Comment by gweinberg
One thing that confused me at the very beginning is, the author says the weak force is weak because it is short range. But the strong force is also short range.
One thing that confused me at the very beginning is, the author says the weak force is weak because it is short range. But the strong force is also short range.
The strong force is short range for a different reason. It's called [confinement][1]. The strong force gets stronger as you pull color charges apart. At some point the energy is so high that it's very likely that corresponding matching-color particles will exist, and so now there two pairs of close charges, instead of one pair of far charges.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_confinement