Wasn’t that incredible how much force was present just between the two? After I figured that out, I wanted to know how much “push” was present between two protons in the nucleus. If you think about it, there’s really no reason for the protons to stick together inside the nucleus because they are all positively charged. Let’s take a look at the iron atom as we figure this out…

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There are four types of forces. They are, in order of strength: the strong nuclear force, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force, and gravity. That’s it. Those are all the forces that do all the pushing and pulling in the entire universe. The strong and weak nuclear forces are responsible for holding atoms together. They are quite important as you can imagine!

What kind of forces do protons inside the nucleus of an atom experience?  They are both positive charges, and really they don’t have any reason to stay together inside the nucleus as they’d be experiecing a repulsive force with each other. Let’s see exactly how big this repulsive force is:

 
Of all the forces, gravity is the weakling. It is actually much weaker than the other three. (In fact, in a way the other three have a tendency to pick on gravity, which isn’t very nice.)

Click here to go to next lesson on Electric Fields.

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