Section XI: The Strong Nuclear Force, from "Is Space the Only Substance in the Universe?"

XI.                    IS THE STRONG NUCLEAR FORCE RELATED TO THE WEAK GRAVITATIONAL FORCE?

If a grand unifying theory of the universe could be developed, it should unify all four of what are currently thought of as the fundamental forces of nature (strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravitation). Unification would mean that they either turned out to be variations of a single force, or at least could help explain one another. The strong nuclear force, which has not been unified with either the electro-weak force or gravity, deserves at least a brief mention. It is credited with holding together quarks to form hadrons, and also holds the hadrons in atomic nuclei (protons and neutrons) together, overcoming the electrical repulsion of the protons. The prevailing theory of the strong nuclear force is a quantum field theory, quantum chromodynamics, and the force is attributed to gluons (Elert 2021), as mentioned above.

             There are some theoretical connections between the strong force and gravity. Byrne (2019) wrote that the strong force is thought to create most of the known mass in the universe (disregarding “dark matter”), which in turn generates gravity.

             Although gravity is considered to be by far the weakest of the four forces, in some ways this is misleading. At very short radii, its strength can be considerable, and with enough mass concentrated together to produce a black hole, it is thought capable of tearing atomic nuclei apart (Impey 2020).

             The strong force is estimated to be 6*10³⁹ stronger than gravity, within atomic nuclei (Rehm 2019).  However, if the gravity of a nucleon were caused by some powerful space deletion phenomenon occurring in the center of quarks, the ultra-short range might account for most of the difference. In a physics paper authored by a physician like the present author, Manor proposed that gravity is a “leftover” force caused by quark oscillation (Manor 2016).  

             Energy processes within quarks may be of physical significance. Only 1% of the rest mass of a proton is the sum of the rest masses of the three quarks within it. The remainder is currently assigned theoretically to the gluons, the existence of which as virtual exchange particles has been questioned above. Perhaps alternatively it could be due to energy properties of the quark wave equivalents. (Butterworth 2016, Wella 2017).

             A unique feature of the strong nuclear force is its very limited range. At too short or too long a range, it quickly dies off, and has negligible force at any distance beyond about 10 ^-15 m, or twice the radius of a medium size nucleus. This is very unlike electromagnetic or gravitational force as commonly experienced (Papiewski 2017).  However, gravity has never been tested experimentally at such small ranges. Strange as it may seem, gravitational strength could be so many orders of magnitude greater at the quark level than at twice average nuclear radius, that it may not at this time be possible to totally rule out some gravitational component for the strong force.