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I believe the four fundamental forces of the universe are gravity, electromagnetism, the weak and the strong force.

Which of these four forces would you like as your superpower for you to control and manipulate as you see fit?

EM. It's the most visually stunning and insanely versatile. Matter disintigration, lightshows, energy blasts, and the ever-popular magneto-kinesis.

SirNitram wrote:EM. It's the most visually stunning and insanely versatile. Matter disintigration, lightshows, energy blasts, and the ever-popular magneto-kinesis.

Control of the strong force would probably be the best for fighting other super-beings (fight Superman by causing his protons and neutrons to fall apart, ouch), but I think you're right that having the whole EM spectrum to play with would let you do a wider variety of stuff. Monica Rambeau (one of the Captain Marvels) from Marvel actually had a similar power which was pretty cool.

Gravity. I don't think I like your planet any more sir. I think it will no longer have the ability to sustain objects on its surface. Or just like turning off the gravity locally, like on dresses and such.

havokeff wrote:Gravity. I don't think I like your planet any more sir. I think it will no longer have the ability to sustain objects on its surface. Or just like turning off the gravity locally, like on dresses and such.

People don't realize just how weak of a force gravity is. You do a very thorough job of resisting it every time you take a step.

Being an utter megalomaniac, I am of course compelled to go with the strong nuclear force.

EM. only 1/100th the relative strength of the strong force, but much greater range (effectively infinite to the strong forces 10^-15 m). Plus if you have full control over it you can fuck things up with far more effectiveness then you can with the strong force. Altering c on a local scale will do far more damage then messing with QCD because altering c changes the variables in QCD.

I also would opt to be the Master of Electromagnetism.

EM. Great versatility and easily applicable to the RW. (Electricity, blasting and big glowing purple shields . [Yes, I'm a Magneto fanboy. What of it? ]).
I could always read old comics if I run out of ideas, although frankly unlimited control of any of the fundamental forces is so absurdly powerful that it doesn't really matter. (So you can divert projectiles, dissassemble them, or pound them into the ground or pull them away with the sun's gravity )

havokeff wrote:Gravity. I don't think I like your planet any more sir. I think it will no longer have the ability to sustain objects on its surface.

Well, if you control the EM force at your whim like that, you can just have every particle in the planet repel each other with something like 16 orders of magnitude more force than the gravity holding them together.

Can't I use gravity to bend time and punch holes in reality?

If it meant being able to break people and things apart at the quark level just by looking at them, then the strong force, hands down.

docfrance wrote:If it meant being able to break people and things apart at the quark level just by looking at them, then the strong force, hands down.

Doesn't that do really funky things to ambient energy levels if people just start randomly dissolving?

Electromagnetism.

Certainly the most fun/practical, I think. You could get a day job as a mobile power plant. XD

Electromagnetism, hands down.

Hell, with that, in theory, you could reprogram people with practice, and totally interface with computers (wow, I'm in the video game eh?).

Also, as someone mentioned, if that includes messing with the value of 'C', well, even more fun is to be bad.

YT300000 wrote:

havokeff wrote:Gravity. I don't think I like your planet any more sir. I think it will no longer have the ability to sustain objects on its surface. Or just like turning off the gravity locally, like on dresses and such.

People don't realize just how weak of a force gravity is. You do a very thorough job of resisting it every time you take a step.

Agreed; for more emphasis, look at a refrigerator magnet. The EM force holding that little bit of iron up is greater than the gravitational force of the entire planet pulling down. Gravity is better than the nuclear forces only because it's got a longer range, and EM is stronger over that range.

Once again, I'll take EM. I can disintegrate things by giving their molecules all the same charge, I can make impressive light-shows, I can work as a power source. It's wonderful.

Everyone keeps saying about how powerful EM is, but if you can do whatever you wish with the fundamental force, why would you even let yourself be so weak? You can increase the intensity of gravity, no?

I mean, first of all, gravity is only attractive due to mass "charges." The idea of being able to create a repulsive force opens up tons of ideas that are now on the drawing board (like wormholes) but can't be done.

I'd also take gravity simply because it's the force that affects spacetime.

Graviton, from Marvel comics, always struck me as a cool villain idea, so i want to be like him, controlling gravity completely. He can do some nasty shit with it, too...like decreasing the attractive effect of gravity in an area, causing a multi-mile wide chunk of rock to fly like a plane, or increasing it so much a person cannot stand or even move. Shit if you increase it sufficiently in a set area, presuming you have his range of influence (several miles), you could disable a small city and rob them blind while they're barely able to breathe let alone move. It also effects space and time in a variety of ways, so shit lik singularities or time warps are always a possibility.

Electromagnetism is kind of cheap. Saying you control electromagnetism is like saying you control everything; you don't have to think about it at all. Fucking cheap. Why don't you just go pick Spiderman and Cable in Marvel vs Capcom while you're at it.

I do wonder what controling weak nuclear force can do...i've tried to read about it but i can never make heads or tails of what precisely it does.

Didn't they unify the Weak and the Electrical forces in, like, the Bronze Age?

And I'll take EM, too, if you please. Can't do Force Push when you're limited to attractive forces (gravity) or forces that rely on force carriers with a lifespan so short that they can't even travel an angstrom before fizzling out (Weak), you can't do Force Lightning when you're limited to hadrons (Strong).

Choose gravity. Build a time machine. Since you control it, you can obviously ignore those pesky energy conditions, and restructure space-time as you see fit.

Dooey's right. Gravity may be an extremely weak force, but it lets you pull off stuff that EM can't hope to match.

Besides, if we're assuming the same ability to alter the relevant fundamental constants at a whim that people have been saying they'd be able to do with control over electromagnetism, then you can pull off some really nasty tricks.

The unified Gravity-GUT force. All four forces under one umbrella. All the cake, and I can eat it, too!

Okay, EM. I like being able to affect 99.9999% of all physics.

docfrance wrote:If it meant being able to break people and things apart at the quark level just by looking at them, then the strong force, hands down.

What, having them fly apart at the nuclear level not enough for you? Just dial up the forces on the individual protons, and atoms disintegrate.

YT300000 wrote: People don't realize just how weak of a force gravity is. You do a very thorough job of resisting it every time you take a step. :lol:

True, but the OP gives us the ability to "control and manipulate as we see fit." A rather broad interpretation of that would make for some pretty wacky feats I'd say. Flight, "pushing" and "pulling" of objects, and of course the ever-popular chucking about of micro-singularities for brief spans of time.

Besides, c isn't determined by light at all, it's a universal constant. The only reason it's called the "Speed of Light" is because that was the first thing known to travel at that limit.

Gravity. Since I can use it to fly my own ftl space ship in 3 easy steps.

1) Create ship (not that easy, but it doesn't need to be move its self so it's not as hard either, no weight limits, just has to be able to survive the vacuum of space and hold enough supplies to get wherever I want to go. I can probably use my gravity powers to facilitate this step somehow as well.).

2) Reverse gravity around my ship to push it into orbit

3) Either warp space Alcubierre style or make a wormhole.

PS: I may not be able to connect directly to the grid and make power like EM but give me a couple million gallons of water with appropriate piping and a turbine and I can just reverse gravity on one side and let it flow down the piping through the turbine on the other and then loop back around. As much power the Hoover dam, none of the mess...

Gravity.

Not because it is weak or powerful, but we already have a theory unifying the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and electro-magnetics into a single force. We just can't get gravity in there for a Grand Unified Theory of the four fundamental forces.

Being able to manipulate gravity to any noticable degree would allow for practical experiments which would revolutionize our understanding of physics.