More accurately, the color force because my issue is with what happens inside a nucleon (the strong force is the leakage of the color force beyond a nucleon).
Am I right in thinking that the Uncertainty Principle stops electrons from colliding with protons? The reason being that although electrons and protons are very strongly attracted to one another, when one gets very close to the other their positions with respect to one another become highly precise and so their momenta become highly imprecise - so they veer off, or bypass, at great speed?
I have also read that electrons and protons exchange (virtual) photons among each other, and that accounts for the attraction and repulsion between them. You might think that these photons would also find it very difficult to collide with electrically charged particles for the same reason, but they have no intrinsic mass, so they are always going at top speed. They can’t veer off, or bypass, any faster or slower.
Nucleons - protons or neutrons comprising the nucleus of an atom - are supposed to be made of quarks, and these quarks also exchange virtual particles to maintain forces between them, significantly the color force that binds quarks together and causes them to form composite particles.
These virtual particles are called gluons and gluons have an intrinsic mass. This means they cannot zip about at the speed of light like photons.
As far as I can tell, that would mean the same Uncertainty Principle mechanism stopping electrons from colliding with protons would also stop gluons colliding with quarks, and the color force would not exist.
No. Electrons can collide with protons. I suppose technically if you’re asking the question to they literally touch and collide like billard balls, the answer is we don’t know. But you certainly can have an electron appear to “bounce” straight back from a proton.
I’m a bit confused – my physics backgroud veering into optics away from particle physics early in my graduate career, but I can’t see any reason the uncertainty princip0le would anything from colliding with anything else, and certainly not photons with electrons. I can see the Pauli Excusion principle keeping particles from getting in the same space and energy level, but that’s a wholly different principle, and wouldn’t apply to dissimilar entities like electrons and photons.
Mass is not an obstacle to collisions or interactions. Anything a photon can do, a Z boson can do also (though not nearly as effectively, at sane energies), and a Z boson is very massive (about 100 times as massive as a proton). And even if it were an obstacle, gluons do not, so far as we know, have mass. Perhaps you’re thinking of pions? Pions are particles made of quarks which are somewhat lighter than protons, and which can be regarded, in a simplistic model, as mediating the strong (not color) force between nucleons (of course, a full model of the strong force must be based on the color force, which we don’t yet entirely understand).