James Fodor

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3,084 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Aug

James Fodor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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The Science of Everything Podcast · Episode 163: The Standard Model of Particle Physics · 8 Aug 2026 podcast

And I've also talked about in when I've discussed radioactivity that the that nuclei become unstable when you have um certain combinations of um protons and neutrons.

Like you you need more neutrons to stabilize a large nucleus because essentially neutrons help to increase the attractive forces that keep the nucleus together.

Whereas protons also, I mean they can add attractive

forces as well, but they also add repulsive forces because the protons all push each other apart because of their they're all electrically positive charged, so they repel each other.

Now those attractive forces between protons and neutrons that keep nuclei together are precisely uh due to the strong nuclear force.

They're the attractive forces

that are um are felt by any particles that have colour charge.

Just like the electromagnetic force is mediated by photons, likewise the strong nuclear force is mediated by another type of particle called the gluon.

So gluons are directly analogous to photons, although they do differ in important ways, which we'll get to.

Basically you can in loose terms you can think about a nucleus as consisting of different types of quarks that are all constantly interacting and and sort of dancing around together in in a sea of gluons.

Um these uh particles that mediate the strong nuclear force.

The strong nuclear force is the most complicated force and it's the one that we have

Greatest difficulty with performing accurate computations, particularly with regard to describing the nucleus.

So I'm not going to get into details of that here.

I'll save that for a future episode where we talk about the chromodynamics of the nucleus.

So chromodynamics is the term that's used to describe the uh study of the strong force, just like we have electrodynamics for electromagnetism, chromodynamics for the strong force because of the color charge.

One important thing to know about gluons is

that gluons have color charge themselves.

So that means that they also experience interactions with the strong nuclear force.

That's different from photons, which are electrically neutral.

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