What Makes The Strong Force Strong?

I love how the color naming system makes chromodynamics so much more intuitive for those of us who aren’t physicists.

Hadrons never skip leg day.

If it wasn't strong it wouldn't be called "The Strong Force." Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

this episode is an absolute masterpiece. please do more content like this, i feel like this is real physics talk but a layman can understand it

Thank you for explaining the color wheel in a way those of us who aren't artists can understand. It's really complicated, but the analogy "it's just like the SU(3) symmetry of the strong nuclear force" is so helpful.

The last three episodes have been exactly what I’ve wanted to learn. So much great information. Happy to have my atoms assembled in this form right now.

I feel like this is one of the best episodes you guys have ever produced. Thank you for continuing to make content about what interests you and your regular viewers instead of falling prey to trying to play the Youtube algorithm game. Two thumbs up, PBS Space Time.

Matt when you teach me science I feel like I’m tripping balls, which is good because I can’t do that anymore. Thank you for letting me trip vicariously through your brilliant journey.

I’m a bit disappointed that the episode named “Why Isn’t the Nucleus Ripped Apart?” doesn’t actually describe how the nucleus isn’t ripped apart. You described how individual protons and neutrons are held together, but not how they hold onto each other. I once assumed it was gluons being interchanged between the baryons, but was recently surprised to learn that protons and neutrons exchange mesons. This explains how the strong force really holds the nucleus together - named the “nuclear force”. I haven’t seen a video ever mention that. Hopefully, this will be described later in this series!

I have an off topic fun fact about color perception: tetrachromacy. Humans typically are trichromatic (having three different color sensing types of cones), but there's a special case where certain people can have four. Note: just because you have X types of cones doesn't necessarily mean your brain can interpret all X types distinctively. Apparently humans have a limit of 4 making tetrachromacy possible, so even if you can artificially make an eye with an arbitrary number of cone types, your human brain simply can't differentiate more than 4 as being distinct from each other. So certain people do have tetrachromacy and see colors differently from most other people. The extra cone type isn't outside the range of visible colors (it's in-between the range of two others) so it's not like they see extra colors or UV or infrared. Instead imagine being shown two red pieces of paper. To normal trichromats they appear to be the exact same color of red but if the wavelength of light reflected off the paper favors the extra cone of a tetrachromats then they will perceive the paper as being different shades of red. If your curious how tetrachromacy occurs in humans it's fairly simple. First it can only occur in women (sorry guys, men can not have tetrachromacy). Women have two X chromosomes. That's twice the genetic set of instructions and if you can imagine being given told to the same thing over again, then this is a bad thing to have. To solve this issue at around 20-100 cells old, each cell of female fetus randomly deactivates one of the X chromosomes. So half the cells roughly have the "left" X chromosome and the rest have the "right" X chromosome. A mutation can occur in one X chromosome that leads to development of a unique cone getting made in the eye due to some cells having different instructions from others. We humans don't have skin or hair color encoded on our sex chromosomes but if we did women would have stripes. Calico cats for example do have fur color on there's and that's why only female cats show that pattern. I just wondered how differently quantum chromodynamics would be taught if we weren't mostly trichromatic lol.

Kudos to Matt for attempting to explain QCD with simple terms and definitions understandable by the laymen.

I appreciated this episode a lot. I’m not a physics major, and this hit some basics things I didn’t know. More episodes like this would be absolutely fantastic. Thanks for the work you do,

I love how the videos are informative and relatively easy to understand while not being too basic on the other hand. Enjoy watching them every time

I think the strong nuclear force just became my favorite force! What a mind-blowing intro to quantum chromodynamics. I'm from an arts background so I'm just an enthusiastic spectator here, but I never expected that color theory would help me understand deep physical forces intuitively. All these videos are great but thanks in particular for this one.

I like it how I have a physics degree and yet recently, Space Time videos have delving beyond the undergrad level into things even I have not seen yet. Keep up the good work, there is never too much physics!

Man these recent episodes have been excellent. I could honestly be happy with about 20 more vidoes that just keep deep diving in this direction and then talking about how various ideas would effect other theories and assumptions we have. For example the past few videos have left me a bit confused about how important (or not) the Higgs boson really is, so a deeper dive into that would be great.

This episode had one of the best explanations of quarks I've ever experienced. Thank you for this great content!

When I started college I read/watched a lot of content on QFT and Group Theory etc but never got very far as I lacked the math. However this video is so well built and explained that my heart actually raced when you said "SU(3)". THANKS for making these videos

2:00 A periodic table except for partials...which was the original idea of the periodic table. I wonder what Armin Shimerman knows about quarks. Maybe you should have him guest star on an episode to talk about it? 5:30 Nice diagram 13:00

Scientist explaining quarks: The strong force is strong with this one.