Via Phys.org: Study points to non-Newtonian force affecting particles' flight by Scott Schrage, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The quotation marks had the force of tradition—and the tradition of force—behind them.
When
Nebraska's Herman Batelaan and colleagues recently submitted a research
paper that makes the case for the existence of a non-Newtonian, quantum
force, the journal asked that they place "force" firmly within quotes.
The team understood and agreed to the request.
After all, the word has long belonged to classical Newtonian physics:
equal-and-opposite reactions, electromagnetism, gravity and other laws
that explain the apple-dropping, head-bonking phenomena of everyday
experience.
By contrast, Batelaan and his co-authors were using the word in the
context of the quantum physics that describe the infinitesimally
small—where the position and velocity of subatomic particles are defined
by probabilities rather than precise values, where electrons
simultaneously behave like both particles and waves, and where other
counterintuitive fuzziness rules the realm.
That realm got even fuzzier in 1959, when a proposed experiment
suggested that the mere proximity of a classical force—rather than the
force itself—could impose itself on the physical world. In the
experiment, two streams of electrons sail by either side of a coil whose
magnetic field is totally shielded from those electrons...
