could probably argue gravity is the most important force, although scientists don't yet fully understand dark matter and dark energy.
http://www.universeadventure.org/
Those are the appetizers, then for mains, if you really drill down, you start to get in to questions of what is reality, exactly? I enjoyed this book, which my local library stocks:
The fabric of the cosmos : space, time, and the texture of reality / Brian Greene.
ISBN
0375412883
"A foremost string theorist discusses such topics as Newton's perspectives on space, Einstein's fusion of space and time, and recent breakthroughs on multidimensional universe theory."
...and this website, play the video (all three hours are available free, on the site), I'm sure you'll love it:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/
Somewhere in that lot you'll find a path towards what you're looking for... and welcome to the forum.
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If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it... of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms...
Albert Einstein
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