OT: Carbon Dioxide races -> known vs unknown -> terraforming mars -> is or is not

[Suicide Junkie]

They would have to be immensely smaller than photons anyways, as we have never been able to detect or see the evidence of any such gravitons.

Not sure how much you can say about the 3D "size" of the force particles besides wavelength.
An imporant note is that Gravitons would be much more weakly interacting with matter, though.
About 8x10^37 times weaker. (Weak, as opposed to rarely interacting like neutrinos)
Building a detector sensitive enough is a challenge.

if it's smaller than an electron, i don't see how we can be sure it's there. least until we have something that can see smaller than an electron.

Electrons are point particles to the limit of current instruments.
Protons are known to be composed of multiple subparticles (3).

To see this:
Take the above particles, Zing them towards each other at higher and higher speeds and watch what happens.
Electron/electron, proton/proton, proton/positron.

They will bounce off each other due to the electromagnetic repulsion, and you'll see the basic 1/r^2 force.
But at high energy, the details of the other particle becomes important.

Think of it like two streams of sand and a hole in your sandbox...
From a distance, its a normal hill of sand, but when you get close, you see the two up-bumps and a down-bump.
If you roll a tiny ball (positron) up the hill (proton), it will start moving in odd dirctions due to the different slopes near the peaks.
Analyse the tracks with your computer to figure out what's going on.

[ July 17, 2003, 13:23: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]