4 known fundamental forces, Gravity, EM, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Gravity is the really weak force trilions of trillions of times weaker than the other three who are all in the same ballpark. The strong force is the glue that binds atomic nuclei together together, and the particle it uses for this is called the 'gluon'. It is amazingly strong and unlike the EM or gravity, it isn't an inverse square one, which is to say, it doesn't exert a quarter of the force at twice the distance, a 9th of the force at thrice the distance, a 16th at 4 times, or a hundredth the force at 10x times the distance, all the way to eternity's edge. It acts more like glue, pull on it hard enough and you simply break the connection totally.

The Weak force though, is a bit different, we always assume the existence of a particle that transmits force, and for the weak that is the W and Z bosons. They are supermassive, and because by Einstein mass is energy, and by quantum energy and time are connected, they have short lives. You've heard that if you know a particles position exactly you can't know it's momentum at all, and vice versa, but every type of measurement has this same paired uncertainty. Momentum and position, and Time and Energy. Because the W and Z are force carriers they're not quite 'real', they are manifested uncertainty itself. Thus the more energy/mass they have, the shorter they can exist before dumping back out of reality. This applies to all such things, as ΔEΔt ≥ h/4π where h is planck's constant, if you see the h with a line through it, called h-bar, that's just h/2π, I don't know an alt-code for that though

Now h/4π is very small, 5.2 × 10^-35 Joule-seconds. Joule being a unit of energy and seconds of time. To skip the numbers, a W or Z boson is only going to live for about 3x10^-25 seconds, 300 billionths of a billionth of a nanosecond. Not much time to do their work, but they travel very fast and the distance they need to cover are very short, they can effect things up to about 10^-16 meters away, which is around the size of a atomic nuclei. These guys aren't exactly real, they are indeed far more massive than the things they were emitted by, so the mass is 'fake' and the universe only lets a very short period of time pass before demanding they go away. Hence, they've got that 10^-16 meter distance to get something done or pop out of reality. Even at the nuclear scale that's a very short distance though so it's very rare anything just happens to be in the way to be effected, making the force quite weak relative to strong nuclear or EM, Electromagnetic, forces.




No. And here you hit a rough patch between General Relativity and Quantum. GR doesn't require any particle to do the dirty work, quantum does, and as was recently discussed in another thread, if gravitons actually exist it becomes tricky to figure out how they could escape a black hole themselves and actually exert gravity on things. Also, detecting a graviton makes finding neutrinos seem like a piece of delicious tasty cake.




Well, pretty much everything in particle physics is a gigantic field of energy permeating the entire Universe. Just think of the higgs as a big ocean with the higgs bosons as water particles, and everything else as little sponges able to absorb some water or really low friction bullets able to slice through the water as though it wasn't there.



Neutrinos are regular byproducts of various nuclear decays and exchanges, and they don't interact with the strong nuclear force, they don't get stuck in the glue, no gluon exchange. Unlike the electron, which obviously does interact with the electromagnetic force... though not with the Strong... neutrinos only interact with the Weak Force and gravity. Because they tear through space at basically lightspeed and only interact if they happen to achieve the almost absurdly rare conditions that let them get absorbed by some subatmoic particle. Typically a proton, which then has an identity crisis and becomes a neutron and a positron. A positron being an electrically positive opposite to the electron, having just appeared inside an atomic nucleus full of protons, but not interacting with the Strong Force like they do to stay glued togather, it is shoved out by the 'like repel' effect of EM, and then is out by the orbiting electrons, where 'opposites attract' applies, and the psotron find an electron, the two pair up and dance around each other for a little bit, growing ever closer, touch and zap out of existence as two massive gamma particles of radiation, which we detect.

Lastly, you might find this link handy for much of this, they've got several animated videos on the Standard Model including the Higgs. Actually cover a lot of science very well.