Actually, it's one of the quarks that is "charmed." < s > I beg to differ on the strong force. It had been a while, so I looked up gluons (aptly named) quickly. From The God Particle by Leon Lederman:

"Bjorken had elucidated the early experimetnal results at Stanford in which electrons were bounced off the quarks in the proton. Whatever the force was, the electron scattering indicated that it was surprising weak when the quarks were close together."

He goes on to say "Quarks have asymptotic freedom. The strong force gets weaker and weaker as one quark approaches a second quark. What this means, paradoxically, is that when quarks are close together they behave almost as if they are free. But when they are farther apart, the forces get effectively stronger."

Doncha just love weirdness!

>The force that holds together quarks is the strong force. It is carried by gluons (charming name huh?). its characteristics aren't quite as you describe, though, it is very strong close up, but fades very quickly and is undetectable at distances much greater that the size of a hydrogen atom.
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