I’m so glad the Artemis II crew made it back safely. I was worried that something would go wrong and NASA would have another spectacular on its hands. Regular readers will know that I’m all for this kind of thing, but I think we need something better than chemical rockets: Artemis II launch image, courtesy of NASA I am reminded of what Steve Buscemi said in Armageddon: “we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts…
The nuclear force holds atomic nuclei together. When protons and neutrons are a femtometre apart, the nuclear force between them is powerfully attractive. If you could turn this powerfully attractive force off, an atomic nucleus would explode into a spray of protons and neutrons. That’s because there’s an electromagnetic force between the protons, and it’s powerfully repulsive. In stable nuclei, the forces are in balance. But as Rod Nave says on his most excellent hyperphysics website, when the balance is broken the resultant radioactivity yields particles…
The nuclear force is the force that keeps protons and neutrons together in atomic nuclei. It is often said to be due to a pion exchange proposed by Hideki Yukawa in 1935. His Nobel prize lecture Meson theory in its developments gives some background: “As pointed out by Wigner1, specific nuclear forces between two nucleons, each of which can be either in the neutron state or the proton state, must have a very short range of the order of 10-13 cm, in order to account for…