strong nuclear force!

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ohiovr
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Joined: Mon Mar 02, 2009 6:36 pm
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strong nuclear force!

Post by ohiovr »

Wow! When they say strong nuclear force they mean it! Two protons within 1 femtometer of each other experience an electrostatic repulsion of more than 9 newtons!

http://ohiovr.com/documents/protons.ods

D Tibbets
Posts: 2775
Joined: Thu Jun 26, 2008 6:52 am

Re: strong nuclear force!

Post by D Tibbets »

Or, the electromagnetic force is much stronger than appreciated. Everything is relative. I used to think that the strong nuclear force must be ~ 10 million times as strong as the electromagnetic force because this is ~ the energy difference between TNT and nuclear bombs. This colors some appreciation about what is going on when the forces are competing. How could the repulsive electromagnetic force overcome the strong with such a differential overcome the strong force. Of course once I understood that the gluons only had a half life that allowed them to travel only a few proton diameters before they decayed meant that their force influence did wane at some power law (like inverse square), but importantly, it just dissapeared once it had traveled ~ 4 nuclons worth of distance. The proton does not suffer this short halflife (it can travel across the universe), so the electromagnetic force never disappears completely.

But, back to my point. Comparing nuclear strong force reactions to typical chemical bond electromagnetic reactions is a biased view. You are looking at strong force interactions over picometer ranges and electromagnetic interactions at ~ nanometer ranges- one thousands times as far away. At intranuclear distances though, the electromagnetic force seems to be on average about 1 % as strong as the nuclear strong force. So if you pack electrons (or protons) into this nuclear volume the repulsive strength will be ~ 100,000 times as strong as that seen at normal electron orbital chemical reaction ranges. Pack them closer together and the electromagnetic repulsion becomes greater yet. With protons there is a limit as they have a certain diameter. But, with electrons being described as point sources there may be no limit-at least till physics chooses to change the picture. With an electron and a positron, the attraction should go to infinity before they touch, if I am not suffering from some logic flaw.

Then you have to consider that many if not all chemical bonds involves only partial charge seperation- the electron/ outer shell electrons may spend only a small amount of their total time biased towards one nucleus over the other.

Throw in the weak nuclear force, and pairing preferences, and exclusion zones, etc. and nuclear chemistry is as interesting and confounding as typical chemistry, if not more so.

Dan Tibbets
To error is human... and I'm very human.

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