These are probably totally stupid questions, but it could tell me what I am getting wrong I would be thankful.
It is my understanding that the force between quarks does not diminish as they are separated so it would take an infinite amount of energy to separate two quarks. So how did any quarks get seperated in the Big Bang? If everything was in an infinitely small space how did the quarks seperate? Why don’t all quarks in protons and neutrons that seperated attract each other throughout the universe? Why do they only attrach the other quarks that they are attached to in the protons and neutrons?
This only applies to quarks, or collections of quarks, with a net “color”. Quarks have a charge-like property called color, but instead of just having positive and negative, like charge, it comes in three varieties, labelled “red”, “green”, and “blue”, plus corresponding anti-colors. A color and its anti-color combine to be colorless, as does a combination of equal parts of all three colors. All particles found free in nature are colorless. A proton or a neutron, for instance, is composed of three quarks, one each being red, green, and blue. And particles called mesons are composed of a quark and an anti-quark, which might be, for instance, red and anti-red.
With all actual particles being colorless combinations, the color force is almost entirely cancelled out. All that’s left is a small leftover residual, similar in principle to the van der Waals forces between molecules (which have no net charge). This residual of the color force is what’s usually refered to as the “strong force” (even though it’s much weaker than the bare color force, the color force can’t be observed directly, and it’s much stronger than any of the other forces in nature). And the “strong” force does in fact diminish with distance. So you can’t pull one quark away from the other quarks in a proton or neutron (or rather, you can, but as Grey says, you’ll end up creating new quarks so it isn’t “away” after all), but you can pull one neutron (or other colorless particle) away from another neutron.