The strength of a gravitational or electromagnetic field is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to the source of the field. Do the weak and strong forces behave the same way?
To elaborate a little, the nuclear forces don't work over macroscopic distances. I never paid a lot of attention during nuclear physics, and I hardly remember what I did learn, but I remember that the W particle that mediates the weak force is very short-lived. I don't remember if that's the only reason the weak interaction doesn't work over large distances or not. Gluons, the strong force carriers, are bound up in color confinement so they can't create interactions outside of nucleus-sized scales.
No. The strong force dies off much faster with distance, which is why they teach you in basic physics classes that protons repel. At very very small distances, the strong-force attraction is greater than the electromagnetic repulsion, so that the atomic nucleus can actually hold together.
I don't know that the weak force is actually an attraction at all. I remember it being more involved in particles changing into each other, and less with forces and accelerations. Wikipedia says its force is proportional to 1/r rather than 1/r2, though.
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I don't know that the weak force is actually an attraction at all. I remember it being more involved in particles changing into each other, and less with forces and accelerations. Wikipedia says its force is proportional to 1/r rather than 1/r2, though.
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