The Science of Star Wars: The Scientific Facts Behind the Force, Space Travel, and More!

by Mark Brake

Electromagnetism is the force that holds our atoms together, while also flowing through us as electromagnetic radiation. It’s also the force that prevents your backside from falling through the seat, even though the atoms are 99.99% space. Its force is conveyed via photons—the unit of light. We can see objects because photons travel to our eyes from said object. Photons can exist at lower energies, such as radio waves, all the way up to high-energy gamma rays. At distances and masses that are within our everyday experience, EM is much stronger than gravitation. The EM field is also infinite, as evidenced by the fact that we can see the light from galaxies that are billions of light-years away. The other two fundamental forces are nuclear, meaning they essentially only exist within the nuclei of atoms. They both have very short-range fields, about a trillion times smaller than a millimeter. The strong force is what keeps the nucleus together despite the protons having the same charge and wanting to repel. It’s much stronger than EM force and its force carrier is gluons, which mediate force between the quarks. Quarks are elementary particles, meaning they are not formed from smaller particles. There are six “flavors” of quark, two of which are used to form the nucleons (protons and neutrons) in the nuclei of atoms. Three quarks combine to form each nucleon. The proton contains two “Up” and one “Down” quark, while the neutron contains one “Up” and two “Down” quarks. The weak ...