| MadSci Network: Chemistry |
I am not an expert in this area, but like you have an enduring interest in this
kind of question. If you want to send another question to clear things up after I
have taken a stab at it, I will not be at all offended.
I want to congratulate you on a very deep question, and one that took a lot of
work to understand on a fundamental level. Quantum electrodynamics (QED) and
quantum field theory require that any interaction be mediated through
interactions between quantized entities. Each type of interaction has its own
force carrier. In the case of the electromagnetic force, which is the one you
asked about, the force carriers between electrically charged particles are
photons. The fact that photons are massless, means that the range of potential
interactions is essentially infinite. In quantum field theory, the field
established by each charge and its intensity determines the probability that a
virtual photon (or other force carrier for the other types of forces) will be
created from the field and travel to one or the other of the charged paticles and
thus "nudge" it in the direction determined by the other charge. This happens so
many times that the particles appear to have smooth acceleration when the model
says they are having multiple mutual bumps from the photons they are "throwing"
at each other. The Feynmann diagrams explicitly illustrate charged particles
exchanging photons. See:
http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/VVC/theory/feynman.html.
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