In addition, this short-range attraction would have to involve the neutron. The hydrogen-1 nucleus was made up of a single proton, but all nuclei containing more than 1 proton had to contain neutrons also to be stable, and only certain numbers of neutrons.
Until the discovery of the neutron, only two kinds of forces, or “interactions”, were known in the universe. These were the “gravitational interaction” and the “electromagnetic interaction”. The electromagnetic interaction was much the stronger of the two—trillions and trillions and trillions of times as strong as the gravitational attraction.
The electromagnetic attraction, however, includes both attraction (between opposite electric charges or between opposite magnetic poles) and repulsion (between like electric charges or magnetic poles). In ordinary bodies, the attractions and repulsions usually cancel each other entirely or nearly entirely, leaving very little of one or the other to be detected as surplus. The gravitational interaction, however, includes only attraction and this increases with mass. By the time you have gigantic masses such as the earth or the sun, the gravitational interaction between them and other bodies is also gigantic.
Both the gravitational and electromagnetic interactions are long-range. The intensity of each interaction declines with distance but only as the square of the distance. If the distance between earth and sun were doubled, the gravitational interaction would still be one-fourth what it is now. If the distance were increased ten times, the interaction would still be 1/(10 × 10) or 1/100 what it is now. It is for this reason that gravitational and electromagnetic interactions can make themselves felt over millions of miles of space.
But now, with the acceptance of the proton-neutron theory of nuclear structure, physicists began to suspect the existence of a third interaction—a “nuclear interaction”—much stronger than the electromagnetic interaction, perhaps 130 times as strong. Furthermore, the nuclear interaction had to decline very rapidly with distance much more rapidly than the electromagnetic interaction did.
In that case, protons in virtual contact, as within the nucleus, would attract each other, but if the distance between them was increased sufficiently to place one outside the nucleus, the nuclear interaction would decrease in intensity to less than the electromagnetic repulsion. The proton would now be repelled by the positive charge of the nucleus and would go flying away. That is why atomic nuclei have to be so small; it is only when they are so tiny that the nuclear interaction can hold them together.
In 1932 Heisenberg tried to work out how these interactions might come into being. He suggested that attractions and repulsions were the result of particles being constantly and rapidly exchanged by the bodies experiencing the attractions and repulsions. Under some conditions, these “exchange particles” moving back and forth very rapidly between 2 bodies might force those bodies apart; under other conditions they might pull those bodies together.
In the case of the electromagnetic interaction, the exchange particles seemed to be “photons”, wave packets that made up gamma rays, X rays, or even ordinary light (all of which are examples of “electromagnetic radiation”). The gravitational interaction would be the result of exchange particles called “gravitons”. (In 1969, there were reports that gravitons had actually been detected.)
Both the photon and the graviton have zero mass and there is a connection between that and the fact that electromagnetic interaction and gravitational interaction decline only slowly with distance. For a nuclear interaction, which declines very rapidly with distance, the exchange particle (if any) would have to have mass.
In 1935 the Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa (1907- ) worked out in considerable detail the theory of such exchange particles in order to decide what kind of properties the one involved in the nuclear interaction would have. He decided it ought to have a mass about 250 times that of an electron, which would make it about ¹/₇ as massive as a proton. Since this mass is intermediate between that of an electron and proton, such particles eventually came to be called “mesons” from a Greek word meaning “intermediate”.